cyberjello

[cyberjello]

Mercury—A Character I Recently Came Up With

If there's two things I love, it's shapeshifting and robots. Mercury here combines those pleasures as a sentient collective of nano-machines, whose form changes at will.

Here's some earlier, unpolished drawings I did to feel out the way to draw them:

[Some more art-process-ramblings under the cut.]

"How do I do this" "WHAT do I even draw for this" and Similar Struggles

This is the second time I've tried to actually render an original character, and I'm not sure if it was easier or harder than the tornado triplets. On one hand, a blob-y form means I don't necessarily need to worry about drawing perfect curves or straight lines. On the other hand, I need to figure out more forms to actually draw, which is more figuring out how to convey different unconventional shapes, which was rather challenging.

For example, the "slug form" in the second image was actually the 3rd shape I'd tried to draw. The first was the wormy blob shape in the first image, but it was hard to figure out and I gave up on it until much later; and the second was sort of like a that one pokemon Grimer, but without the arms and instead of the face it just had that big, black lens.

Likewise, that 3rd form in the second image with the spinny sharpness is also my second attempt at drawing a sort of "angry" form. My first idea was more of a writhing mass of tentacles and long sharp spikes, but I couldn't wrap my head around how to draw that without it looking... off, somehow. Like it was too off-center, or seemed to be weighted strangely, and it just—it didn't work.

Conveying a 3d Noodle

So remember how I said the "wormy blob shape" was hard to figure out? The reason for this, as it turns out, is that if all you only draw the outline of a curved noodle facing the viewer, it doesn't actually look like it, it just looks like a shorter, slightly misshapen noodle facing to the left:

It took me a while to figure out that you gotta add side details that curve around out of sight in order for it to work.

All in all, I'm pretty proud of the end result.

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I'm partial to that one time the Da Vinci Tank did a badass quadruple backflip attack

I can only imagine what other chaos went on behind the scenes lol

Probably still the best moment in TABS development history when this happened.

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Spoilers for the new minisode

Interesting that this is the second time Red has acknowledged someone's... less heroic qualities as pros rather than cons. First Purple's scheming skills, and now "Hey, you're pretty much the Master of Minecraft, you give this a shot!" with King Orange.

I wouldn't be surprised if years down the line Red needs something blown up and goes "hey I know somebody who's good at causing destruction and mayhem" and somewhere Dark perks his head up

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Psst, I have an art-only blog now

for reasons. I dunno.

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I finally finished Undertale for the third time.

I got my ass kicked out the window, retrieved and handed to me on a silver platter, and bashed over my head for the last SIX OR SO MONTHS.

BUT NO MORE! MY TORMENT AND HUMILIATION AT THE HANDS OF THAT SMUG POTATO-SHAPED SKELETON IS FINALLY OVER! AAAHAHAHAHAHAAAH!!!

So I guess I need to check out Deltarune now.

Finally decided to play Undertale.

I got bullied by a flower in the first 5 minutes. 10/10

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I drew some robot triplets

Twirly, Swirly, and Whirly (top to bottom) have been roaming around in my head for a number of years now, and now I've finally gone and drawn them. I think this might be my biggest project yet!

(More artist's notes/ramblings under the cut. There's a lot this time)

This is DEFINITELY my biggest project yet, having taken me a full 10 hours and 20 minutes to create. And I think it looks great! I'm so happy.

That Butterfly, and Musings about an Artist's Skill

This butterfly took me like a full 10-15 minutes to get the shape of the wings right. I find it interesting that something so simple could take so much time, and since I'm willing to bet an actually good artist (someone who's been drawing for a long time and knows what they're doing) could probably crank this butterfly out in about 2 minutes, I wonder how long this whole project would have taken them. I imagine one's speed increases significantly once you don't have to trial-and-error just about every individual stroke of your pen/brush/etc., but even then the actual drawing part only made up maybe two thirds of the work. I can't remember exactly, but a lot of the time spent making this (maybe even as much as half of it) was spent just shading it. Does more skill directly lead to significantly faster creation? Or merely higher quality, produced in only a marginally smaller time frame due to more efficient techniques? WHICH REMINDS ME—

