#I did try and cover it though

[i-wanna-die-like-now]

Day 26: Puppet!

Say hello to another OC!

[shepscapades]

6. Overdose — Trickle

I've known from the start that it all would fall apart Heart-broken after dark I'm such a fool for thinking anything has love for me, hah Overdose, hold me close, darling Feeling so low, falling Close my eyes and let me leave my blues behind

This is actually a piece I finished a few months ago; I had wanted to experiment with a more solid line brush, color palettes, and cropped compositions, and I figured doing an album-cover-style piece would be good practice for it! I meant to post it back when i finished it in June, because I'm honestly super proud of how it came out! But i just never got around to it— super happy I get to share it with you all now :]

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

"See you tomorrow"

MDZS Disco Elysium AU part 4 [prev parts]

[aethersea]

devastating to go into the tag for an obscure vampire movie I've been quietly obsessed with for years to find mostly gifsets of minor characters (played by big-name actors) and review blogs saying they didn't like it :(

@ everyone who made a post saying "I liked it :)" I am blowing you a kiss. everyone who made a lovely gifset or photoset of the cinematography I am tipping my hat. that one poster that said "bro did y'all just miss the Entire Message about class and race or???" I am shaking your hand with enthusiasm there was SUCH a message about class and race

anyway everybody should watch Night Teeth and revel in glitzy flashy modern vampires in LA with me

[luck-of-the-drawings]

IMAGINE. working at ur stupid uhhh job or whatever. pulling into your drive way and ready to work on some crazy project in your garage. opening the door to the most unfamiliar silence. did your wife and kid leave for something? could you imagine knocking on your kids door, hardly getting an answer, and opening it to find the splattered remains of your wife across his room your child is scared! hes hardly consolable, in a state of shock and terror. you are too, but youre the adult here. you need to take charge. you need to protect him. you need to do something. you need to do something.

[todayisafridaynight]

whatever og text i had in mind for this post about ko shibasaki looking like sayama in this movie is completely cancelled on account of utsumi (this character)'s first name being kaoru and i only found this out cause i was looking up her name just to be sure when making this post

like jesus christ i legally have to make this post now

[starsh0cked]

okay so. two things!! first of all, over the course of january (and the beginning of february) i participated in the kirby oc secret santa, which was wonderfully hosted by @/moonverc3x. i was lucky enough to be the santa for @/starflungwaddledee, and ended up with two of my best pieces so far!!

these were CHALLENGING, though. which is where the second thing comes in!! under the cut, i'll be going over some of the sketches, drafts and phases of either piece! there's also a speedpaint. exciting!!

i'll be starting with my starstruck piece! the theme here was wanderlust - literally one of the most whimsical words i know - and generally anything to do with the stars. i had a few things in mind, but considering how long it sometimes takes to make artwork, i decided to roll with what inspired me the most.

this is the final sketch compared to the final artwork. certainly one of the crazier transformations i've done. i had a mental image of most parts of the artwork, from the material of starstruck's bow to the lighting cast by the stars. everything except for the grass (i hate grass!!) i ended up rendering the grass and background first, anyway.

doing the background before the rest of the artwork helps define the lighting and shadows! if i decided to draw starstruck before the background, i'd have to draw it according to the lighting.

weird explanation, but in summary: background before character helps the character look like a part of the environment! character before background means extra steps need to be taken before the character fits in the environment!

starstruck's bow was also a decent challenge! i'm a fan of bows and satin, so a satin bow sounded like a good idea. it was, but i've never drawn satin before. the workaround was an active satin study! i stared at a satin bow i found on pinterest and tried to understand how light spread over the material. it's quite interesting!!

you might notice that i flipped the direction of the shooting stars. this is for composition reasons!! i wanted to make starstruck the obvious focus, and while the contrast between her warmer palette and the background's cooler palette easily achieve that, i wanted to cement it. i also added little hand drawn sparklies everywhere. because i like it.

of course, i have to talk about the eyes!! if anything, i noticed that in all of starflung's drawings of starstruck, she had really glittery eyes. literally adorable. so i made it my mission to capture her feelings in her eyes!! i had a lot of fun making them super shiny and adding little stars in there. i also needed to pay attention to the subtle gradient, though - they fade from blue to pink if you zoom into starflung's artworks - and decided to keep it vibrant.

okay. thats all for this one!! i'd like to mention that in the original sketch for this specific pose, bandee was in the background. i really regret scrapping that now. oh, well!

time for morpho dee! i'll be starting for with the speedpaint for this one, mainly because it sort of explains some of the process by itself.

i restarted the shading... three or four times at least? so yeah. i was losing it on this piece. i'll be completely honest, i contemplated dropping it for the sake of meeting the deadline. it wasn't stressing me out, but i had studies to worry about too, and i was worried that it wouldn't be of great quality? but after some advice from my beloved older sister, i managed to turn the tide!!

this is a first for me, but everything here was a challenge. if you scroll through my account and the few artworks i've posted, you'll notice that i draw gijinkas far more than orbs. now, you may be wondering why this didn't pose so much of an issue for my starstruck piece! it's mainly because i chose a far simpler pose for her than i did for morpho over here.

for morpho, the artwork needed to be dramatic. i draw cutesy things - while i've always wanted to draw something dramatic, i've never pushed myself to do it. until this artwork! i went for a dynamic pose which would (hopefully) pull the viewer's eye towards morpho dee. that's what's up with the foreshortned spear! i also realised that the plcement of his feet would be quite significant to the artwork. you might not know this, but feet are my greatest enemy. i'm still trying to figure out how best to draw them for people or orbs, but i'm getting there.

