elkian-art

[elkian-art]

"It'll just be a quick sketch!" I said, you know, like a liar,

I literally haven't drawn Ivy in over a decade and I think I have colored her never, so this was interesting!

Agatha is from Kidd Commander, highly recommended webcomic if you wished One Piece involved more starkids punching god in the face and suplexing evil spiders.

Ivy the defense golem/construct is an old OC of mine. I thought she and Agatha might get along :3

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Silly thing that popped into my head yesterday and compelled me.

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This post by Yugo Limbo ( @yugsly ) reminded me of my girl Sickle, who operates on Roger Rabbit Rules. I gave drawing her to fit into GGG a shot and it came out pretty well!

[elkian-art]

Not me doing a Mobility Device Monday Friday upload!

Character: Gaz, AKA Gazzy, AKA Gazzabellisima (her parents meant well)

Canon / Noncanon: Canon

This is actually my first time drawing Gazzy so expect her design to fluctuate a bit!

A lot of the time when I make a blind character I tend to consciously or unconsciously crib from Toph Bei Fong or Terezi Pyrope or both. Usually as the characters develop they tend to gain and lose traits and become less like those two, but Gazzy is very firm about remaining a wrestler and I am powerless to stop her.

Gaz is a small-name professional wrestler. She currently plays heel and loves it, but may become a face. She's quite skilled at grappling.

Not quite as much of a gremlin as Toph or Terezi, but she doesn't mind raising hell from time to time.

Gazzy's cane is a classic white cane. Sources vary on whether it's supposed to have a red stripe or stripes, and region and time period seem to be part of that. Gazzy has no light perception and her cane has one red stripe. I think that's correct but please drop me a line if not!

She also has a WWE sticker and a sparkling heart emoji sticker applied to the cane.

Gazzabellisima was born with impaired vision and then an incident when she was a child left her with no light detection. Originally she was actually made as a Fallout: New Vegas OC and got poison spat in her eyes by a mutated snake (she learned a valuable lesson about not chasing animals into their dens or sticking her arm into random holes, unfortunately); unclear how much of that will translate if I bring her into more of a real world setting.

Currently the only OCs I have her interact with much are Ray and Dazka, but she should definitely befriend Linh too.

Likes: Pro Wrestling, arm wrestling, short nature walks with friends, soap operas, donut holes, letter jackets (I would have drawn her in one but the guns refused to be stowed).

Dislikes: Hot dogs, period dramas, long-hair cats (allergies act up), yoga (Linh is trying to warm her up to it).

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Also, help me out. Which has a better ring?

Happy Mobility Device Monday to all who celebrate (just me... for now). Of course due to work reasons I couldn't actually upload this Monday so it's Mobility Device Monday Tuesday.

Character: Ray

Canon / Noncanon: Noncanon

Ray doesn't currently use mobility aids, but given the joint issues he has from both PTSD effects and physical trauma, he probably should. I gave him a knee brace here (the spikes are just hard rubber) but he might need something different depending on how it would actually shake out.

I've done some research for this project but there's always more to learn! Ray's cane was kind of the start of things and I had a pretty solid concept from the beginning. He has a pretty classic punk aesthetic, so a classic cane was more his style.

The text was harder - I wanted to shoot for more of a graffiti style but it's been a minute since I tried to make stylized text! The blue lightning is more his style (and I have at least one other character who will very much be about the flame decals) but it was worth trying. I definitely want to refine that a bit more in pretty much every respect.

Ray's cane is one-footed, single-point, with a solid build and t-shaped handle. He's added the text "this machine kills fascists" down the length of it.

Ray has a lot of hangups about how he's perceived and using a cane would be something he'd resist at first, partly because he's awful at anything self-care adjacent and partly because he's afraid of appearing weak in any way. I think he'd warm up to the walloping possibilities quite fast, though!

Bonus:

Speaking of noncanon medical aids, sometimes I play around with the idea of Ray with a service dog, Gil (short for Gilgamesh). Ray's PTSD and short temper can make him easily agitated or have flashbacks at inopportune times, so Gil might be trained for grounding (ie. leaning against Ray's leg or placing a paw on his foot and providing a physical presence to help Ray come back to reality).

In the sketch above, he's blocking - placing his body between Ray and a stressor (loud drunks in this case). Ray gets extremely uncomfortable around drunk strangers, but is also aware that his usual belligerence isn't a reasonable response to people having a good time completely unrelated to him. The presence of a warm body between them and having something to hold onto could help him come down from that instinctive response.

I think Gilgamesh would be a black Doberman - leggy, a little unorthodox, and not as scary as reputed, he's perfect for Ray. Dobermans aren't common service dogs but apparently they're working dogs with a lot of traits that make them good service dogs, including the short hair making them more hygenic (Ray works at a tattoo shop so that's important!).

