#i'm so happy with the final result of the rendered one!!!!

[guaxinimraccoon]

WE HAVE OUR MERMAY BEFORE MAY ENDS YIPPIEEEE

I know usually ppl make the all the gang as merpeople, but I thought it'd be cute if Brad was a giant mermaid pesting a human Toby

I love them so much ❤️❤️❤️

I'll be doing an Alelisa version of mermay too!!! Not sure if it'll be out till the end of the month, but we shall see it for sure :>

[heirofnight]

so long

pairing: azriel x reader

word count: 1.8k (of heart-crushing angst)

based on this request: could you do something for azriel based off ‘so long, london’ by taylor swift! thank you in advance 🩵

a/n: this is literally just soul-crushing angst. that's it. pls give feedback, and lmk what you think <3

i saw in my mind ferry lights through the mist i kept calm and carried the weight of the rift pulled him in tighter each time he was drifting away

you stood with your back to the rest of the room, peering out at the velvety night sky that was blanketing velaris.

your arms were wrapped around yourself, and you'd opted to put all of your focus towards counting each bright, twinkling star in the onyx sky - anything to avoid turning around, which would result in meeting the eyes of the male sitting on the bed behind you.

you'd heard the sheets rustle as azriel shifted his weight against the mattress. he huffed out a dejected sigh, his wings rustling in anticipation of the conversation that was inevitably going to take place.

you'd shook your head then, squeezing your left shoulder in an attempt to ground yourself, silence your swirling thoughts.

my spine split from carrying us up the hill wet through my clothes, weary bones caught the chill i stopped trying to make him laugh, stopped trying to drill the safe

"i can't keep doing this, azriel," you whispered hoarsely, sniffling once.

although you couldn't see him, you felt the tension that stiffened his slouched frame after you uttered those words.

"i've felt this way for awhile, but i kept telling myself to ignore it - i've ignored you shutting down, shutting me out for days. i've ignored the way you've so-," you paused, trying to reign in your quickly escalating emotions before continuing, "so obviously have been going out of your way to avoid me, and i've even ignored you leaving my bed in the middle of the night to return to your own rooms - to sleep alone," you breathed out a quiet laugh devoid of any humor.

when he offered you no response, you kept going, "i'm exhausted, azriel. i am tired. i cannot keep forcing this relationship along, and i refuse to allow myself to continue to be involved with you when it is so clearly one-sided," you finished, voice shaky yet firm.

i stopped CPR, after all it’s no use the spirit was gone, we would never come to and i’m pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free

you finally turned around, daring to meet the hazel eyes of the male that, a year ago, handed his heart over to you in the palms of his beautifully scarred hands. you were both so happy in the beginning. he'd given you everything, he'd shared everything with you - his past, the horrible, vicious past that he'd endured. every thought, every feeling that made itself known at any given moment. he had slowly but surely opened himself up to you. no crevice was left undiscovered - and you had granted him the same.

but, for what? so much wasted time, wasted energy.

over the last few months, azriel had begun to revert back to his old ways - to the point where, you'd sometimes had to ask yourself if it was all a dream in the first place. this abrupt, glaring switch had been flipped, and it almost felt like you'd never known him at all.

even now, it was like looking into the eyes of a stranger. his shadows were twined tightly around himself - a safe cocoon that rendered him wholly hidden from you. his expression was cold, unreadable. before you was the shadowsinger, but you'd fallen in love with your az.

and if this heartbreaking shift in his demeanor wasn't awful enough to endure, he was also refusing to even speak to you about it. you'd receive grunts and hums in lieu of actual verbal responses. did you not even deserve an explanation?

"so, i'm done. i'm done trying to make this work, i'm done bending over backwards. i've only broken myself in half in the process. i am not going to be the only one fighting to keep this, this - whatever this is, alive. thank you for all of the times we've had, but i'm done," you sneered, cringing at how professional your last statement felt, sounded.

so far from where you'd both begun.

and you say i abandoned the ship, but i was going down with it my white knuckle dying grip, holding tight to your quiet resentment

his eyes were cold and full of disdain, all of that anger and negativity being directed towards you - boring through you so intensely, you'd sworn for a moment that his gaze would leave gaping holes on every part of your body it touched.

he cleared his throat, his voice sounding like pure gravel, "so that's it, then? you're just - giving up?," he spat, his shadows swirling around him angrily - the sight reminding you of furious storm clouds preparing to decimate the land beneath them.

you must have been hallucinating.

giving up? you narrowed your eyes, taking a moment to process his words before you spoke.

"giving up?," you repeated out loud, voice hard and disbelieving.

"azriel, have you not been listening to me? have you not been bearing witness to how hard i have tried, and tried, and tried over the last 5 months?," you stepped towards him, face twisted in anger.

"how dare you?," you spat, hands slapping against your thighs as you gestured in utter shock. "i would have died for you, azriel. and several times over these last few months, it felt like i was heading in that direction," your voice lowered, growing dark.

he winced at your words, head dropping to stare at his hands that sat folded in his lap.

so how much sad did you think i had, did you think i had in me? how much tragedy? just how low did you think i'd go ‘fore i’d self implode? 'fore i’d have to go be free?

"i'm sorry," his voice hoarse and full of gravel - remorseful.

you paused, dropping your own head toward the floor.

"it's a little too late for that, az," you softened at his nickname escaping your lips, your heart aching at the familiarity of it. proof that you'd both been more than just strangers to each other at some point, even if that was the heart-wrenching truth now.

he shook his head to himself, running a frustrated hand through his jet-black waves.

curls that you'd play with so frequently when he'd begun to shut down right in front of your eyes. the action always seemed to bring him temporary piece, settling the raging storm that was beginning to brew within his molten-honey eyes.

your hand twitched at the memory, urging you to do the same thing for him again - now. but it was over, past the point of no return.

you swore that you loved me, but where were the clues? i died on the altar waiting for the proof

you bristled, straightening your posture after a pregnant pause of silence - you'd realized that he had nothing else to offer. no more words, no more explanations, no energy to fix whatever had irreparably split you both in two.

there was a point - about three months into the relationship - where things were so good, so heart-achingly perfect, that you were absolutely positive that he must be your mate. that was the only explanation for how well you both intertwined with each other. surely, there could be no other male walking this planet more made for you than azriel.

now, that thought almost made you laugh, the irony of it all almost paralyzing.

and so, with azriel offering you nothing further, you began to stride towards his bedroom door. this was it. he had no reassurance to give, no proclamation of love, no argument against the truth.

it was over, and that was that.

and I’m just getting colour back into my face

three months had passed since you had ended your relationship with azriel on a devastating note.

you'd avoided the entire inner circle for that entire timeframe. you'd stopped visiting the town house, the house of wind. you'd stopped visiting rita's, and the bakery that you knew feyre loved to frequent. you'd opted to ultimately avoid the rainbow entirely. you couldn't bare it, couldn't bare the thought of running into any of them.

the thought of their pitying eyes assessing you after everything that had happened - it was suffocating, it would leave wounds almost as deep and bloody as the breakup itself.

but, as time progressed, you'd begun to heal. you'd met new friends at a cooking class held across the river. and as time went on, you were even able to stomach the food you'd spent so much time learning to create.

and then - it happened.

you'd decided on a whim to accompany your new friends to a café alongside the sidra after a cooking class one evening. it was a beautiful night, the clearest sky you'd seen in what felt like months. you weren't sure if this had anything to do with the newfound clarity you'd received since ending things with azriel, but regardless, it was welcomed.

you were sat around a small, round table right next to the peaceful river, the stars reflecting off its surface in a way that threatened to steal your breath each time you glanced over.

you felt true peace, surrounded by company - friends, friends that were yours, and not yours and azriel's.

a laugh trickled out of you as you listened intently to a story being shared around your table of wine and appetizers. you glanced to your left, squeezing the arm of the new male beside you - leaning against his frame as you both giggled. you'd met him at these aforementioned cooking classes, and you'd be lying if you said he wasn't a large reason behind your continued attendance.

your eyes met his, and you shared a warm smile, and that's when something behind his head - in the distance - caught your focus.

the apex of large, membranous wings. you felt your face blanche at the realization, and you leaned back in your chair hesitantly, heart stuttering against your ribcage.

and sure enough, there stood azriel. he'd already found you, and his narrowed gaze pinned you in place. he was with his brothers, and they seemed completely unaware of your presence at all.

but azriel was always aware, of everything, all the time. and he was painfully aware of you, sitting next to a male that was not him. hooked around his frame as if you were sewn together.

his shadows twirled and looped around him ominously, and you knew him well enough to know that although his expression was blank and unfeeling, his shadows always gave his emotions away.

he was pissed.

but you offered him a tense, pained smile. you felt dizzy, but you nodded once in his direction anyway.

as if to say, i see you, and i'm here, and so are you, and that's okay

it was over, and you'd met someone new, and you had come to terms with that - with all of it.

and you'd wanted him to do the same.

so long, london stitches undone two graves, one gun you’ll find someone

a/n: this shit HURT. angst with no happy ending makes me want to claw my eyes out. but i hope you enjoyed this request!

a/n x2: i am just getting home from a morning shift, so if any of this was written poorly or not .... great, it's because i've been awake since 4AM. so sorry!!!

[crispycreambacon]

Et tu, Ryan?

— ☆ —

Happy Ides of March everyone!! Not exactly sure how this holiday works since I only joined and found out about it last year, but I'm glad to be here.

Obviously I had to draw Puppet History for this holiday. My god. If there was any historical event that would fit this show's events, it would be this one. I mean there's also Judas betraying Jesus, but I already did that (and also it's not JUDAS BETRAYING JESUS DAY, IS IT? 👹)

I'm really proud of how this turned out!! I had SUCH a hard time figuring out how to render that I even looked up tutorials before I finally went "Screw it, we ball." Ball indeed!