Speaking of Efficiency—OR RATHER, THE LACK THEREOF

GREAT HEAVENS

WHAT A MESS

124 layers is... a bit much, no? And I thought 20 was too many! This is mostly shading and lighting and whatnot! (Though it also includes layers with rough sketches and references, the default background layer I never bother to delete, and primarily group layers, so it's a touch inflated. The total number of layers that actually factor into the final image is actually "only" 78. I really like organizing my layers.) You know, I think a better artist who's used to working with this software might be just a bit more efficient in this regard.

For reference, this is what the image looks like without all the lighting/shading layers:

I am happy that it still looks pretty good, just less rendered. It's nice to know that I'm not just relying on fancy lighting effects and blur filter masks to woo the viewer, and that I can in fact draw something that looks good.

The Characters Depicted

Twirly, Swirly, and Whirly, as they've come to be named, have existed as characters in my head for... I wanna say two, three years? They're among many of the robot designs I've dreamed up over the years in defiance of the boring old "Human but Metal and Plastic" designs that are just everywhere. You can see elements of their design that take inspiration from other robots across fiction; from the round, expressive eyes of the personality cores from Portal 2; to the cold inexpressiveness and many arms of the imperial Viper probe droid from Star Wars, to the glossy surface and digitally displayed eyes of EVE from WALL-E. (Well, I tried to make it look kinda glossy. Not sure it came across as well as I'd hoped.)

This was only the second time I'd ever drawn them, by the way. The first time was only a few days prior starting this one, because other than a few vague shapes, I had no idea what they really looked like. I hadn't even figured out what colour they should all be!

Here's that first concept drawing:

That Accursed Monowheel

This monowheel exhausted me. I traced it over an image I pulled off Google Search but even so, both the sketch and the final line layer each took like half an hour to get it looking right. It looks good though, I'm happy with it.

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I drew Niko from Oneshot!

It hasn't even been a week since I discovered Oneshot and I think I would die for Niko. This game is great and everyone needs to play it. More art-related ramblings under the cut!

This is the... third time I've bothered to try making a proper background/environment (first with M-O, and then with the raptor) and it's not too bad. I didn't really want to obscure it with blur filter masks like I did before, since nothing's moving and I didn't think a "zoomed in" look would work here like it did for M-O (Niko may be small, but not that small). If you look reeaally closely, you might be able to make out the random noise filter mask I put over the ground. I was trying to make it look a little less flat and a little more grainy to give it some texture, and to be fair when you zoom in it actually kinda works. Unfortunately that graininess I was going for is just a bit too fine to be noticeable when viewed normally.

But hey, you know what else isn't noticeable when viewed normally? The obnoxiously large number of layers I used for every little thing and bit of lighting stacked on top of one another!

MY GOD I CAN'T EVEN FIT THEM ALL ON-SCREEN AT ONCE IS THIS TOO MANY? I WOULDN'T KNOW, I HARDLY KNOW WHAT I'M DOING

But it turned out looking not bad, so whatever works I guess.

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Once again, back with the eyes, someday ill do one without but im addicted its so cool lol

I love the last dimension 🫶 I think we're starting the menter-ification and I am HERE for it

Tld and phil belongs to @oneeyedleaf

Click for quality

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Thinking about Minecraft EXP and hypothetical lore

Hey yeah so what if "Experience" was entirely literal. Every point gained from mining, smelting, farming, and so on is a literal expansion of one's lived experience, and your experience is what makes you you.

But every time you kill something, they drop their own experience. Not all of it, most simply disperses into nothingness (after all, players only drop a small portion of their EXP when they die). But some of it stays behind and is absorbed, a fraction of themselves becoming a part of you. You are painfully aware (sometimes in a literal sense) that these creatures are living and feeling beings like you. Every zombie killed in self-defense shares some of their hunger with you; the last terrified moments of every animal killed for food haunt you.