Anyways, just some stuff I've been working on.

[elkian-art]

Happy Mobility Device Monday to all who celebrate (just me... for now). Of course due to work reasons I couldn't actually upload this Monday so it's Mobility Device Monday Tuesday.

Character: Ray

Canon / Noncanon: Noncanon

Ray doesn't currently use mobility aids, but given the joint issues he has from both PTSD effects and physical trauma, he probably should. I gave him a knee brace here (the spikes are just hard rubber) but he might need something different depending on how it would actually shake out.

I've done some research for this project but there's always more to learn! Ray's cane was kind of the start of things and I had a pretty solid concept from the beginning. He has a pretty classic punk aesthetic, so a classic cane was more his style.

The text was harder - I wanted to shoot for more of a graffiti style but it's been a minute since I tried to make stylized text! The blue lightning is more his style (and I have at least one other character who will very much be about the flame decals) but it was worth trying. I definitely want to refine that a bit more in pretty much every respect.

Ray's cane is one-footed, single-point, with a solid build and t-shaped handle. He's added the text "this machine kills fascists" down the length of it.

Ray has a lot of hangups about how he's perceived and using a cane would be something he'd resist at first, partly because he's awful at anything self-care adjacent and partly because he's afraid of appearing weak in any way. I think he'd warm up to the walloping possibilities quite fast, though!

Bonus:

Speaking of noncanon medical aids, sometimes I play around with the idea of Ray with a service dog, Gil (short for Gilgamesh). Ray's PTSD and short temper can make him easily agitated or have flashbacks at inopportune times, so Gil might be trained for grounding (ie. leaning against Ray's leg or placing a paw on his foot and providing a physical presence to help Ray come back to reality).

In the sketch above, he's blocking - placing his body between Ray and a stressor (loud drunks in this case). Ray gets extremely uncomfortable around drunk strangers, but is also aware that his usual belligerence isn't a reasonable response to people having a good time completely unrelated to him. The presence of a warm body between them and having something to hold onto could help him come down from that instinctive response.

I think Gilgamesh would be a black Doberman - leggy, a little unorthodox, and not as scary as reputed, he's perfect for Ray. Dobermans aren't common service dogs but apparently they're working dogs with a lot of traits that make them good service dogs, including the short hair making them more hygenic (Ray works at a tattoo shop so that's important!).

Anyways, just some stuff I've been working on.

[elkian-art]

The first comic is, of course, referencing this classic: LINK

The second one is "POV: You kidnapped a small goblin child."

Not sure where the meme source for the 3rd is, but you've probably seen it before.

I've mentally inserted my boy Ray into ff14 and noticed a trend in all my art lmao.

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I was leveling Gunbreaker the other day and....

I think that Monk just needed to go to bed, no clue what was going on in their head. Very sorry to the one teammate who got roasted in that beam attack :(

(Ooh you want to make a Mob Sandwich so bad, you want to correctly place the flimsy characters out of harm's way while the tank soaks hits soooooooo bad,)

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Some OC sketches and memes! Descriptions in the alt text.

The colored sketch was supposed to be part of several sketches and have a line about livestock guardians but it kind of took on a life of its own, ah well.

[elkian-art]

Hate AI "art"? Don't want your hard work to get datascraped? I feel you. Tools like Nightshade and Glaze are cool and have appeal, but involve downloading some stuff and in some cases require pretty hefty hardware, so I felt like providing a helper myself.

What this is: a series of frames on a 3:4 aspect ratio with anti-AI messages. The second pair of frames is full of copyrighted characters and such. All of these images are free to use and to edit.

Who can use these: Anyone! I hope they prove helpful. NOTE: The second pair is deliberately intended to either invoke or at lease evoke copyright litigation panic. If you use this for your own profitable works and get sued as a result, I am not responsible and cannot help you.

Can these be edited: Absolutely! Different font, new copyrighted characters, resizing, etc. are all an option you're welcome to apply. I would recommend adding an extra measure here and there - maybe a line of 1% opacity pixels across the actual image? Adjusting the frame itself also should make it harder for scrapers to avoid it entirely. The first pair of frames also has a line in the lower right for you to sign or put a watermark if you so choose.

Can you make one that has/is...? I might make more of these, but no promises. This was a spite-fueled late-night project. If you would like to make your own frames, please go ahead!

[elkian-art]

Silly comic idea I've had for forever and finally sketched out.

On Pillowfort.

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Trust Fall.