As a bonus: Here's the filterless version of my painting, and here’s the first version! I was so unsatisfied with how the rendering was turning out that I went nuclear mode and restarted from the sketch. I'm glad I did that 'cause I'm much happier with the final result.

[kozachenko]

(Click the image for better quality)

Yipeeee that Keiki and Mayumi fanart I posted the WIP of is finally done woooo- This piece was a very experimental one that I'm kind of OK on. Maybe because I've just gone insane looking at it for so long and I'm my own worst critic lol.

Artist's Notes;

So I've once again been playing around with my rendering style, mainly because I have been wanting to improve my lighting for a while now and as I was just scrolling through Tumblr, I saw some of the official art for that one webcomic-turned-animated-TV-Show Lackadaisy and was immediately inspired. I also have seen a technique a few times in the past where the lineart and shading are merged together, so I've been meaning to try that for a little while.

I did some experimentation on this one sketch of Keiki I posted in my sketch dump and I really liked the results of it, so I carried those over to this piece.

I ended up scaling up Keiki and Mayumi from the original WIP because I felt like they were both getting lost in the composition, and I'm glad for that because I think it works a lot better. I'm not a fan of how Mayumi's sword turned out at all, but it's not really meant to be the focus of the piece so eh. Overall, I think I could do better with my colours, probably because with Keiki and Mayumi's colours, I did them flat in greyscale and then used a brush on the overlay blend mode to colour all of them over, after which I changed the base layer for their colours from white to yellow and then lowered the opacity so it all went together better. I also decided to use gradient maps for a lot of the background elements, mainly to experiment with getting in my values first to make them pop out more. I ended up finding a really nice sky gradient on Clip Studio Paint that I really liked, and that kinda helped to establish the colour scheme of the background a lot. I think the whole "start in greyscale then colour" thing really works better with painterly styles rather than more illustrative ones, and while it is good at making sure your values are more readable, I honestly don't think I have the skill level to pull that off yet. Honestly, I think I've been looking at this drawing too long or maybe I added too much to it, but I wish I could've made the colours less monochromatic, but I'll just save that for the next piece I do.

I do love how the flame (...well it's more of a weird space rift than anything in this piece) and the lighting turned out, those were fun to do. I was initially struggling with the flame and how Mayumi is positioned in front of it before realizing "Oh wait! This is a weird abstraction of a weird creature! I don't have to follow the laws of anatomy!" and just dislocated it's flamey bottom jaw from the main body. I also changed the colours of it since I was really not liking how incredibly bright it was when it had lighter colours. Again, the gradient maps served the more painterly style of the flames well.

I also love how Mayumi turned out. I could do her sleeves better but that's more of just me needing to study how those types of sleeves fold in that position more. I'm also very happy with the posing, the technique I used for that was taking photos of myself in the positions I wanted, blocking in the silhouette and then modifying that by adjusting it to my lines of action that I drew on top of the original photos, and then sketching over the silhouettes and drawing in the shapes of the hands overtop of the photo if I needed to get the fine details right. As for what I do to take the pictures myself, I use a tall chair I have, prop up my phone with a phone stand, put on a ten second timer and scramble to get in position. Yes, I did have to use a bunch of thin markers I had to try and get the hand positioning on Keiki's pose right, yes I do have a fake sword that I used to get the positioning of Mayumi's arms and hand right, the sword was for an old Halloween costume from several years ago. I really like how both Keiki and Mayumi turned out in this drawing, I'll have to play around with these designs for them more in future drawings.

Also, if you wanna know why I draw buildings like that, when I watched Fantasia 2000 as a kid (One of the Disney movies where they make really beautiful animations to classical music) the way they drew the buildings in the first few sections Rhapsody in Blue segment (the jazz one with the cities) changed my brain chemistry and now whenever I need to draw buildings really quickly, I refer back to that. Since the buildings aren't really the main subject, I didn't put much thought into them.

As you can tell I am very tired of this piece, mainly because I made things harder for myself by overcomplicating the process compared to what I usually do, mainly with the whole "starting in grayscale then adding colour." I'd honestly just prefer having a black layer set to colour that I can just toggle on and off when I need to see the values, but it was good to experiment. And that was mainly the point of this whole drawing, to experiment. I'm definitely going to have to play around with this new style I'm going for, mainly because I liked how it turned out a lot in the augmented Keiki sketch, and also because I want to find ways of making it suit my style more. I also really want to keep experimenting with my lighting like this, it's very fun. Last but not least I am never starting in greyscale again because dear god I do not like the workflow it forced me into. I don't have a problem with the method itself it's mainly just a skill issue lol.

If you wanna read my headcanons for these two, I put them in my WIP post, so you can read them there if you want to. The more I look at this the more I prefer the simplicity of my WIP. I might go back to this and just take away the fancy colours and effects to see what it looks like without all of that stuff and reblog this post with that drawing, but for now, I don't think I can look at this drawing again for a while.

[crescencestudio]

๋࣭⭑ Devlog #42 | 6.25.24 ๋࣭⭑

tis the season of Kayn

HAPPY SUMMER!!

Hope you're all doing well and keeping cool <3 I know for me it's started getting to.... the Hot Season. To celebrate the start of Hot Girl Summer (and the beta route going live), I of course had to draw the hottest girl, Kayn.

we must stay cool brothers

Now that we've paid respect to The Hot Girl, let's get into the devlog!

Writing has been fun this month. A lot of it has been dedicated to Etza edits and writing Kuna'a's route. We're getting to about the halfway mark with Etza edits, so we are definitely chugging along!

Sneaky peeky of a recent edit

For Kuna'a's route, I said I wanted to have his first draft complete or almost complete by the next devlog, and I'm VERY PLEASED AND PROUD to say their first draft is In Fact almost complete! This is, of course, the very, very first draft so I'll be going back in to flesh some scenes out here and there and rizz him up even more. But I'm happy with the fact that at least the very base draft is done ^^

This month, I did quite a bit of drawing actually! I finished rendering two of Kayn's CGs, meaning 8 out of their total 9 CGs are finished YYYEEEAAAHHHH!!!!!

it feels so good to see the ending cg titles ouuggHHHH

Because Fenir's beta will be going out soon, I wanted to make some headway on his CGs. This month, I ended up finishing 3 of his CGs and sketching two. I'd really like to get 5-6 of his CGs finished so that it's a similar amount to Kayn's beta, so here's to praying!

baby girl

I also finished Senja's (they/he) sprite and base expressions. His outfit was designed by very talented bestie @saffein-e so please thank them for doing god's work o7

Finally, this past month we worked mostly on Kayn's beta route and getting Fenir's beta route ready for Patreon access!

If you'd like to try out Kayn's beta, you can get access to it if you subscribe to my Patreon (tier Hydra). Beta access to Kayn's route will close as soon as Fenir's beta goes up which will be early July, so if you want to experience Kayn's beta, definitely make sure you subscribe before it ends!

Player feedback for Kayn's route so far has been really positive, which has been a relief, especially since Kayn's route is the first one I wrote so is arguably the roughest (I have a big soft spot for it and like it, but I'm obviously Biased). So I hope you're all looking forward to it!! <4

beta feedback: so real

I also have started the voice acting sessions for the characters, which is EXTREMELY EXCITING!! That's the last asset I need basically, so the fact we have finally entered a stage where we can start recording is crazy. Our current session is for Kayn's route, but in the coming months we'll be moving to the next routes similar to how beta-testing is going :')

Aside from Kayn's route, I've also been working on coding Fenir's beta route. Rereading his script and he's... a cutie, I'll admit. So I hope the Fenir fans are excited for his route to enter the beta phase!

LET'S.......... GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Last thing, but I also ran a poll on Alaris's release, basically asking whether you all would prefer a full or segmented release. The results were basically 50/50 LMFAO and that's the vibe I've been getting in general. So while I don't want to solidify anything yet, just let it be known that Alaris may end up having a segmented release, where the first four Central routes are released first, and the Fae routes a bit later. I'll see how I start feeling as the year goes on and where Alaris stands, but thank you all for the support and understanding for the poll <3

I was pretty busy this month, so I didn't have too much time to do market research :cries:

But............

I did see the new Haikyuu movie..................... And I am the biggest Haikyuu fan. Quite literally if you want to know everything about who I am as a person and creator, watch Haikyuu and you will understand who I am to my deepest depths.

obviously I had to draw baby

But aside from that, I want to give one last shoutout to our Hot Girl Summer cross-promo! If there are any games you haven't tried out in this little set, I highly recommend giving at least 1 or 2 of them a peek! All of the games are so charming and have some similarity to Alaris, whether it's a personality mechanic, hot Fae, or a fantasy/ adventure story :')

Links to each game can be found on the Alaris Game page under the magic and mystery otome section!

I'm pretty happy with the progress we made this month. While there's still a lot to do, it's satisfying to see Alaris come more and more to life with each month. See you all next month with hopefully more exciting progress!

[red-water-dragon]

Raren demonstrating a suspicious spell in front of the royal court.

visual storytelling notes:

The bg was left blank until I started painting and the elements added to the bg were designed around the character. I didn't go into this with a little synopsis of what I wanted to convey. Only an abstract idea that Raren was going to be talking to someone, figure it out later. I decided he'd be presenting a new spell in front of a political chamber because he wears a crown and a blue crystal. So he has to be of some form of nobility and magical prowess. He also has blue eyes meaning he is an ice dragon and thus its a blue spell wow. The monarchs he's addressing are left dark and disapproving in the corner while Raren powers a statue beneath them. He could be demonstrating how the spell effects the world around them, maybe it freezes the stone? maybe it brings the statue to life? Either way its primed to eat Raren's opposition. Two of the bg guys are red one is blue maybe he's an arch nemesis who knows.