The Ender Dragon has lived centuries; only a few decades of its life will survive in the one that kills it. The Wither is a conglomerate of tortured souls filled with a hatred for life itself; killing it drives many a victorious hero insane.

What if enchanting came about as a way not just to imbue power into one's tools and weapons, but to purge the unwanted memories and feelings accumulated over the years? Before the iron defenders of today's villages, warriors worn down by the gnawing hunger and pain of the countless undead they'd killed defending their home would visit the local clerics and librarians, who could relieve them of that burden and channel it into a vessel, keeping them sane and creating powerful items.

Perhaps the Illagers are an example of what happens when the act of sacrificing a part of yourself like this is taken too far. The Illagers practice magic far beyond that of the villagers, but their forms are twisted and sickly. They are always in need of more experience to survive, and when research involving strange alters and rooms filled with plants evidently falls short—perhaps attempts to generate EXP from other forms of life—they turn to raiding and killing to get their fix.

Consider the Sculk, an organism that, at first glance, looks like some kind of plant or fungal growth. But while plants don't have lived experiences, this stuff does. Every inch of this thing is alive and feeling, and it feeds on the very lives of those that expire within its reach. The appearance of souls within the Warden's chest suggests it even allocates small portions towards fueling parts of its immune system for brief periods. Consider, when clearing out an ancient city of Sculk, the massive quantity of EXP you gain from it, and think about how many things you would have had to kill to gain a similar amount. I wonder how many people once lived in those cities. I wonder how much of that experience is theirs, and how much is the Sculk's own. I wonder what you'd feel when you absorbed it.

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Battle Time

I drew Fai doing cool Oracle stuff and... it actually looks pretty good! I like it!

Further ramblings under the cut.

WELL. OKAY THEN. This turned out FAR better than I expected! The proportions are decent, the hair looks like hair, the legs look like legs rather than pool noodles, the HANDS LOOK LIKE HANDS WHICH SHOCKS ME, even the face isn't too bad! Even the cloth wrinkles look pretty good. And the lighting! Oh, that lighting! Turns out I can just draw some semitransparent blobs, apply a blur filter mask, and the result looks really nice!

Some Gripes and Lessons for Next Time:

I cannot draw a smooth curve to save my life, and the curve tools in Krita are enigmas I have yet to solve. This wasn't an issue with the shield on the right (I just used the ellipse tool), but the left one... well, if you can't tell, I tried to hide my inadequacy with a motion blur filter mask. I might have applied it either way to try to sell the spinny movement (like I did with the raptor, which worked great), but it does very little to fix the curves. Guess I'm just going to have to practice more.

Speaking of the shields, it's a darn shame they're so big, because they cover up a lot of the clothing and lighting work that I'm really proud of:

In fact, I almost like the shieldless version better because of this.

Those hands, though. I'm pretty happy with my ability to cheat and get away with not drawing fingers like the coward I am. Left hand looks great, right hand might need some work.

Although I'm pretty happy with the face and expression thereof, one issue I have is with the eyes. The downside of using Henry Stickmin Eyes (because I'm a coward) is that there's no pupil/iris/white distinction, and the result is that they don't really glow clearly enough here. If you zoom in, you can see how I tried to cheat a little, but it isn't really enough when zoomed out. Too much saturated pink over the face, not enough bright color in the eyes, I think. My options are either "refine my cheating technique" or "give up and study how actual eyes work". Decisions, decisions... Overall though, I'm very proud of this one! It's exciting to see that I'm gradually getting better at this!

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Mit-osis

Phillip's shapeshifting has some interesting possibilities.

Oh gravy, the longer I stare at this the more it starts to gross me out. It's so... gooey. Eugghh.

This was actually a lot easier than I expected it to be. It only took an hour and a half! Turns out all you need to animated stretchy goop is to have gradually expanding holes and thinning strands and boom, goop.

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I drew a Constructor from Borderlands 2!

I love non-humanoid robots, and the Constructor is possibly my favourite Hyperion bot in the game. This took about 6 hours to make, but I'm really happy with the result!

Further ramblings and backgroundless/close-up version under the cut.