Pixiv / Pillowfort

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[ID: A sketch of the Honorable Mentions, featuring the protagonist from the original Pokemon Gameboy Color games holding a Pikachu, and next to him, the female protagonist from Pokemon Crystal, resting her hand on her Typhlosion's head.]

Following Glow but before we get to Crystal, I have some Honorable Mentions to get into.

Sydney

Shortly after I got my Sega and got into Sonic, which in many ways was the first media I was into (I can't really say fandom because I had no real way to connect with other fans at the time; one of the disappointments about not getting an N64 was that everyone had an N64, and nobody had ever heard of Sonic except for like one person I knew who had a Dreamcast and a couple of Sonic Dreamcast games, which were not at all the same thing to preteen me) - anyways, a year or so later, I received a Gameboy Color and copy of Pokemon as a gift, and still have them somewhere.

I can't say for sure if it was Blue or Yellow that I received first (I never got Pokemon Red), but I got both and played them often.

(My GBC has some kind of curse where every time I have Pokemon Blue, and only Pokemon Blue, inserted, I drop it and the data wipes. I cannot explain it for the life of me. It is still happening to this day.)

The original Pokemon games are pretty sparse on the story and characterization, and that's not a criticism, just a fact of life.

While the GBC protagonist is ostensibly a boy, the thing is is that this isn't really stressed much of anywhere in the game, giving you some breathing room. To tiny, age-6-ish me, two decades away from learning the term "agender", this space meant something to me. 

I have a vivid memory of being maybe 8 and trying to play a word game in the car with my mother where we named all the names we could think of that could be a "boy name" AND a "girl name". Long before I had the tools to understand myself, I was trying.

For reasons I can't possibly recount anymore, I was convinced that Sydney/Sidney was and is a unisex name and a perfect way to hedge my bets. When I was playing Pokemon (I've never been much of one for self-inserts; characters in games are almost never 'me', that's just not how I work), Sydney didn't have to be a boy or a girl or anything at all. The fact that I remember this nearly 30 years later says, I think, a lot about me.

In the early 2010s, I was big into Homestuck, and one day the music lead said "hey folks, can you try my game demo?" and I did. Both in the demo and the full game, Sydney became the name for the Fallen Human; it was a callback to something integral to me as a person, and the fact that this time it was in a space where nonbinary people could canonically exist resonated in ways that are hard to put into words.

Liza

While I had Sydney and the thoughts above, the fact remains that I genuinely wouldn't be allowed to access relevant vocabulary for these experiences for a long while yet, and another fact was that there were, and still are, an absolute dearth of female protagonists in video games. This issue has been addressed more recently and has its own foibles that I absolutely am not going to get into here, but the point was that it Meant Something to baby me to boot up Pokemon Crystal for the first time and be asked "are you a boy or a girl?" That was genuinely something I simply did not get asked much in games at the time - if you asked me to name a female video game protagonist, I would probably have stalled out at Lara Croft. Pokemon Crystal released in the USA in 2001 - a solid 6 years before Portal.

Again, the characters in games were never 'me', and that was fine. My Pokemon Crystal protagonist was The Girl One (visually much cooler than the Ash Ketchum design that I'd seen everywhere since the anime first started airing in the USA; I try not to be bitter, but I just can't vibe with the weirdly cutesy redesign for the Heart-Soul remakes, especially since the boy's design didn't change so fundamentally). The Crystal protagonist was cool not just because it was one of the first times I'd ever had the option to Be A Girl in a video game, but because she matched the game she was made for, with her crystal-blue hair and more modern design. She just looked rad as hell and utterly indomitable, and I loved her.

I named my protagonist Liza and, for reasons that I still could not begin to decrypt, named our starting Cyndaquil Suco, who would become my beloved Typhlosion. Return was one of my favorite moves; I loved Suco and he loved me, and that made him powerful as all get-out. It was great.

These two are Honorable Mentions because they haven't really developed beyond the bounds of their original narratives - they're less "Original Characters" and more my particular take on the protagonists of the game I was playing, but they're still near and dear to my heart, and still are an important part of my personal history.

Previous: Glow

Next: Crystal

Pillowfort: https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/5856968

Pixiv: https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/126577471

[elkian-art]

Hey, all, I'm working on a little project: trying to draw and discuss my OCs by creation timeline. It's ambitious and going to be messy! Here we go.

Glow the Hedgehog is an interesting place to start this project, because Glow, technically, is not my first OC, or even my first Sonic OC. My first OCs are lost to time, crafted during my hours in proabably preschool, kindergarten and first grade and so on. Glow is the first Sonic OC whose name, design, and general deal is memorable enough to touch on.

