clairemation

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Took part in my first #paleostream flocking night! Well, half a night. I had not drawn dinos in a while and I had DEFINITELY not speed-painted in a while, so it was a rough start, but fun!

Amargasaurus, I kinda forgot to indicate the structure of the spines within the sail

Bajadasaurus

Close relative of Amargasaurus, with forward-pointing spines. But the holotype is missing all its vertebrae except the first two, leaving room for speculation. So I decided to make each spine longer than the last. Managed to briefly make @knuppitalism-with-ue speechless at the implausibility 😆

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Briefly entertained the idea of a slightly different design for the assassin wraith character.

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Oops

Just story/vibe sketching

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Oh wow, uh, long time no post.

I have been spending a lot of time developing that fancomic I was talking about making. So much, in fact, that, in what may come as a disappointment to like five people, I’ve decided to make it an original work instead of a fancomic of that thing. But hopefully, if you like the thing that inspired it, you’ll still love this!

The bright side is that I now get to really push the designs to support my story and play up the vibes I’m going for!

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Literally nobody cares about my original art, but here’s an old unposted sketch of some of my OCs, just for proof of life 😅

These characters are from the same project as the one further down on my blog. They still don’t have official names.

More Olympic Torchbearer content coming… sometime! I’m working on it!

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More finished version of that torchbearer and flagbearer fanart from earlier!

ART PROCESS RAMBLING BELOW:

Oddly, I feel the composition would work better if they were facing left, but then it feels like they’re going the “wrong” way. Like they’re just skipping out on the Olympics 😆

This way, it feels to me like they’re coming from the ceremony, having just discharged their duties. I think if they were further left in the frame, especially relative to the Tower, it would look like they were going TO the ceremony.

Also, I meant it to look like there are water droplets on the “camera lens,” but realistically if there were, they would be SO out of focus that you wouldn’t be able to see the forms like that. They’d just be bright spots. Artistic license.

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More finished version of that earlier masked torchbearer fanart!

(Edit: I edited in an even MORE finished version! 😆)

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How the HELL am I going to account for this in the fancomic

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Stuck on a design point for the torchbearer & flagbearer story I'm cooking up

In my story, both characters are former humans who lived and died during the French Revolution. In flashback segments, I want to keep their appearances ambiguous. I don’t want to override readers’ preferred mental image (or lack thereof) with my own. And I don’t want the "phantom" versions to have less presence/charisma in comparison.

Even a silhouette would require me to reveal a face shape and hairstyle. So I need to obscure the WHOLE head area down to the shoulder to keep it totally ambiguous.

Problem is, this constrains the acting. I can get around lack of a face, but losing the whole head AREA makes it hard to even make expressive body poses.

How can I keep head anatomy and hairstyle completely ambiguous, but still be able to indicate neck and head position? 🤔

BTW, the effect I called “line pull” was inspired by some awesome expressionistic shit I saw in a Craig Thompson comic

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I’m still here!

Some quick action studies of the masked torchbearer from the Paris Olympics opening ceremonies. How is he so… aaahhhhh… without even a face 🫣 Anyway his outfit makes it easy to sketch gestures with just big brush passages, which I find very satisfying

Would anyone read a fancomic about the torchbearer and the flagbearer? I have a concept I’m trying to pump out quickly, but I’m worried these characters will be completely forgotten next week 😅

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More rough concepting for the co-lead of this thing. She’s an ancient cosmic demoness who feeds on terror ☺️

When designing, I sometimes find it nice to just jump in with a large brush and paint in shapes rather than line.

Anyway, I’m not sure I’m hitting the vibes I’m going for, so I’m interested to hear how she looks to you!

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I give up, I’m back to the animal skull head motif. It hits all the notes I want, and I’m not good enough to throw that away just because I’m afraid people will think I’m being derivative. It’s pointless to pretend that this project (whatever it is) isn’t explicitly a post-Ancient Magus’ Bride work :p

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Back from the posting abyss? with some kind of?? crocodile man???

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I’ve had this valentine in my head all year 😆 Happy Valentine’s Day!

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Fanart of the Corinthian from Sandman. Notes below the fold!

There’re still wonky parts that bother me, but I think I’ve gone about as far as I can go with this short of starting over with perhaps a less fucky foundation. A lot can be chalked up to the fact that suit collars and shoulders confuse the hell out of me, like… spatially.

As for the speech… This is fanart of the show, not the comic, so I’m not leaning on the comic’s dialogue styles. What I’m trying to do is find a way to visually capture how he sounds on the show. Smooth, velvety, inviting… balanced on a knife’s edge with terrifying menace.

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I’ve come up with a working title for this inchoate comic concept thing. Let’s call it:

The Beau and the Beastess

So here’s the ex.

I’m thinking the monster folk in this story have a giant god-beast-type form and a more human-like one, and they can shift pretty fluidly to anything between those two extremes. This guy’s human-scale form is closer to human than most—and that’s when he’s at his most sinister.

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Drowning in WIPs, I can’t seem to finish anything. Just an endless struggle on something that never gets there. Can’t get anything looking right. But maybe if I label stuff explicitly WIP I won’t feel bad posting it.