God the perspective was so hard to get right. The subtle forward angles of the metal plating around the eyes was particularly difficult. A couple of details that spark an unreasonable amount of joy in me are the soot smudges around the missile ports on its back, and the little rust dribbles under the little holes in that one black body plate. Also look at those eye lenses! I'm so proud of those little reflection-y bits! And that red lens flare isn't too bad!

Lessons for Next Time: The biggest flaws I see are with the legs, particularly around the joints. I think it would have looked better had I used a smaller brush size for the details there; as it is, it looks somewhat squished and clumsy. Good to know.

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Speculating About Chondrias and Their Combat Potential: Puppeteers

Yeah, this is a thing I'm doing now.

Ah, Puppeteering. Possibly one of the more limited chondria expressions out there as far as we know. But with Alex seemingly about to duke it out with Lokki at the time of writing, I feel compelled to analyze his combat potential, however outclassed he may or may not be.

The unfortunate reality of trying to analyze this particular chondria expression is that the only Puppeteer we’ve seen is Alex, and we haven’t even seen him successfully use it all that much. There’s not a whole lot to work with, but here’s what possible important factors I can think of:

Factor #1: Connection stability. Aka, the time limit. This is the most obvious limiting factor of Alex's chondria. He can only maintain a connection for a brief moment before it breaks. Or is it really all that brief? In a fight, even just 8 seconds is a pretty long time. A lot can happen in those seconds.

Because we have such a small sample size, there's no way to know if Alex's limit of 8 seconds is a little or a lot. For the purposes of this activity, I'm going to assume it's somewhere in the middle.

Factor #2: Per-target cooldown period and the effects of early disconnection. We have no clue how long Alex has to wait before he can establish a second connection to one target once the first one breaks on its own. It could be seconds, it could be hours. And what if Alex disconnects before it breaks? Can he split his 8 seconds into a 5-second connection, disconnect, and reconnect for another 3 seconds? We haven't seen anything suggesting either way. Perhaps stability decreases while connected, but slowly recovers over time? We just don't know yet.

Factor #3: Ease of connection. Equally as important as stability is how quickly and easily a Puppeteer can establish and break a connection. High ease of connection might allow for rapidly switching between targets, or preserving connection stability by only using very brief periods of influence.

Now, having considered all this, I can think of three main methods of using this in a fight.

Method #1: Brutal Brute Force

This method is suited for Puppeteers that have little to no actual hand-to-hand combat training, and may either completely lack a conscience or possess the steel willpower and/or unstable emotional state needed to disregard the one they do have.

This is the most obvious way of going about things: Take control as soon as the fight starts, and force your opponent to introduce their own face to a wall, the ground, or any other hard surface, repeatedly and at high velocity. If the opponent is armed, this can become much easier. If the Puppeteer is also armed, they can take this opportunity to assist their opponent in bashing their own head open. Substitutes to hard surfaces such as nearby cliffs, busy highways, or other environmental hazards are also viable!

BONUS: I'm no human biologist, so I'm not even sure the following is possible, but the possibility of forcing your opponent to—purely via muscular tension alone—hyperextend their own joints kinda freaks me out. Imagine snapping someone's neck with their own neck muscles. Again, I’m not sure whether this is even something the human body can theoretically do to itself, but still. Nasty.

Pros:

Incredibly safe and effective against single opponents as it ends the fight before it even has a chance to start.

Incredibly easy, from a technical standpoint.

Cons:

Not very effective against multiple opponents. This technique only really works on a single target. Any additional opponents are fully free to kick your ass while you deal with Enemy #1. If anything, this technique will make your opponent’s friends even more eager to beat the crap out of you as quickly as possible.

I’m not going to downplay it: this is brutal. It’s horrifying and violent. You are putting your opponent into a state of utter defenselessness and forcing them to seriously hurt themselves. Morally speaking, you’re on shaky ground, and doing this to another person will likely haunt you (and any witness's opinions of you) for the rest of your days. If doing this doesn’t bother you… good for you, I guess. You might be a little evil.

Method #2: Et Tu, Brute?