Around 1996, I was one of many kids who desired a Nintendo 64, and had parents who could not discern the difference between consoles. (My sympathies to the modern kiddo crowd; at least we had wildly different machines by different developers and not three different Xboxes to try to tell apart.) So instead I got a Sega Genesis and handful of Sonic games that Christmas, and despite it not being what I had wanted, I fell in love with the Sonic series pretty instantly.

My earliest OCs were vague critters shoehorned into a series that, at the time, didn't really have much in the way of lore. We didn't have cable TV and I didn't own any of the comics for a good 5+ years onward, so the games and the Sonic Movie (which I copied off of the Blockbuster VHS, I loved it so much) were the bulk of any kind of storyline.

Fast forward to the release of the Sonic Adventure games, and particularly Sonic Adventure 2: Director's Cut. I was absolutely captivated, particularly with Shadow. It's probably for the best that I didn't get my own copy for years; having to borrow the game meant I couldn't play it constantly, just a lot.

Glow was initially designed as an "opposite" to Shadow - inverted color scheme, a girl instead of a boy, and so on. I kind of set her up as a romantic interest to Shadow, but it never really went anywhere; you can sort of see my first real pokings at queerness and gender stuff around this time frame, though it would be years yet before I really Realized anything about myself.

Revisiting Glow for this project made me think about her for the first time in years, and even as I started working on this timeline, I began revising. Design is iterative (a thought that popped up when I incidentally gave Glow that Rudolph nose while sketching for this very post!) and a lot has changed.

In working through my own narrative thoughts and character design, Glow underwent a transformation; Glow, now, has started as someone with a crush on Shadow, which then became a one-sided rivalry, until a good friend finally sat Glow down and explained the concept of gender envy. Glow initially was solely transmasc before becoming more comfortable as bigender, and having more fun with his own experiences. There's something very freeing about playing with one of my oldest character concepts in this way, bringing in experiences and concepts that are relatively new for me and blending them into something nostalgic.

On the more general character design basis, one of my few strong memories of playing around with Glow was with her hanging out in a waterfall, so I've decided she's also an inverse to Sonic's strengths - that is, slow on land but a fast swimmer! This lead to the idea of Rescue Diver Glow - one of the doodles shows him rescuing Sonic, and I think I'm happier leaving Glow out of the main game crowd at this point, if not completely divorced from them. Also, can you imagine helping someone at work and thinking they look like a celebrity only for all of their celebrity friends to turn up and prove you right? Glow is having a time.

'Rival' Glow was pretty wound up, but having a Genderpiphany and working through the resulting conclusions and taking charge of her own experiences more actively has made him chill a lot more. She still feels a little embarrassed about the whole thing, to be honest.

Carmen the Turtle there came up when I tried sketching out Glow's Gender Moment - initially it was Amy Rose, but by the time I started sketching I had vague ideas of Glow's more personal social circle. Most of them are still very vague, but as I worked on this project, Carmen took on a bit of life. I already had an idea for Glow having a (fake) turtle shell backpack, which in retrospect is a bit of a weird affectation for a Mobien; so Carmen not only gives him a pass, but allows for me to double the joke back. In the doodle page, Carmen is wearing a fake cat/hedgehog-ear headband to match Glow's turtle-pack.

(Above: the first piece I did for this project and possibly the first time I've ever drawn Glow. This was roughly "Shadow rant -> Carmen asks Glow if maybe she just has beef with traits she reads as masculine -> Glow tries to respond -> Glow Buffers -> Genderpiphany Moment". Honestly, it's probably funnier without the dialogue.)

I don't have a lot for Glow at the moment; as mentioned, it's been a long while and I haven't put much energy into catching up on the comics, but I had fun working on him and this project, and look forward to the rest.

And as you can see above, Glow is passing the baton to Crystal, but there's one more thing to address... ( Next )

Posted on pillowfort: https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/5856924

Posted on pixiv: https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/126577471

[elkian-art]

Digseum was pretty good actually.

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Throats Cut At Eight Years Old Gang unite!

Phineas Kidd is from Kidd Commander which I highly recommend.

Ray (he/him) is my OC!

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[ID: Three versions of the same image. Each picture is a sketchy, full-color shot of the protagonist of Great God Grove, holding up a megaphone. They are set against a blank background.

One image has a white background, one image is transparent, and the final image is transparent and wider.

The final image has a white word bubble next to the megaphone, one which in dark red is the text “Voice of God (?)” in all caps.

End ID.]

@limbolanegames releasing a cowpoke-themed game the same week I get re-obsessed with Fallout: New Vegas feels targeted. 😂

Anyways I absolutely adore the godpoke and can’t wait to learn more about them! I’ve gotten a bit back into digital painting lately so this is a bit outside my usual style. I think the Voice of God(?) text could be improved but it’s fine for the moment.

I had a lot of fun making this!