Art process and wips under the cut

I'm trying and failing to get better at visual story telling while keeping things simple. My long term goal is to have a frequent and consistent posting schedule. Most of the art would be stylized and simple like this and the rest could be fully rendered.

Art has been more of a "draw what's in you head and make it look pretty/ cool to hang up later" thing to me w/ the benefit of being a good source of self reflection as I create. Writing has more so been my go to for expressing that meditation. Writing I don't share because im unnecessarily cagy abt my emotions and my harshest critic lol. I want to tell stories with my art , convey tone, feeling, etc. and right now my paintings don't do that. I don't have the technical skill yet. This painting is the first of many to come that will hopefully change this.

The texture in this is chaotic and the line work is rough. Raren is the only part of this with a full sketch. All other line art was added to create the illusion of detail. There is less attention on rendering each section and more being put into the placement of characters and props. I had hoped this would make the painting go faster and...it has the potential to do so in the future. Sooo a piece that could have taken a couple hours took a whole day.

While im not overly thrilled with the final image im still happy about the process. Normally the dragon would be the only real focal point in my painting with the bg being a gradient, or a simple theme added last second. Conveying a message is more work but it gives more cool things for the eye to look at and the mind to ponder. So in theory even if the final result is aesthetically unappealing the theme can still salvage the work a bit.

what this taught me:

sketchy line work is passable in the final image

it can even add character to the art

plants are a great way of filling space without actually doing so

(hence the wip of the room looking empty af with out them)

the more clothing and eye candy you put on your character the more clutter you have to add to the bg to balance it out

the main oc was sketched the bg was painted on the fly

doing so saved time but harmed the natural flow of the piece

all of the storytelling is happening in quarters and it is almost abrasive to look at

what ill try in the next piece:

perspective guides

less shading and rendering

find a color palette to stick to

or work in greyscale first

write a little picture synopsis

or pick a theme

just find something that acts as a story guide

sketch out bg elements

toy around with the sketch more before moving to painting

[dead-lights]

the grand occult baking competition // in progress!

this is taking wayyyy longer than expected, but i'm finally picking up steam and making progress. episode 1 is fully written! the confessional set is complete! i really like the renders i've done so far (bc yeah to make the food stuff happen i kinda have to do everything in blender...)

unfortunately, i still haven't finalized my kitchen. i have two versions i'm working on, but i'm not very good at decorating and i'm unhappy with how both look. once that's done, i should be able to churn out everything else fairly quickly!

i'm so happy with how the confessionals turned out. i'm using a slightly edited RoM greenhouse as my set (bc i hate building sets). gotta nail that reality tv vibe, and nothing is more reality tv than a good confessional

I'm having some trouble getting fonts and sizing to look right across monitors/devices, but I'll get there!

very rough set previews + my complaints about how hard decorating is below the cut! i could use advice/feedback - i've been playing the sims since i was in first grade but this simblr stuff is comparatively new to me!

The countertops are intentionally bare - those are going to be set up specifically for each challenge. the walls/etc that will show up in the background are the issue. I really do like how a cluttered wall looks in the distant background, but whenever I try to do that myself I'm unhappy with the results :(

first set, based more on the design of the kitchens i see in baking competitions - sorta threw in those bookshelves bc i didn't know what to do. i don't like how the wall hangings look.

this overall looks good in renders in terms of positioning/lighting, and I'm happy with how some of the backgrounds look (also brandy is a cute cutie)

I'm less happy with other shots... it feels like my options are either a) poorly decorated or b) bare walls, but I'm sure there has to be a happy medium somewhere.

my second design: this one feels more like a classroom (those stairs just feel academic ok) and since my overall vision is that the competition is being held in Morgyn's converted alchemy classroom, this is kinda nice for that. I have a LOT of decorating to do though - like currently that back wall is completely bare and I don't know what to do with it. Probably a door/portal/staircase or something bc there's no other way out of the room, but when i tried that it looked bad. i'm not very good at this :(

anyway! it's going slowly, but it's going. i'm not sure when i'm going to finally start posting this, but if nothing else at this point i'm confident that i actually am going to get this done and online, and that feels nice!

[yanderend]

All Yandere's reactions when you hug them!

Requested by an anon (well, sorta...)

— The Detective

As far as Charlie's concerned, your hug came out of nowhere! He knew he was successful in you starting to feel more comfortable with him— but wasn't expecting this!

His initial response is to push you off, out of shock and embarrassment.

Seeing your face, all affectionate and smiley makes his heart race, and he's not quite sure what to do! Usually he's the one trying to render you blushy.

What can I say? Cuddles make him feel soft!

Quickly, he pulls you back into the hug, this time holding you so tight you can barely breathe.

'Don't you dare share this with anyone, okay? You know what'll happen...'

He speaks with his usual malice, but it's a little less threatening than he'd like when you can feel the heat burning from his cheeks.

— The Childhood Friend

· Eli never knew how much she missed the feeling of a good, long hug. You two have almost always been fine with physical touch, but after her spiral you seemed to become a bit more wary— and she hated that!

So, oh boy is she happy to have you finally be physical with her again!

Your hug might result in a few tears, as she holds you tight and shakes with happiness.

'I- I thought you hated me...' She sobs, nuzzling into your neck. 'Please never stop again... Don't let go.'

Not that you'll be physically able to let go, anyway. She'll have an iron grip on you until she's cried all her tears out.

Just like old times, eh?

— The Worshipper (cw: suggestive at the end)

His prayers have been answered! Kazuo has spent days on end asking for a crumb of touch.

(It has been 48 hours since you last hugged him. What are you doing, starving the man?)

He simply can't help it, standing there, frozen as tears well in his eyes, overwhelmed from the feeling of warmth with your body wrapped around him.

'O-oh dear... Oh gosh...' He whimpers, hands flailing, unsure of whether he should hug you back or not. 'I'm not- I'm really not deserving of this, my love! Please--'

When you give him permission to hug back, his touch is incredibly gentle; careful, even. Kazuo feels like he's melting into your touch, wondering if this is what heaven will be like. He sure hopes so.

Even when you let go he feels the warmth residing on his body— leaving him in a fuzzy afterglow all day.

He's a desperate boy, and the slight scent of you on his robes drives him insane. He berates himself for thinking such sinful thoughts, but can't help wondering how long he could've kept you there... Touching him.

He wants more, always hoping, every time he sees you, that you'll do it again. Maybe you'll do more, that time..?

— The Queen Bee

• Anya's immediate thought is to take a picture— preserve this moment! A defining moment of your relationship, to be sure!

Whether it's a short hug or a long one, she'll be sure to make little comments; an attempt at convincing you to hug her more often.

When you hold her, her bout of narcissism comes back in full.

'Look at you, getting all friendly! It's alright if you're falling for me, cutie. We both know I'm irresistible, haha!'

She plays it off as a joke, but she means every word. Your affection solidifies her ideals of you two being a power-couple.

It takes a minute to hit her that you could be this open with others, too. Anya won't allow that, no way!

'Careful not to go around giving everyone this treatment, you don't want to give them the wrong idea, do you? No, I don't think of you that way, of course!' She takes a second to think, bringing her hand up to run it through your hair. 'In fact, why not just keep the hugging to me, yeah? You're soooo super cute when we're alone, after all!'

— The Fanclub

★ The excited squealing of lovestruck girls is one you should get familiar with. You're going to hear it a lot after this.

Fortuna becomes a stuttering mess immediately— she needs to say something, anything! But nothing's coming out except for excited and incompressible whispers.

Aurora is a little more forward, but her heart is still beating way faster than she can keep up with, and she's a little lost too.

The former will shake in your grasp, carving every detail of your body this close-up into her mind. She'll be thinking about this all day, if not all year.

The latter will place a hand on your heart, cozying up and testing the waters as to how close she can get. And also... to gauge if your chest is thumping as loud as hers. (Though, if she picks up any heartbeat at all she'll take that as a 'yes' and let her imagination run wild.)

'H-hey! Um... you're not like... acting like this with any other fans, are you?'

You're confused by the 'fans' sentiment, but that just makes the two of them high-five and interpret it as a "you two are my favourite ladies, so you get special treatment" response.

It wasn't that at all, but it's much safer to let them think that.

— The Deity

Nitai's head has a buffering moment, responding with a 'huh?' when he feels you burrow into his chest.

He wraps muscular, super-soft arms around you, and gets a dopey smile on his face. A hug has never felt so good...

'Am I winning you over, my little angel?' Nitai hums softly. 'Good, good. You're being so nice and loving to me today.'

His nearly inhuman height and strength only gives him a warmer feeling in his chest— you're so very fragile, holding onto him like that.

It's decided! He has to protect this, protect you! There's nobody that should share this experience. They could hurt you!

Nitai will now ask for cuddles CONSTANTLY, his craving for physical attention now overriding everything else.

Any chance The Diety has to hug you goodbye, or crawl into your bed when you're having trouble sleeping— he'll use anything as an excuse to snuggle up close, even something ridiculous.

He's reminded of all the previous followers of his who would've given their right arm to hug him— Oh well, he's always been a fan of nepotism.

— The Anomaly (cw: mild body-horror)

Yvetan was wondering when you were going to do something like this. They chalked the lack of impromptu hugs as having to 'act professional' in front of the armed guards.

They let out a not-quite-right sigh, and let their entire, sore body rest in your arms. They're a lot lighter than you expected, to note.

Yvetan's eyes flutter open to look at your face, their head leaning comfortably on your shoulder. They're wondering why they didn't just miracle you into doing something like this in the first place.

It means even more to them that you did it of your own accord, though. Even more to cherish. What a truly pure human...