This method is optimised by high connection stability and is effective against small numbers of opponents.

If a Puppeteer is facing two opponents, they can always take control of one and force them to attack their buddy. This has the added benefit of forcing the uncontrolled opponent to choose between hurting their partner, or getting pulverized by them. The Puppeteer may also feel free to get a few opportunistic swings in themselves during the mayhem if possible. This shares some similarities with Method #1, but offers a less brutal option if the Puppeteer’s goal is only to escape their opponents rather than defeat them.

Pros:

This nicely flips those 2-to-1 odds on their head.

As soon as the connection to Enemy #1 breaks, the Puppeteer can immediately switch to Enemy #2. For Puppeteers with longer per-target cooldowns, this at the very least allows for twice the available Puppeteering time. On the other hand, those with sufficiently short per-target cooldowns and long connection times may be able to continue switching back and forth, Puppeteering one or the other indefinitely until the fight ends.

A less brutal variation of this can work if the Puppeteer is themself part of a team (awesome), and can be *incredibly* useful against larger numbers of opponents. If establishing and breaking connections is easy and fast enough, a supporting Puppeteer can cause tremendous chaos and disrupt coordination among a group of enemies for their allies to take advantage of by forcing brief, frequent moments of clumsiness, sabotage, friendly fire, and so on. Go teamwork!

Cons:

As a solo technique, this really only works best against two people. Any more and you’re gambling on whether Enemies #3, #4 and so on decide to help restrain the controlled Enemy #1, or cut straight to the source of the problem and target you.

You’re forcing two friends to fight each other. They likely won't forgive you for this, if you ever encounter them again.

See “Brutal,” “Horrifying and violent” in Method #1 if you wish this to be viable as a solo strategy.

Method #3: Gentle Nudges

For those who—for some reason—lack the stomach to force someone to bash their own brains out, this method is suited for a Puppeteer with a high ease of connection and lower connection stability. This method also assumes connection stability only deteriorates during an active connection.

This method is a bit more subtle. (I mean I know the bar for subtly isn't exactly that high considering the last two methods, but bear with me.) Through frequent, fraction-of-a-second influences, a Puppeteer that can frequently keep their opponent(s) off-balance would have a tremendous advantage in close-quarters combat. Quickly connecting and disconnecting, nudging attacks into near misses, missteps, and other subtle acts of sabotage to provide maximum effect while preserving as much stability as possible would require constant awareness of the opponent’s position, momentum, center of mass, and probably a whole lot of other stuff. This would probably pair extremely well with existing martial arts training, and would make one's opponent look like an absolute fool.

Pros:

I think it's cool

Very effective in close quarters

Can work against multiple opponents if you’re REALLY good at it

Cons:

Really, REALLY hard to master. Like, “many years of training” hard. You need some serious dedication to get any good at this.

This method relies on an unproven assumption on how the chondria functions in order to work. If this assumption is wrong, it doesn't work at all. Might want to save those years of dedication for something else?

Overall, in combat your average Puppeteer is probably going to be an incredibly efficient solo combatant or a very helpful saboteur as a teammate, though it's hard to say with how little we know about this chondria’s mechanics.

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I know we were all nervous about how this would be executed, but damn this thumbnail gives me hope. Just something about it.

One thing's for certain, though: Scott Buckley is going to emotionally destroy us all with his soundtrack.

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I drew a TABS Raptor

SPEED

Decided to try conveying motion using motion blur filters and... I think in an animation one would call it a "smear frame" but I have no clue if it's the same term in static images or what.

Anyway, this turned out GREAT. I feel super proud of this one.

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I drew M-O

Little dude is hard at work.

First time I've tried messing with blur filters, and I think it does a lot to hide just how flat/empty the floor and background are. Boy, am I proud of that red lightbulb though.

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Project TABS-ify, Part 7

I drew Jagg as the Swordcaster!

First time I've tried modifying the unit's original colors to suit the character better. Made me nervous, but I think it turned out OK. Also those swords were the funnest pain in the but I've drawn yet.

Original unit under the cut.