#Imoen

[blighted-elf]

Re-creating my favourite Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 party in BG3 (x)

[promniight]

redraws of Viconia and Imoen’s sprites :-) since i’m kinda dedicated to this bit now lol

[crimsonender]

Mikaila Orchard sucks at Paneling

I debated making this a video or not. But, I decided against it. If you guys are interested in me making videos about this sort of thing, let me know and perhaps it's something I could cover in the future.

So Mikaila Turkleson aka Mikaila Orchard has always made... questionable art. To me it seems like a weird amalgamation of Equestria Girls and Sophie Labelle's art. Anatomy bad character design bad etc etc. I don't however see a lot of people talk about her paneling.

Recently, Mikaila and presumably her partner, Lily Orchard started a new art endeavour. I assume to turn over a new leaf and bury the now-infamous Pokemadhouse. You can find it over at bhaalspawnfunnies. It appears as if the blog will focus around the player character of Baldur's Gate 1, Gorion's Ward, and their half sister, Imoen. This is the first entry.

Source

Where to start? My first impression is that this is very poorly drawn, and low effort even by Mikaila's standards. The speech bubbles are low contrast against the background. The ground/floor blurry blob looks extremely bad. As a fellow artist I get the distinct impression that Mikaila did not want to draw this piece.

Moreover, there's a huge issue with the panelling and pacing. Comics are really cool in that you can kind of use panelling and negative space to "time" jokes, leading the eye where you want it to go and using framing and other art tricks to make a punchline land a little better.

This "comic" has none of that. There is no pacing, there is no comedic timing. It's all bland and presented as a block. I took it upon myself to re-panel this piece, and I've made two versions: One, with Mikaila's art style and visuals, but with the panelling slightly adjusted to be more punchy and effective, the other I completely redrew, using the same joke.

Excuse the sloppiness. I'm not going to expend too much energy polishing and gilding this turd.

That being said, this is already a huge improvement. Even if Mikaila isn't at the technical level of a professional artist, this is very attainable with only a few more minutes of effort. The timing is punchier, the speech bubbles draw your eyes down the page, and even without colour coding, it's clear which of the characters is talking. This isn't exactly a hot take but in my opinion you shouldn't need colour coding on a comic page to denote who is speaking. It should be very obvious! Moreover, speech bubbles should be included in the composition, not added as an after thought.

I'm guessing the original comic took her less than an hour to make. I think I'm being generous here, honestly if this took her more than twenty minutes I would be concerned. Being generous though I gave myself one hour to make a version completely redrawn.

This was again, very quickly put together and of course is in no way perfect, but its to demonstrate what a little bit of thought can do to improve a comic page. I decided to change the pose of Gorion because making family guy references should be a a cardinal sin for artists, as well as make the characters a little more recognizable. "Aryana" is, notably, Lily's OC and bears little resemblance to the canon character of Gorion's Ward, but considering Baldurs Gate does allow character customization and dialogue choices, I decided to make their gender a little more ambiguous so players of any gender could see their version of Gorion's Ward in the comic, but kept the elf with long dark hair appearance from Mikaila's original. I also looked over the pic after I was all done and ready to upload and noticed some small flaws I could easily fix, and went back and did those things. You should always go over your pieces when you're finished them with fresh eyes before you submit them as a final piece.

Again, this certainly isn't perfect and I'd probably put more effort into a piece with characters I care about and a joke I actually find funny, but I hope this demonstrates that pacing and expression really are everything in comics.

[lilyvalorchard]

This is the reason why Solid Lily desperately wants to chase Rebecca Sugar out of animation, so she can take "the place that was rightfully stolen from her" and create....well, whatever the hell this is.

Then I realize this is also the real reason Lily hated Baldur's Gate III. Because it was nothing like her awful, sister x sister coffeshop fanfiction here.

[ratscrap]

guess what!! finally time for bg2 portraits, baby. imoen, illasera, viconia and yoshimo!

[xebsart]

found this old screenshot and it re-dumbfounded my brain and I immediately thought of just all the party members hitting him with The Look of Judgement after that

so now Edwin gets the red solo cup stare:tm:

[mikaila-orchard]

Real conversation in BG2

[lilies-in-the-attic]

Personally if I was trying to convince people I didn’t molest my sister I would not be parading around the fact that one of my favourite ships is of two siblings, constantly pointing this out and not making any effort to disavow mods that write them as siblings while still being a romance but hey maybe I’M the weird one in this situation

[liquid-bonhomme]

Lily's confusing "line weight" for "thin lines." Line weight means like, literally just how thick or thin the lines are. They teach you to vary or consider your line weight based on a bunch of different factors when you learn to illustrate professionally. Line weights are just another element of design you can use for utilitarian and stylistic purposes. You can pull attention to something by giving it heavier line weight, you can give something a more dynamic or organic quality by varying line weight, you can give something a delicate or textured quality with very light lineweight, etc. And of course, obviously, some illustrations has no lines.

Here's some good visual examples I just pulled off Google.

[purpledemonlilyposting]

Aww is that what Lily said? Her incest mod written by incest fetishists is the best "RPG" romance?

[Lily's Post]

Too bad that was on her old now terminated blog lost forever to time. Oh wait.

Ah yes, one of the best romances ever written according to Lily.

Credit to this now anonymous post for this info on the mod.

[marigoldbaker]

world’s most adventure bard and her most favorite people, circa bg1 🩷

[shallow-life]

Lily, is it incest to ship siblings together?

[soelvfiskart]

Some ink practice with some bg1-2 characters

[lillianvalorchard]

[ratscrap]

my favourite part of bg2 is how everyone is so downright miserable

[the-effervescent-sun]

Heya! It's me, Imoen