'You two,' they speak suddenly, not even turning to look at the guards behind them. 'Look away, now.'

The guards look to eachother, and then to the two of you, stating that they're can't do that as it'd be against protocol.

Yvetan huffs, and you can feel their body go tense for a moment, holding you with their left arm.

From the position you're in, you have clear view of the guards faces crumpling up in horror before one drops his weapon to raise his visor up in a panic.

No eyes. The entire upper half of his face had been flattened out — removed of any features. The guard standing next to him doubles over, dry-heaving before facility medics run into the room to escort them out as they start to scream.

You can feel The Anomaly smile against your skin as they start playing with your hair.

'I can't let them in on this intimate moment of ours. You understand, yes, dear soulmate?'

— The Idol (cw: suggestive)

## Jamison has been open with touch since the moment you met, and has himself constantly prepared to hug you if you need it. (Or if you don't.)

He's never been good with such a genuine emotional connection until you, though, so having a meaningful hug full of so many feelings has him shaking in your grip.

He gets so excited- and not even in the sexy way he normally is! This is just so much for him...

You think he was bad when he broke his arm to get your attention? You've seen nothing yet. Minor or major injuries will become worryingly common— and the only thing he ever asks for when you ask what you can do to help is a hug, or a peck on the lips, if he's feeling cheeky.

Naturally with The Idol, he's going to take every opportunity to invite you to hug him in the public eye so that people know who you belong to. No-one's going to mess with a celebrity's partner right in front of them.

After you initiate PDA, he might take it a bit far and try and get steamy with you on date night. Surely, you want him as much as he wants you, so what's the problem there?

You get groped a bit more often than usual now, and Jamie can't help but be a little disappointed you don't do it back (as often, at least.)

[robotlesbianjavert]

What's the problem with Deku's writing?

well for one he's a main character. which is strike one.

technically that's a joke but also not. there's a lot angles i could take in order to complain about deku, so for now i want to take the angle that as a main character, there are things that are going to be taken for granted as endgame for the narrative, but it's so taken for granted that the story forgets about the actual material needed to reach the endgame.

i'm going to use ofmd s2 as an example of this, because it's another thing i like to point at and go :) bad writing. so for that, it's very evident that the writers are aiming for "ed and stede are together and are ready to embark on a new, more mature phase of their life together". you can tell this because the showrunner was constantly talking about it in interviews. and indeed, the season ends with ed and stede parting ways with their crew and pirate life to try their hands as innkeepers.

but to reach that endgame, the series has to a) get stede and ed back together as soon possible, meaning they have to lean heavily on coincidence rather than any real efforts on the part of the characters, b) resolve the very emotionally stark situations the characters had left s1/started s2 in a way that makes the happy innkeeper endgame possible, but this makes the segue from drama to resolution unbelievable because the series can't really dedicate the time to dealing with that fallout before hopping onto the next big issue, which c) means that the ways that the other characters have been hurt as a result ed and stede's relationship drama have their pain sidelined and shrugged off, and in turn d) the focus on ensuring that ed and stede are together and in love means that their relationships with other characters get de-emphasized and feel much less lived, which rebounds and makes ed and stede feel more one-dimensional without the magic that fleshed them out. and most dire of all e) the audience is expected to believe that "sorry i was a dick" "you're not a dick life's a dick" is meant to indicate a development of maturity that means they are able to go off and be innkeepers together. it is NOT there.

essentially, the focus on a specific endgame without care about how that endgame is achieved ends up undercutting the triumph and catharsis of that endgame, rendering it much more hollow. people still enjoyed ofmd s2, and they're allowed to! but they enjoy it because their otp ended the season standing next to each other. three feet part. not for any genuine critical acclaim.

it's a similar issue with deku, especially in this final arc. his obvious endgame is that he'll affirm shigaraki's humanity and pain, "save" him (what that looks like yet, we don't know), and in turn become the greatest hero. we've got all the bones of that - just recently in 411, deku did his whole "you ARE human" declaration. but the lead up to deku and shigaraki's confrontation is thematically shallow and heavily dependent on us knowing that deku is a great kid and a great hero.

deku starts the third act realizing that if he understood the villains that he's faced, things could have turned out differently - the set up is that deku has to understand shigaraki as a person in order to stop him. the lead up to this is. well he asks muscular "what's up with you" one time in the middle of battle. that didn't work out. and then he had his nagant confrontation, where he was more shocked about her killing the former commission president than he was about the commission ordering a lot of evil assassinations. and then never thought about what that meant for society at large. and he was just like "well i know the world has some greys in it now" and that fixed her i guess. overhaul was there and deku made no real effort there to get why he was so frantic about seeing his boss. and then he has that conversation with ochaco where they both go "isn't it crazy that we have empathy for villains".

so basically the most work that he actually put into "understanding villains" was with nagant, who is a completely new character who has the baggage of "hero commission assassin is ANYONE in series gonna talk about that", and the potential she possesses as a shigaraki foil and a stepping stone for deku towards his endgame gets muddled. she's also basically, while a significant confrontation, is one beat of many in the third act.

so the set up for "understanding villains" as a factor in deku's endgame, in seeing villains as human, is pretty weak. and deku was honestly really dependent on getting that build up and using other villains as a learning experience, bc his actual dynamic with shigaraki is sparse. compare it to uraraka and toga - the "understanding" thread fares a lot better there, because uraraka has had specific and charged interactions with toga that deeply affected her and made her think. deku's most constructive interaction with shigaraki was way back at the mall, before the training camp, but that's not enough to carry chemistry through their supposed arc as hero & villain.

but the story already knows that deku, one way or another, is meant to succeed, so it acts like he received the necessary development to be able to understand shigaraki as human in their confrontation.

there's a similar lack of meat for many other aspects of deku's characters - like his relationship with the vestiges, where yoichi could be 2nd and 3rd around on deku's behalf, and his mastering of the new ofa quirks, which we get TOLD has consequences or that he's struggling with, but it's never in a way that actually causes him substantial issues that he must overcome.

but actually, we can move all of that aside and ask one simple question about deku's character: what does he think about the floating death coffin the other heroes built for shigaraki?

deku gets confronted by the vestiges about having to possibly kill shigaraki, and his response to that is "yeah i guess but i gotta try saving him". which is very nice, but it just ends there. deku doesn't have to deal with how everyone else - people who are scared, or have been hurt by shigaraki and the villain's actions - might feel about this initiative. at no point does deku have to stand his ground against the other heroes after shigaraki's head, he doesn't have to convince anyone of his point of view, he doesn't have to look inward and understand why he wants to do this. it's just "well if i can!"

deku doesn't have to have any thoughts about the floating death coffin. he never has to be in scene with it before it started malfunctioning. he doesn't have to have any opinions about its construction, about the heroes deciding to take this path. he doesn't need to have feelings about it, he just has to save shigaraki.

and when that happens, the narrative will celebrate him, and the heroes will be like "wow deku really is the greatest hero, kids these days are so great". they don't need to have thoughts about deku wanting to do this in the first place, because it's going to happen and no one can stop it.

in a similar way that some ofmd fans can walk away happy with season 2 because they don't need anything more than their otp standing together three feet apart, a lot of fans would be happy with deku and shigaraki's likely endgame because what matters is that deku is the hero and that he saves shigaraki. but from where i'm standing, deku has so little substance and build up to this endgame (or at least the build up is THERE, but poorly done) that it's hard for me to be impressed.

also everything @codenamesazanka said here. everything she says i nod and go hell yeah.

[lemongogo]

what's your process for coloring like? the look of that elendira is so textured and interesting, i can't figure out how you do it

AA THANK YOUU ^__^ !! textures & brushwork are my favorite things abt my art, so im happy you find it interesting hehe . its SOO cool to look at & so much fun to draw imo

i prefer to color by building in layers , if that makes sense 🤔!! hundreds of them !! such that i'm always drawing on Top of previous layers, working from big & messy blocks of color to, eventually, small and refined blocks of color until it feels processed enough. as a result, i rarely ever erase (!!) and i rarely ever draw lineart aside from the initial sketch

a rough, patchy textured brush is key here, as it'll give you dimension and variability w/ your colors. i recommend "Brush and various sets of fountain pen style (万年筆風ブラシと色々セット)" on Clip Studio (ID: 1679706) !! :3

im terrible with explanations though, so i'm going to show a step by step of that elendira drawing if you dont mind :3

sketch layer !! because i mostly render through color alone, i try to make this as close to the finished thing as possible . ^__^ i hateee drawing the same thing over and over and like the expressivity and movement of my sketches anyways , so the more i can preserve at this step, the better. if u were to look at a side by side of my sketches and finished pieces, youd notice a lot of those og lines are present in the final drawing :3

2. flats !! pretty self explanatory, but the solid background gives me an idea of where the figure begins & ends while the colors themselves help distinguish whats what . i stick to ambient lighting @ this point because im usually not sure what i want to do with the overall palette or lighting yet . having two tones (ex, dark and light in her hair or dark and light on her skin) can also help in identifying key features early on that u wanna preserve. as you build layer by layer, sometimes these areas will remain untouched and i think it makes for a rly lovely feel at the end

3. start blocking !!! to be totally honest with you, i dont really know what i do here HAHAHA. like i just scribble the shit out of it, usually focusing on what i might want to do with lighting (ex: grey areas to accentuate folds in her costume). i think i like to start "erasing" the sketch where possible by coloring on top of it .. like if you look at her hat or her arm , you can tell i'm starting to get a sense of the shapes i like vs the ones i dont. it's at this point that the final image starts to emerge in my mind , like im gradually pulling her from a tarpit of scribbles until shes recognizable lol. chipping away at the marble until i can free her. tbh.