after 'lineart' (which really ended up being a cleaned sketch - this was supposed to be linelessly rendered, but i gave up on that) the pose was no longer a problem. because the shading was! hooray!!

nothing has quite bewildered me like metal shading has. i've shaded gold. satin. cotton, fluffy scarves, shiny things, grass. yet metal shading continues to elude me! this was, hands down, the most difficult part of this artwork. i struggled to make sense of how the lighting was supposed to work, even with references. and every time i thought it made sense, i ended up with something i didn't like the look of. the solution? long breaks, more references and pinterest tutorials. i have no clue how i managed this, but we got here anyways. i finished it off by colouring the lineart according to the shading.

i have experience with drawing fire, at least! it was three or four years ago in an old artwork, but i have experience! i simply had to figure out how to work it into the atmosphere. for the glow, i duplicated the layer, gaussian blurred it and used a slight glow layer! i did something similar for the durst particles, but i used motion blur instead.

i also want to talk about the spear a little bit. you might notice that i added a bit of ambient glow around the blue gem. that was with the light intensity in mind, but also for a sense of realism! i also had to keep the pink light in mind, though. so i ended up using an airbrush to create a base for the lighting and i continued from there. i added a few scratches on the handle just to give it a bit more life, too.

and, finally, a one-to-one comparison between the sketch and the final! i have literally no idea how i pulled either of these pieces off, but i'm quite proud of them.

i recommend you drop by @/kirbyoc-secretsanta for other artworks! a total of 75 artists participated, so there are plenty of super cool ocs to adore over there and new artists to find!! this was my first secret santa experience, and @/moonverc3x made an amazing host (thank you for hosting, by the way!!) bye bye!!

[maddieandangel]

Had a weird Hollow Knight-related dream a couple days ago, so I decided to draw a major scene I remembered from it dgsgshf

More context will be in the tags, for those interested!

[good-wine-and-cheese]

The other half of Star Trek AU! Ochanomizu (ft. mind meld with Tenma)

I thought about putting him in science division but I like the idea of Ochan having a background in communications tbh. I feel like he would be really interested in that.

He grew up hearing about the development of the world's first "positronic brain" - supposedly a piece of technology that would enable humans to create life forms with true Artificial Intelligence. However the research was shelved and left incomplete, leading Ochanomizu to take interest in conducting his own work on the subject. This gets him scouted by Starfleet, with promises of ample resources and a retinue of colleagues with the varied skills offered within the Federation; and while it was never his intention to join Starfleet, he could hardly resist the opportunity.

This eventually lands him leadership of a research initiative whose aim was to continue the research done into the positronic brain, hoping to create the Federation's first truly self-determining AI android. It's three years into his efforts that the outpost gains its first representative of Vulcan's own science institute, though it could be argued he's much less of a "help" than he is an annoyance; Tenma does not make a strong first impression with the human crew he so derides. Though he's proficient as an engineer, it'll certainly take time for the two to warm to each other in any capacity.

Ochanomizu, outside of his primary research, loves Tribbles! He is a licensed caretaker and helps educate people about them. He has a Tribble nursery on the outpost, much to Tenma's chagrin.

Also, even though he's at the rank of captain, he has never sought out his own command. He likes what he has on his little research outpost and doesn't really have the itch for space cowboyisms.

[devilsskettle]

i feel like i’ve been WAITING for the other shoe to drop wrt people’s opinions about watcher for this very reason. not that i think the reaction is completely not understandable but the greater the parasocial relationship, the greater the fallout as soon as public opinion shifts. you don’t have a relationship with these people they’re just content creators, chill

[coquelicoq]

i have so many strategies and policies for writing work emails. and the thing is i used to think they were all super self-evident, until i started training people who did not do ANY of this and it all had to be explained. i was like, i don't know why clients love me, maybe because i'm adorable? but then i discovered i actually had to tell my coworkers to say "thank you" in emails and was like hmmm. maybe it's because i'm adorable AND i say thank you in emails. further research is needed.

[raiiny-bay]

some things i never finished

[bmpmp3]

i feel so bad for cover singers who like to do a lot of anime music because rn one of the biggest anime openings to cover is Idol by Yoasobi which is hard enough to keep up with, like even if you can hit all the notes correctly you still have to figure out how to sell the speak-singing bits and thats a whole nother ballpark like dear god have you HEARD the sheer personality thats oozing from every note like the enunciations and the lilts and the subtle vocal fry like right before the ruby aqua bit in the “aida” like LISTEN

okay that was really tricky to cover but we made it. and now what if you really wanna get that SEO? what if you wanna do another cover, usually doing the ending song for a popular anime is fun too right? lets hope its not as difficult to sing at the opening- AND then you get hit with Mephisto by Queen Bee and you explode on impact

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2023. THE TEN THOUSAND DOORS OF JANUARY by Alix E. Harrow. Up next! Back on my Driscoll-adjacent reading vibes, to fuel the Driscoll-centric revising vibes (pictured in the background).

[keeps-ache]

watch me shatter the sun!

[transparent version below]

[13eyond13]

So glad I can spend my work day today with my best friend Guts Berserk instead of slogging through the swamps of Colleen Hoover Land