deactive-420

[deactive-420]

officer's ball

If there was one thing that eventually turned you against the aristocracy, it was the yearly humiliation of you, your handler, and your entire ground crew being forced into beribboned beyond-antique pre-starflight fashion every year for the Officer's Ball. They insisted. They said the nobles needed the human element. They said it'd justify your funding.

"Ammo doesn't grow on trees," the woman who directed your every combat action said. "And if it did, they'd be found growing only in First Landing family gardens. I hate this. I hate these people. Every fucking year, just to keep the program running. Don't they get bored?" and then she burst into tears and you had to do her makeup again, from the beginning.

You didn't mind it so much for yourself. The entitled fat old perverts of every gender trying to grab your ass and catching a handful of hoopskirt were entertaining. So was being forced to sample a continuous mix of canapés, sherry, cocaine, chocolate, PL-2141, and further canapés. If you really worked at it, you could approximate a slight buzz, the faintest echo of what interface drugs did on an average mission day.

But your poor mechanic wasn't used to being groped by the nobility or plied with anything stronger than hangar coffee. By two hours in, she was looking green around the edges and ready to puke in the nearest potted palm. Your avionics specialist, parted from her usual headphones and overlay glasses, was rigid with sensory overload and unable to dissociate because some third son of some electronics bureau minister had her cornered about a harebrained idea and wouldn't let go.

Your handler was worst of all: thoroughly miserable in her tightly corseted dress and constitutionally unsuited to any kind of discomfort inflicted upon her own person, rather than yours. She jumped at the slightest touch, gritted her teeth even more noticeably with every introduction. Your signed or whispered attempts to quietly reassure her that the "mission" was on track and would be over soon caused her to twitch and on one occasion even yelp, startling the admiral responsible for your fuel allocation. You smoothed it over as best you could, insinuating something about "combat nerves" — the old fool might have actually thought she was a pilot! But you didn't feel the need to explain, not that night.

The next day, as you hunted down a rebel tactical element in the hills above Seyan's Folly, she was still hung over. Not hung over enough to not notice when the pinned-down rebel lieutenant started in on an honest-to-God "you're not so different, you and I" speech, but hung over enough that she told your comms operator to cut the audio feed to Command, not your cockpit speakers.

"We're listening," you boomed over external PA speakers, forwarding her orders. "Wait? We're listening? Apparently we're listening."

"Shit. I mean. We're not that different, really, but obviously there's, uh, you're part of a system, and there's, redemption is on the table, I guess, maybe you'd like to, uh… honestly, I was just buying time."

"Don't get cocky, I've had your reinforcements bracketed by smart mortars for the last two minutes," you said. "You never had any time to buy. But… tell me about your side's command structure. Does it have a yearly ball?"

"Are you fucking joking?"

Things got complicated after that, with the improvised extraction, but what the hell, your team already worked well together.

You've had to work for every round and every joule and every mole of active nanomachinery since (much of it wrested from lesser units sent from your homeworld to drag you back) and you share a tiny, noisy cabin with your handler above the large bay of a rebel assault transport.

Maybe you're on the right side. Maybe there isn't one. But they're still letting you pilot, and your handler has happily returned to a tank top, fatigue pants, and what's left of her battered leather jacket, restoring her confident growl over the tactical link. The liaison officer they've got watching you has assured her that there's not a single brocade ball gown in the entire fleet. □

[deactive-420]

Art by Simone Ferriero

[deactive-420]

How do you go about your backgrounds? Particularly interiors where believable looking perspective makes or breaks the scene.. Do you use vanishing points or is it something you just intuitively build around the character?

I will often just freehand it, starting with the character and then building a scene around them, but for more complex or rendered pieces I do make use of perspective tools. If you use Clip Studio, I highly recommend downloading the TOPGYN(The Only Perspective Grid You Need) assets, I've been using it a lot recently and it's very useful.

I'll use this recent commission as an example to show my process. I usually start with just freehanding perspective when I'm sketching. I don't like worrying too much about being 100% accurate with the perspective at the start, I just wanna be able to feel out the image I have in my head, then I can worry about accuracy later.

Depending on how rough I am with the initial sketch, the perspective probably gonna be at least a little off in terms of accuracy or "believability". So I'll set up TOPGYN and focus on setting up the background as close to the initial sketch's perspective as possible

And once I have all of the rough shapes blocked out, I just use this as a guide to draw everything else back into the scene.

I don't really use the perspective tools for any of the details at this point, it's just too much hassle to block out the perspective for ever little object in a scene so I just do my best to eyeball it from there. And from that point I just paint it, that's basically my whole process for setting up backgrounds and perspective! I don't know how novel any of this info about my workflow is but I hope it's at least somewhat useful ^_^;;

[deactive-420]

dizzy nation raise up

"Лизочка" (Lizochka) is a more affectionate and sweet version of the name "Liza" (which is similar to Lizzy)

[deactive-420]

was supposed to be a valentines day post but i needed a bit more time to finish the coloring. anyways, yes, SU reference :]

[deactive-420]

*writes on chalkboard* i'm very sorry for making them look like reagan ridley and ms frizzle

[deactive-420]

Pomni has a crush <3

[deactive-420]

I’m all for the funny goofy comics… I hope u get the reference xD

[deactive-420]

I like funny high as hell Ragatha. Her being in love pomni I find very cute lol She is very upsetti. She just wants someone to flirt with her too...

Help idk how to background- or to make something not detailed-

I think I should doodle them more they are cute. I really enjoy their potential. I also really like disheveled as fuck Ragatha.

[deactive-420]

Ragatha more like Rizzless

[deactive-420]

this is so bad but i permanently cropped the file so brutally that i can no longer edit it. whoops! also panels 4-7 were fully coloured but it looks better without for some reason. pomni (penny?) is such an ugly crier. i love my horrible failgirl accountant

[deactive-420]

Moment of freedom

[deactive-420]

mech pilot trainee who just flunked out of the program. she wasn’t supposed to be anything but a weapon and she couldn’t even do that right.

she doesn’t have anything. no house, no job, no car, no free will, no legal protections. her entire life down to the level of her brain has been organized around piloting a mech for years and now she doesn’t get to do that. she doesn’t know who she is and she doesn’t even know how to turn back on the higher level brain function that would let her try to answer that question.

she’s basically an empty shell that had a human being in it once. she eats and sleeps and uses the bathroom like a person, but her eyes are completely dead. now she just sits places, silently and unmoving, for hours at a time, waiting for orders she’ll never receive…

[deactive-420]

miku pony

[deactive-420]

[deactive-420]

Yes, I am a straight man. Yes, getting the shit beat out of me in an all-male mosh pit is an erotic experience for me. We exist

[deactive-420]

I have recently learned that white and brown stoats are not in fact different species. Dahlia's winter coat....