4. keep blockingg...when u think u are done , block some more . as you can probably see, the brushwork becomes more intentional as i add more shape, with specific focus on line weight. this is also where the patchiness of that textured brush comes in - notice how none of the colors seem totally uniform (ex: the red cross or the original sketchlines for her waist). you can see bits and pieces of the layers underneath pushing through and i really like that !! ^__^ its very fun and sketchy to me, so i try to keep them around. those areas are also great to colorpick from, because it'll give you "new" colors to work w/ that are already part of your palette.

5. GRADIENTS & GRADIENT MAPS !! TONE CURVE !! COLOR PICKER !! this is the best stage tbh. flatten your image so its all on one layer and just go crazy with all the color settings in ur program. add gradient layers and set them to darken, or overlay, or subtract, orrr. lighten or dodge glow or divide or soft/hard light.! OR!! edit the hue, saturation, luminosity and contrast.and then color pick from these edits, block even more on top of ur image, flatten, color edit again, etc. etc. until u feel satisfied.

ANYWAYSS . i hope that makes sense @__@ sry i wrote this out and deleted it like 23 times trying to make it make More sense but thats what ive got HAHA i hope its useful though :3 !

[going-loud]

look at me getting shit done!!

okay so for the next tarot card, the High Priestess, i chose the figure of The Body - specifically Harrow's obsessive characterization and adoration of her. The High Priestess in the Arcana tarot "guards the threshold between the physical and spiritual planes," which in my interpretation can be seen in the way Harrow turns to The Body for guidance while she grapples with reality and the River in HTN. The High Priestess is the divine feminine, which I don't necessarily think is reflective of Alecto, but of Harrow's idealized version of The Body and her devout worship. pulling the High Priestess in a reading can signify the importance of prioritizing your intuition and subconscious mind, themes that are obviously very prominent in HTN. while drawing this card i also started to think about how in christianity, there is the holy trinity: God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. something about Alecto's series of personalities (The Body, Nona, Alecto) is reflective of this trichotomy and i just thought that was interesting. do i have any grand plot analysis about this thought? no. but that is okay

i have to apologize for how long it took me to crank this one out; i started to get frustrated with the rendering of all the background portions and i was also depressed because of my job (which I quit!) so it took me awhile to finish. i finally just forced myself to finish it though and i'm really happy with the result! that being said, for my next card i'm going to try a new lineart technique, and i'm excited to see how that goes, so stay tuned!

edit: i realized i left some lineart in my drawing over the hair that was meant to be erased...had to fix that and also i'm posting the print version rather than the card version :)

[lillifaba]

Here's why I'm still unimpressed with the Wicked movie trailer

A while ago I made a post explaining my thoughts on the Wicked teaser trailer. A lot of it was mostly negative due to the poor CGI, acting, lines etc... Well the official trailer dropped and I've got some new thoughts both good and bad. This is going to be way longer than my last post because I'm going to go into detail about why I think this movie won't live up to the musical by comparing it to other movies and musicals. I'll also be talking about some scenes from the featurette.

THIS IS JUST MY OPINION SO FAR ON WHAT WE SEE IF YOU LIKE THE TRAILER OR LIKE ANY OF THE ACTORS THEN DON'T GET YOUR PANTIES IN A TWIST MY WORD ISN'T GOSPEL NOR IS IT MY FINAL OPINION ON THE MOVIE.

Starting off with things I liked:

I'm actually starting to warm up to Cynthia as Elphaba. In my last post I argued I didn't entirely see her as Elphaba mainly because it was obvious she's a thirty seven year old playing an eighteen year old. While I still believe she doesn't pass for younger Elphie and her simple "I am" comeback is weak, hearing more of her lines and performance is actually on point with Elphaba's character. I wouldn't be against her revisiting Elphaba on stage after the movie. Bottom line: I think she's a great singer and am happy a fellow WOC is playing Elphie.

Holy shit that witch cackle gave me goosebumps. It might be the editing and sound in the trailer that makes me feel that way so we'll have to see when it happens in the movie.

Michelle Yeoh???? Like hello? Although she seems more toned down compared to the campy personality MM has on stage, she plays the role of the evil villain quite well. (I'm sad she had to stop using her beautiful Malaysian accent ;_; I hope it was by her choice and not by the choice of the executives.)

Some set designs look quite nice. I'm particularly curious about the scene where The Wizard is dancing around a full size diorama of Oz.

The effects of the grimmerie are quite neat. I despise the new shape of the book, but I think it's cool how instead of going for some floating colorful lights to pass as "look magic oooo", they're going for the spells to be coming out of the pages. Very unique.

And now, on to the negative. This is where I'll be comparing some of the shots and scenes of the trailer to other movies and parts of the musical.

I hate hate hate the CGI. You don't understand I absoultely for forever deeply truly LOATHE the CGI. It cheapens the movie and all that talk and show about how they built up the sets and rainbows showing over their productions goes all out the window when I see those flying monkeys.

Let's talk good CGI vs rushed CGI.

First off I do not blame the VFX artists for this movie looking the way it does so far. VFX artists are one of the most overworked and underpaid workers in the film industry who have to pump out content in a short amount of time. It is also not their fault that audiences are tired of seeing overdone CGI movies every month. It's part of the reason why the Wicked teaser trailer got so much hate when it came out (on top of Ari/🧽, reactionary bros, etc...)

The CGI (mostly in the Emerald City) looks AI generated. Most of my issues with it come from the effects looking poorly rendered. Elphaba flying looks obviously fake. I know they recently touched up some of these scenes but honestly it doesn't make a difference to me at all in quality.

If John Chu and the team behind this movie really cared about this like they insist they do, it wouldn't hurt to take time with the effects. When you do so, you get mind blowing results like this:

Onto other effects: The flying monkeys don't look great. They look poorly rendered along with the rest of the effects. For that I wish they would've stuck to practical effects like Pan's Labyrinth did or literally any character Doug Jones plays like down below.

Heck, even the musical does a better job:

I seriously encourage you to watch B T S footage of Wicked to see how insane and amazing this effect is. Once you see it, you'll realize just how bad the movie fucked up on this.

Bottom line: movies that take their time with CGI effects and utilize other methods like practical effects before leaving everything up to post have better results than your run of the mill CGI Marvel or DC blockbuster.

I'm still not feeling Arianna as Glinda. Before you fans eat me up alive I need to say again I don't hate her and even like some of the stuff she puts out there. This critique is not a reflection on who she is as a person because I don't know her personally. With that out of the way I still cannot stand her Glinda impression. "But Lilli!" You say. "You said you didn't like Ari as Glinda because she's not giving Glinda but she's doing Glinda's voice!" And I stand by that. She's not giving Glinda. She's giving Kristen Chenoweth. You might think that's the whole point of playing Glinda but let me ask you; When you watch Megan Hilty as Glinda, did you think she was imitating KC to the bone? What about Kendra Kassebaum? Ginna Claire Mason or McKenzie Kurtz? Did you think KC was imitating Billie Burke? Or were all of them doing their own interpretations of Glinda that made the character unique to themselves and not a copycat version of the original? Because I argue that's what makes every Glinda special and unique from the previous actress who played her. Doing a copycat rendition of KC makes me believe you have no faith in yourself as an actor and you are incapable of playing character that's been done before without having to copy the source material beat for beat. Because of this, I still cannot seperate Ari the pop star from Glinda The Good.

This point has less to do with Ari as Glinda in the movie and more as what she's doing to promote the movie. I have no idea where else to rant about it but here. I hate hate HATE how Arianna is making this movie and Glinda her ENTIRE personality. She acts like she's part of this fandom yet never interacts with anyone in it (unless its directly involves her) and it all feels so... artificial and money grabbing. Someone please tell me I'm not alone. Like girl please call me when you read and write fanfic on AO3 and get three kudos on your multichap fic lol.

DTL: Again I ask, WHY IS THIS MOVIE SO DARK? DTL is meant to be in a ballroom with tons of bright lights and projections. This ballroom looks so dark and depressing. I'm not thinking "let's dance because dust is what we come to" I'm thinking "turn me into dust already." When I saw Elphaba putting that hat on in the teaser trailer, I thought that was a scene in defying gravity. John Chu failed this scene which makes me angry because I this is my favorite scene in the musical.

Adding on to DTL, we have to talk about the scene where Elphaba and Glinda establish their friendship. If you know this scene in the musical (which duh) you'll know that this is where Glinda realizes that she did a horrible thing to Elphie and wants to make things right, even if it means putting her reputation in the gutter in front of her friends. I know this is an edited trailer so we won't know for sure how the full scene plays out in the final movie, but Glinda immediately going for a hug before they start dancing threw me off guard. At this point, they still aren't best friends because Elphaba doesn't realize that Glinda is sorry for what she did, their relationship is only now starting to build up. Let me ask you, what do you think makes a scene more impactful? Glinda hesitantly and nervously walking up to interupt Elphaba doing a solo dance and then cutting in to make her feel less alone, which eventually leads to all while making them ease up around each other as the song and dance progresses OR Glinda rushing into a bear hug with Elphaba before they even establish them making amends on the dance floor? One seems like a slow burn that tugs at your heartstrings while the other feels like a cheap attempt to get some kind of emotional response from the audience? (Then again not sure how this scene will play in movie but it's not looking good right now)

Final point, why is Elphaba crying during this scene? I get she's just been put through public humiliation and is just now getting an act of kindness from someone but don't you think it's too soon to show her in such a vulnerable position? One of the things about Elphaba in both the musical and books is that she's built a wall of apathy around her because she's been judged her whole life and doesn't care how other people percive her. We don't see her breakdown in the musical until Nessa's death because she's been forced to stay strong her entire life. Maybe at the earliest, we'll see her tear up during defying gravity but I'd argue that's a part of the actress playing her and not the character herself.

I hate how this trailer has been edited to make Arianna look like the protagonist. I get she's bringing in a large audience, but she's playing the secondary character, not the main one. It just pisses me that the protagonist (who is a WOC) has to be in the shadow of the white woman. It almost makes me believe they're doing it because they're more worried people would be offended at the prospect of a POC being a leading role.

The main actors still look way too mature to be playing their characters. I spoke about this already. I don't buy any of these adults (with the exception of Marissa Bode) as college freshmen.

Still hate that riff at the end of defying gravity and that after all the backlash, they're still going with it. I also can't believe some of you are defending it to the death and acting like Cynthia Fucking Erivo can't do a better take than what she gave. (Yes, I know every Elphaba does a different take on the riff and we all have our favorite ones but I'm going to say something that is controversial yet brave: Not every riff that every Elphaba does is great. Some of them are range from underwhelming to straight up bad) Here's a reddit post I found that better explains my gripe with the riff since I'm bad at explaining musical terms:

Costume and makeup design is still atrocious. I'm sorry, but the low effort looking costumes cannot hold up to the extravagance and camp the stage has. They should've brought Susan Hilferty back. Look at Elphaba's act 2 dress and the dress movie Elphaba wears and tell me you're not disappointed.

Adding on, why does everything look modern, including the makeup? Arianna using her brand of makeup in the movie doesn't impress me when she's using a modern day mascara wand over her wispy falsies in a 1900's inspired society when she should be using one of these:

Like... come on? Can you imagine a scene of Glinda doing her makeup while she's ranting to Elphaba about how men (except for darling Fifi of course <3) are so entitled and disrespectful and in the middle of her sentence, she just SPITS on her mascara cake, scrubs the brush like she's scrubbing the floor and does her lashes? Iconic honestly.

Adding on to the makeup looking modernized, I'm not a fan of Elphaba's modernized makeup either. It could be the deaging filter they added on everyone older than thirty but one thing that stood out to me is they used 90's era lip liner on her. I'm much aware if you're darker skinned, you will often times need to use a liner in order to blend in parts around your mouth that are darker in comparison to your lips. Counterpoint however:

They could've easily used a dark lipstick post-Popular like they already do. The 1900's era mostly used a single shade of lip color anyways. And no, I don't want to hear from any of you how none of this matters because Oz is an advanced society or some half assed excuse why it's totally okay they didn't care about the miniscule details while they cared about the number of tulips used in Munchkinland for NMTW. (also note: Oz was considered an advanced society FOR THE TIME IT WAS CREATED. Meaning they weren't envisioning the future items we have now like a mascara wand) If they allowed Arianna to use her own brand of makeup for the movie, they could've allowed an expert on BW's makeup history on set for their main protagonist.

Set design. I've got to say, while some of the sets are impressive, they really don't fit into Wicked or Oz. I mostly blame CGI and lighting, but even then, it can't hold up to the simple, yet brightly colored sets we see on stage. Shiz looks like something out of Hogwarts, which nearly every fantasy academia story looks like these days. Can we please have something original for once?

What I would've enjoyed seeing the movie do is something similar to Melanine Martinez's K-12. They were working on one location on a smaller budget, yet it looks better than the dimly lit and CGI sets we're seeing.

Obviously I'm not saying Wicked should look EXACTLY like K-12 because they have completely different themes and genres, but my point is good lighting, original set designs and color correcting can take you a long way. Wicked is deserving of having the same whimsy look that the WOZ movie had, while still having dark parts where needed.

Some more examples of good use of lighting during dark scenes in movies:

Continuing from not being a fan of the sets, I'm FUMING at the location of Fiyero and Elphaba freeing the lion cub. Why is it in a dark dreary forest?????? Did John Chu mix up the locations between INTG and ALAYM???? The lion cub scene takes place in the poppy field, with a soft orange pinkish lighting that creates a romantic atmosphere and establishes the growing romance between Fiyero and Elphaba (<3) This forest looks too erie and mystical, which should've been used for act 2.

Another hot take: I think the tulip field in Munchkinland looks completely unnecessary. I literally do not care if they planted thousands of rows of them. They look CGI'd because nearly everything in this movie is CGI.

Now onto some things I'm confused about.

God I was so looking forward to Peter Dinklage as the voice for Dr. Dillamond,but from what I heard of his voice acting so far, it just sounds... underwhelming. But I can't complain too much because at least it's not James Corden. I still believe in Peter and hope he will pull through.

Why did they feel the need to change the shape of the grimmerie? It was fine the way it was!

Adding to Dr. D, I'm not sure if I like his new design. I'm guessing they're taking inspiration from the book but if we're discussing live action, I really prefer makeup effects over CGI. One of the things I liked about the Animals in Wicked and in Cats the Musical is they find a perfect balance between blending human features and animal species without it going into the uncanny valley.

I feel underwhelmed by Jeff Goldbulm's acting as The Wizard :( I can't complain too much because he kinda-

On a final note: I think this movie just cannot and will not match up to the excellence of the musical. Will it be a good movie? I don't know yet. I'll still see it in theaters and will give my thoughts.

While brainstorming my thoughts for this trailer, I've really been thinking about why I hate what I'm seeing so far while I enjoy other interpretations of Wicked, especially when it comes to costumes. Then I realized something.

I love non-replica productions of Wicked... So why don't I like the design of this movie?

Part two of my take COMING THANKSGIVING 2025

Not really, give me like a week or two.

[boggsart]

EXCUSE ME who told you you’re talking too much about your art?? Dude that’s the part I love most!! I like hearing about how you struggled to get it where you wanted, or how much the tools you’re working with frustrated you, but you got to a place you were happy with anyway.

I don’t know anything about 3d animation, and I know even less about game design. So it’s really important for me that you describe your process and how much work you had to do because it your work context. I’m sorry anybody made you feel like that wasn’t valuable. I’d argue that’s more valuable than the finished work itself!!

I always love seeing your posts pop up on my dash. And Wolffe and the 104th look absolutely fantastic in the newest one!! If you don’t mind me asking, what were some of the weird issues you ran into in the 104th’s one, and what makes them different issues from the ones you ran into before?

Thank you so much for all the kind words, but to be completely honest, they are kinda right. I think any artist can relate to the feeling of being too critical towards your own work. I tend to overexaggerate mistakes, or point out issues that aren't even really noticable to someone that knows little about this field. But at the same time, i always have a vision of how i'd like my current work to look like, and when i don't meet my own expectations (which i rarely do), that's when i start yapping. Well there were some minor ones, like noticing how some of the armors were not modeled accurately( like around the shoulder part of the chest piece, it's completely missing that part where it connects the front to the back, elbow pieces are way too big, helmets were also not modeled accurately, etc). I also completely messed up the rigging process, thus giving myself so much more work when animating. There are always certain body parts that just go into eachother (lower arm going into the upper arm when it's bent, feet going into the floor, hands going into the chest, etc) that could have been easily avoidable if i took the time to make a proper rig for my models.

There are also always some texturing mistakes, or wrongly placed focal points i notice once the final render is done. In this one, once all of the characters come up, and the camera starts zooming in on their faces, the focal point was placed too far, resulting in some parts of the helmets looking blurrier, than they should look. Since renders take a whole lot of time, i always try to fix this by putting the final renders into a 3rd party AI upscaling program, instead of going back to place it correctly, then re render it. That's probably a crappy workflow, but if this project wouldn't have a deadline that's approaching WAY TOO QUICKLY, and i wouldn't have a lot more stuff to model and animate, i would do the latter. At the same time, i probably should just pay more attention before hitting the render button lol. Also, the movements of the characters sometimes look way too stiff, and don't have that fluidity to them. I haven't been animating for long, so here's the reason for that, at the same time tho, i'm noticing some impovements when comparing the recent piece to my first animation. These are the problems i'm running into most of the time. In the recent one though, if you look closely, once Wolffe goes into his stance (after the commander Wolffe text disappeares) there's some weird black flickering going on around his chest/belly area, that for the love of God, i could not fix. Sometimes the particle system can cause some really interesting issues, that most of the time can be fixed by baking the dynamics. Since i did that (multiple times, deleting them, then re baking) and the issue persisted, i started to think either the shaders, or the particle system+volumetric fog combo was causing this problem. I also use a s*** ton of REALLY powerful lights, with the power constantly changing throughout the entire animation, that could also be causing this issue (i think?) I tried re-placing the cube that's making the volumetric fog, tried placing the lights and camera slightly elsewhere, but nothing worked, so i just decided to leave it as it is. The super slow mo parts are being made in the Non Linear Animation editor, which is... just as confusing as it sounds lol. Making the slow mo parts sometimes causes the blasters to disappear then reappear at the wrong time. The way grabbing the blasters then putting them away works is by having one blaster that's always parented to one hand, and one, that's always parented to the holster, and you change the visibility accordingly. (the moment the character pulls the blaster out of the holster, both blasters have to be perfectly alligned so the change in visibility doesn't have a weird jump in it) The visibility itself gets an action strip on its own, and it's hard to line them up correctly once you chopped up all your other strips and scaled them to make them slow motion. Because if the armature's action strip gets chopped up and scaled to make the movement slow motion, then everything else that has movement linked to it has to as well. So lights, the camera, the empty axes that the camera is parented to, and the blasters as well. This could be achieved by just placing the keyframes further apart from eachother, but i found this method to be somewhat simpler.

I'm probably doing this the wrong way though and could just place the keyframes accordingly without pushing the blaster action down to the NLA editor (cuz after all it's just visibility, not slow motion movement the blaster has). Though i have some really cool ideas with blasters in the upcoming animations, that would probably require to have them as NLA strips. Or maybe not, and everything i'm doing and talking about is bullshit, and isn't the way it should be done, and i really hope someone, that's in the industry doesn't read this and go "what the f is this woman talking about" lol. Basically everything about animating confuses the hell out of me, and i'm always doing stuff on the trial and error basis. So i hope one day i'll be able to learn it properly haha See, i'm yapping way too much after all. And i'm sorry for the long answer, but i'm really really passionate about this. And it actually feels so nice to know that there are people out there that care. 💖💖

[pictureamoebae]

Hello I recently downloaded "Otis camera tools" for DAI and I was wondering if u could assist me with it, for some reason when I try to use the "IGCS CONNECTOR" dof doesn't activate properly, I click to render the picture but it shakes around on the screen and doesn't do anything ^^' I've never used mods like this so idk what I'm doing sorry if this isn't what u usually help with

Hi anon,

IGCSDOF doesn't work like a traditional DoF shader. It takes a little getting used to.

I'm guessing you've read the guide on Frans' website about IGCSDOF? So you should understand the basics from there. Make sure you have the companion IGCSDOF.fx shader activated in your load order. You want it to be at the bottom of your load order. The only thing below it should be film grain.

Basically what happens is:

choose whether you want fast or classic mode (if you're using TAA/DLAA/DLSS/FSR you'll want to use classic mode) and choose the number of frames to wait (for classic you'll probably want 4-5 to be safe, for fast you'll likely want 2 but you may need to experiment to see which produces the sharpest in-focus results)

decide what you want to be in focus, and turn on the magnifying box and position it over that part of the image

move the focus slider until the double images overlay each other perfectly and sharply in the area you want to be in focus

move the intensity slider (above the focus slider) until the part of the image you want to be blurred has its double images a distance away from each other - the further apart they are the more blurred it will be (this is the hardest part to get used to, but you'll quickly learn what you need to aim for)

readjust the focus slider if it became slightly misaligned when you adjusted the intensity

make any adjustments to quality and bokeh shapes (if you're making a test render to check the bokeh/blur intensity, set the quality to low at first so it renders quickly, and then change it to higher once you're happy)

start the rendering and wait for it to finish

take your shot

end the session

Depending on the mode (fast or classic) and quality you chose, the number of frames you wait, and the fps of your game, the rendering part can take anywhere from a few seconds to several long minutes. That's completely normal.

While it's rendering, it takes hundreds of separate temporary shots from different angles. This is why it looks like it's moving around on the screen. It then blends all those shots together into one final one, and that's when you take your picture.

It is complicated and confusing the first few times you do it, but once you've practiced a bit it'll become a quick and easy process. The hardest part is being patient while waiting for the render to complete. I've waited over 20 minutes before. It's totally worth it.

[hellothere-generalangsty]

It's way past my bedtime ans my cat is sleeping-purring next to me but I thought I'd post the process of the @ailani-reillata Ailaniversary art I made today just to talk a bit more about it

Disclaimer: doing traditional art is cool until you need to scan it or post a picture of it 😂 also kinda long post below so ofc no obligation at all to read it!

Phase one: Sketching the Idea

My inspiration for the posture was a Yara Flor comic strip I found on Pinterest. Yara looks over her shoulder and her hair falls on the side of her face, and I loved the way it framed her face and thought it would look great with Ailani's hair.

I drew a little doodle on the page to help me visualize how the hair would be divided, and focused on 3 main parts (the lines, the bubbles, the empty space) which would - supposedly- help me during the lineart stage. Below are images of the final sketch.

I was hesitant on adding details to her arms, such as the folds of a dress, but I was so anxious about ruining the drawing I abandonzd that idea. I was considering adding her tattoos and was still not decided at this stage of the drawing.

Phase 2: Line-ing the Art

Is that even a real word? Idk, I'm too tired to English properly so we will say it is. Following the sketching phase was naturalle the lineart phase, which is one of my favorite stage when drawing. I bought new inking pens too so I was able to test them out, and it went quite well!

As you can see, the ribbons, outline of the skin and facial features have been done with my new pens, and i was quite happy with the result! It gives a more natural look to the whole drawing in my opinion.

At this stage I decided not to add her arm tattoos and consider this version of Ailani as the one you would find in the early chapters of Begged and Borrowed Time, so before she would get her tattoos.

Phase 2.5: Line-ing the Hair

This stage has it's own part because it was really fun to do! The inspiration for the way I draw hair comes from @/ssavaart (aka Scott Christian Sava on Youtube). I've been following him for a while now and I'm trying to push my art beyond my comfort zone and try new stuff thanks to him, and having fun with drawing hair is one of these things!

Look how beautiful these curls are. I'm not trying to toot my own horn or anything, but I'm really proud of the drawing at this stage 😂 it's the perfect moment where the inking went well and I have not yet ridked myself with the watercolours - so I always take a long sight (and tons of pictures) to celebrate reaching this stage without incidents.

Phase 3: Watercolours

Here comes the difficult part. It always makes me nervous because I always fear ruining my drawing and all the efforts I put into it by doing the watercolours. But I love the medium too much and if I want to get better I need to practice. So, testing the waters, I finally dive head first into this crucial stage.

The watercolouring goes well, I'm overall satisfied enough to take some pictures and even try to scan it, with the hope that the scanned rendering will be better than the usual "photographing and editing" I do with my phone.

Spoiler alert: the scan was NOT better than the pictures, and no amount of editing could change that. (Or maybe I am just very bad at editing.) So, back to my "photographing and editing" habits, I somehow managed to get a good enough result:

I still feel unsatisfied as I find these digital versions do not properly render the visuals I have on paper, IRL. With the digital versionsw the hair is either so dark we don't see the details, or too bright, the colours are too warm and light... And while Ailani looks light-skinned, the paper version has these visible brown tones that I struggled to find on the digital version, even when editing the pictures. The closest I got is the tone you see on the first picture, but the image is not lighted enough so the overall quality of the picture is a bit lessened by that.

Still, I won't complain too much, because overall it was a very fun drawing to do, I enjoyed every stage of it and I would love to do another piece like this! But for now I will go to sleep because it is Way Past My Bedtime 😂

If you've made it this far, thank you for your attention, feel free to let me know which stage is your favorite and what you liked most (or disliked most) about this drawing!

I for one really had fun doing Ailani's lips, as well as filling her hair, and colouring her eyes! 😊

[mayordea]

huzzah! 2023 art review!

it’s almost the end of the year, wowzers! i always do one of these art review thingies since i always like looking back at the art ive made :> last year i posted the review on my other account and left it at there, but this year i want to actually review each month and notable pieces i made… just for fun!

this post is very much just for me lol, but i hope someone out there enjoys it. month-by-month review + previous year in reviews will be under the cut! 🩷

(also, shoutout to tumblr for going rouge and posting this way way earlier than i had scheduled 😍 luckily tumblr post editor is weirdly based and kept all my embedded links when i pasted it from the old one? hell yeah)

Jan: started off the year with a painting of my beloved ocs after ending last year with one! (and i will be talking about my older year in reviews, rest assured). this was my obligatory cute shared scarf art, and i wanted to try attempting to render something more involved like two characters and draping cloth. i don't think the result was too shabby, though this was before i discovered my favorite rendering brush for procreate, so in hindsight, it looks kinda flat and boring now. where's all the crunch? ah but anyway, starting a whole year with your art in a mid place compared to what you made later on is par for the course.

Feb: probably the month where i had the least art to put here, i remember scraping a little to find one. this was a chrobin piece i made in my sketchbook! nothing too noteworthy... i think i tried doing a slightly different approach to coloring with markers (applying the color before the lineart) and incorporating paint, but i remember this one giving me trouble. first of all, the size i drew this in was really small (it was in a small sketchbook and i decided to mask the margins with comparatively wide masking tape), and second of all the paper was absolutely NOT built for gouache, so it ended up a kind of wrinkly and muddy mess. i mean i'm still not the best with gouache now but still, not my best.

March: a redraw of a robin piece i made back when i was still on amino. i probably won't share the old versions because they're crap, so just trust me on the redraw part. anyway, the last iteration of the concept was in 2019 i think? and while i was proud of it for a while, its luster finally faded and i decided to try doing it again in procreate. this was when i discovered my love for the soft chalk brush in the jingsketch basics brush pack. for a while i've been using the hard render brush in that pack to render, but this one's texture and chalkiness totally changed the game. i was in love!! also tried to be a little more crazy and vibrant with how i applied the base colors, using saturated colors across the board. this process didn't consistently stick, but i think it yielded some neat results here. another hit from this month was my piece of grandmaster robin, since i'm really proud of the detail here!.

Apr: guys, april was MY MONTH! i remember making so much art in just a few weeks, something just clicked in my brain i guess. i chose my drawings of hagane rin and len since this was when i truly began to get comfy in my lineart era (after the grandmaster drawing). this month was full of detailed line drawings at that, but this one was what made me both enjoy the process a lot and do more of it. hell yeah. other hits: vocaloids at mcdonald's (i drew a background omg!!!), alice in ny fanart (just the euphoria of finally nailing a composition for this piece after struggling with it in november was great), and the end-world normopathy fanart (it's a line drawing, and a traditional one at that. i was happy with incorporating gold accents into my typically monochromatic style when it comes to my line-focused drawings as well as getting tamari's mechanical details nailed).

May: hell yeah. evil power couple time. this one was another line-art heavy one since i thought it fit the vibe. the softer colors in the background i feel like could have been executed a little better, but i do like how this came out, especially the armor (good god fe armor is a pain to render, but i think i've gotten better at it this year! middle school me would be so jealous). not much else to say here. Other hit this month would be my alice of human sacrifice fanart, another line-heavy traditional drawing. i think it turned out nice, especially for a crammed composition lol.

Jun: another end-world normopathy-centered fanart. i mentioned it in my og post but i was trying out a slightly different painting style where i did a black-and-white base first and then added colors as an overlay (also in the initial upload of the post i was so fucking meek about posting fanart of mariyam's alternate design teased at the end of the mv?? 😭 sorry about that, i've edited it out but it's still in early reblogs. kind of cringe on my part). i didn't end up committing to this consistently cuz the beginning process was kind of tedious (plus i'm too inept to pay close attention to values anyway), but laying down all the colors after the long rendering process was rewarding! it's a nice alternative with i get bored with my other method to yield basically the same-looking result lol. this month featured some more pieces that tried using this process, like the one with my oc alice, lucina and dark pit hanging out, and f!robin's resplendent design from feh.

Jul: ah yes my typical flavor of "improvised oc art that i invent new symbolism for on the fly that i apply meaning to after i'm finished". kinda just wanted to paint something again because i've been doing a lot of line drawings lately and to go back to my old painting process again. honestly, i mainly picked this one because i wanted more oc art and non-lineart drawings to be in this chart lol. art i made this month that i'm real proud of is this family pic of some young cryptonloids (i really like how the colors came out on this one!) and my birthday drawing for miku's sweet 16, which was originally completed this month. i opted out of considering it for my july art to avoid confusion. also also, this very whack pathological facade fanart (plus some doodles i didn't post) opened my eyes to the beautiful world of NOISE and HALFTONES and just slapping crazy textures onto my art like nobody's business. hell yeah.

Aug: ok this one is kind of another piece i picked to represent this month that isn't quite my favorite but i chose anyway for the sake of variety (in this case, i wanted more traditional pieces and non-vocaloid stuff). for once, i used my bigger sketchbook to make a big n detailed piece for my boy's new brave alt in feh (that game has zero significance to me outside of cool alt costumes for my faves). my actual fave from this month was young miku/meiko/kaito chillin in their house; i'm real proud of the background and lighting! but i still like this robin too ofc, big fan of how the colors came out ;3

Sep: another traditional drawing! felt compelled to draw kandy again, specifically her evil miitopia great sage incarnation :> this one was pretty standard in terms of process, and not much was really done to experiment. just wanted to draw something cool of my girl for my sketchbook. other fave from this month is this sketchy miku i did, i like how loose it came out and how the colors pop.

Oct: pretty palutena!~ i think i went into this trying to do something a little different with my painting process (i think it was to try incorporating more colors in the shading like the blue in the dress or more saturated colors near the focal point, but i can't remember LOL) or try rendering a more detailed character w/ a background (even if the background was pretty vague). i like this one! especially the color cohesion, it's pretty swag imo. other faves from this month was fanart i made for the song "orbit" since i also like how the color cohesion came out for this one, and the maid dress/crossover drawing i made for cringetober. no other words needed to explain why.

Nov: another digital painting! it's yet another ghost song, this time "uncanny". i really loved the aesthetic of this song, especially its bold colors and simplistic shapes, so i wanted to try capturing it in my style. i really love how the colors turned out on this, though i've yet to truly recreate what i like about this particular painting again? regardless, it's one of my faves, deserving of one of my favorite ghost songs. few other highlights from this month would be my obligatory purple robin drawing for the month, my sketchbook drawing of my luka design, and my fanart of utsu-p's song "ga". i like how i was able to do a couple of my different "styles"/processes this month rather than just sticking to just one. they all have their own feel to them that i like to play around with depending on the idea.

Dec: and finally, we're at the end. like july, we have another heavily improvised oc drawing with symbolism i came up with on the spot. that's just how i do things. anyway, this turned out really good in my opinion! i tried to stick to a color palette i saved in procreate a long time ago, and damn is it a fine palette. it helped me get a little loose with the colors and solely focus on creating a strong composition with colors and contrast rather than get hung up on sticking to typical color palettes. i also really like how i did the background by essentially using the liquify tool to swish all the colors around and then polished it a little on top. made for a really cool effect. other notable work would be the companion piece i made with my other oc that had a similar style since i liked the process of this one. there will probably be more as of when i'm drafting this (at the beginning of december) but i just wanna be finished w this post already bro

all around, very satisfied with this year. there was kind of a lot of song fanarts (something that i am somewhat guilty about because it feels like i'm unoriginal or something, but i swear it's cuz i'm really passionate about vocaloid music and need to act on what my braincells do when i listen to certain tracks), but overall i'm happy i was able to maintain some slight variety in the art i made this year through my chosen mediums and "styles" or processes i use.

this was the first year where i really wanted to have a fully rendered piece i'm proud of to represent every month. now, i wouldn't recommend this since forcing yourself to make art is not a good mindset to be in (sometimes, with how early i pushed some pieces out in certain months to get the monthly quota over with makes it seem like i'm getting paid to have a pretty year-in-review LOL). i was pretty lucky to not really have much burnout i guess?

~~~

ok now that all that boring stuff is out of the way, here’s my previous years! this is the sixth year i have made an art review chart.

lightning round review time! (probably just gonna be more boring stuff)

2018: ok, so this was the year where my prime art hosting platform was… amino… specifically smash amino. as much as i could rant about how much i hate that place now, i cant deny that it got me creating a lot of stuff. also it was an actual date archive for my traditional art because i never got in the habit of dating my physical art 🙃 uh don’t mind the absolute horrid graphic design on this one. i grabbed a template which was probably saved from a bunch of other places from amino and… didn’t really know how the formatting was supposed to work. first of all, i edited this in picsart on my phone and the chart wasn’t transparent, and second of all i didn’t know you were supposed to crop only the main focus so it could fit and be a little more clear. hence why its such a visual eyesore. i've been meaning to remake it to make it a little less bad (once i get my hands on the traditional pieces again), but i guess its shoddiness adds to its charm, much like amino. but anyway, 2018 was a bit of a turning point year for me in the smash amino art biz. on amino, i mostly made copies of official artwork from smash (character renders and so forth), and this year i actually tried experimenting with my own original ideas and scenes (my copying roots were still around at this time tho, seen in the november drawing which is based on ssbu’s mural art. i mainly moved on to copying artwork from feh). this was also the year i got my ipad and finally got into making digital art. i didn’t have the knowledge of digital art that i have today obviously, so colors and lighting were usually on the plain side. i also hit my stride with making more ambitious traditional art that incorporated backgrounds and such, and they’re pieces i’m still really proud of!

2019: so, i actually made this chart some time in 2021 or 22 because i didnt make an actual chart in 2019 officially (i forgor). which bums me out because i deleted my amino account by then, so a lot of dates for traditional pieces were flushed down the toilet the one time i needed them. so, to compensate, i tried scraping any digital piece i could to fill in some spaces, which is why some are more underwhelming than others. but yeah since this isn’t fully accurate to my art progress that year, 2019 is a bit fuzzy. main thing of note that year is midway through i got really REEAALLY into fire emblem: three houses and drew a lot of art of the characters (not shown much on the chart because they were mostly sketches and whatnot). imo there’s not much improvement or stylistic changes from 2018 in this year to note. 2020 on the other hand…

2020: if it wasn’t clear, this was my jojo phase. i got into jojo at the end of 2019 and my downward spiral into jojo hell bled into 2020 :p as such, i made a lot of jojo art. and because i made a lot of jojo art, this was the year where my style shifted drastically. i feel like it’s a common phenomenon for artists getting a total stylistic makeover after getting into jojo. whether it’s to imitate araki’s style or just trying to accommodate the characters’… features, i ended up facing the same thing. gone were big round heads with tiny mouths and in were tree trunk necks and higher effort placed in learning anatomy, both for the full body and well as the face. it was around may of this year i got procreate and moved on from ibis paint for digital art. while i still have my personal hangups with procreate, im glad i ended up investing in it since it really just works for me!!

2021: around summer 2020 in peak pandemic mood, i decided to indulge in some nostalgia and listened to some old vocaloid tunes from my middle school days. and then i kept rediscovering more stuff, and then i ended up browsing producers' individual discographies, and uh yeah i am still suffering the consequences of my vocaloid renaissance to this day. while it wasn't prominent in the 2020 chart, it really started to leak its way into my art subjects in 2021. however, i still primarily stuck to my roots with fe/"smash"/jojo fanart. this year was mainly trying to find my style again i suppose? i had already learned the ropes of procreate, its limitations, and the options it has to aid with the art making process, so it was just a matter of flinging a bunch attempts at a ~style~ to see which one i liked the most. i did try finding a painting/rendering style a lot by way of copying (mainly guessing based on speedpaints) other artists' styles and process with digital painting which ended up growing into my own thing. i know they all sort of look the same, but march, april, and october of this year all had slightly different ways of doing all the shading n rendering for painting that i liked experimenting w/ in the future.

2022: by this point, i had fully gotten used to procreate and the methods i used to make art, and the vocaloid train had no signs of stopping. i think the main thing of note this year was that i was able to break out of the "5 million overlays of pink and purple color vomit" box my digital art was set it. while it used to amuse me when i first began abusing it in my art, i guess i just sort of grew out of it? it ended up making a lot of my art look homogeneous, and it took out the fun trial and error of picking the colors to match the atmosphere myself. i also tried to get more experimental with my compositions, mainly in trying to make them more dense with Stuff as well as finally get a little more comfortable with drawing backgrounds. besides those things however, i remember feeling my art progress was very stagnant this year, with not much noticeable change from january to december. perhaps i've gotten a bit comfortable with the state it's in. regardless, still a good year all around.

~~~

whew. THAT'S finally done with. if you made it to the end of this very me-centered ramble, congrats. i will probably make reblog additions in future years to continue this little saga. idk if i'll be as detailed as i was for the 2023 lineup, but we'll see.