#might add shitty sketches of some of the side characters later??? if i have time

[emsartwork]

OK I WILL

very long post underneath i do not blame you at all if you don’t read it

MODERN FAIRYTOPIA

ok so, to start off you need to understand i'm not; a chemist, a bio engineer, a general engineer, a doctor, a ceo/organization chairman type, or a government official, so there is a little bit of suspension of disbelief involved in this. I am also not physically disabled! If any wheelchair or prosthetic users would like to chime in for accuracy's sake please do!

We start off with the world changes! Basically all the characters are human now (bibble is a parakeet). 

Fairytopia is now the seaside town of Farypool. HERE'S A MAP BECAUSE I GOT SUPER CARRIED AWAY (map generated by this, edited by me). 

Short history of the town before getting into Elina: Farypool is a decent town, for most people, however it is plagued with injustices of all kind! The local government is super inefficient or just doesn't care so two sisters start planting flowers in the town square as a kind of "this is a small thing but it's what we can do rn with our abilities!". Named after the flowers they planted they formed the Rainbow Company, a non-profit community aid organization originally run by other volunteers from the neighborhood. 

As the company grew they split key volunteers into heads of different sections to better serve specific needs in the community based on the colors of the rainbow obviously. Red: housing needs, orange: food and meals, yellow: children's and seniors welfare (basically a bunch of mandated reporters and emergency/long term fosters, as well as in home nurses, handyman types, and drivers), green: financial needs, blue: medical needs, indigo: mental health (grew out of the Blue section), violet: abuse in any shape (domestic, child, sexual, animal, of power etc), they have also expanded into brown: racial issues (discrimination, hate crimes, general support and community resources), white: environmental needs (ensuring clean water, clean streets, proper waste disposal, community access to nature and recreation etc), and pink: sexism issues (supporting and defending women and providing resources and assistance). That's basically it for the town. (i have no idea if this would work lmao) 

ELINA! Elina is a young disabled woman who's been in a rough patch for a few solid years. (idk what to do with her parents so- they died?) Elina was born without her lower legs fully formed, they end a bit after the knee(I did a little research and there are a few things that could cause this type of disability? but i don't have a solid answer). Her chairs have always been on the shittier side due to money issues. After graduating highschool Elina would have loved to attend the local community college, even if she couldn't afford a four year university, unfortunately the campus wasn't wheelchair friendly and the school was unable to provide accommodations. 

Being lower income (because of stupid rules regarding disability) Elina was lucky enough to find a remodeled garage space for rent in Farypool's Meadow Field district. Ms. Peony is an older lady who lives with her niece Dandelion in a small house. They decided to renovate the garage space into a studio apartment type space for a little extra income. They were very happy to help Elina make changes to the space to better suit using her chair, and hand grips along the walls for extra mobility (Elina is pretty buff btw). Elina does some remote work with her laptop and picks up shifts with the local corner store when they need an extra person. The sidewalks are kind of terrible so it's a chore for Elina to get there. The store owners are understanding and sometimes pick her up if Dandelion doesn't have time to drive her. Elina really loves to garden with Ms Peony and is good friends with Dandelion.

THE PLOT

It's a normal day for Elina, she wakes up, feeds Bibble, and does a little gardening with Dandelion and Ms Peony. Ms Peony starts feeling pretty weak and decides to turn in early. Elina is woken up the next day by a panicked Dandelion, Ms Peony collapses and is experiencing numbness from the waist down. Elina and Dandelion try to call for help but the few ambulances the town has are out and it will take a while for anyone to get to them. Elina and Dandelion talk to neighbors and hear that other people are having the same symptoms, mostly children and the elderly. 

Dandelion and Elina decide to take Ms Peony and drive across the river to Farytown where the hospital is. They get part way north through Meadow Field before Dandelion starts to lose function in her legs. The Rose Side Bridge is completely backed up, people are just sitting in their cars, some Rose Side citizens have placed a Meadow Field into quarantine as the symptoms seem to have started there (the paralysis is still spreading into Rose Side but people panic and do stupid things) The crew makes it up to Crystal Cove Park, some others are in the same situation, but people are having some relief, or at least a delay, of symptoms as they're closer to the river (and the breeze that flows along it). Elina, unstoppable and stubborn af, rolls her way across the park to the river boat recreation center. She's there for a bit trying to figure out how she could commandeer a boat when Nalu pulls up. 

A local marine biologist and conservationist, Nalu specifically came upriver to see if anything in the water was weird and possibly causing the sickness. He's just come up from the ocean, and isn't experiencing any numbness yet. His small motor boat is full of water bottles and protein bars, which get handed out to the people who made it to the park. Dandelion and Ms Peony are unable to move their legs, but Elina is determined to get to the hospital to get help. She manages to fit her chair into Nalu's boat, and He takes her up river. Nalu drops her off at the Farytown Green and heads back to the docks for another water/food run. 

Elina makes it to the hospital, its jam packed with paralyzed people, and people who suffered accidents due to the paralysis. The doctors and nurses have no clue what's causing it and are just trying to take care of life threatening injuries before they can't walk either. Enter Azura, a respected doctor and head of the Blue section of the Rainbow Company, she is aware that the CEO(is it a ceo for a charity??) Iris has been MIA since last night, and everybody is wary of  her sister Laverna as the two had a huge fall out when Laverna wanted to start using their charity as a for profit business recently. She also knows Laverna is a talented bio chemist and engineer (she can make nerve gas that does specific things idk) and is horrified to think that she might be punishing the town for being shut out of the Rainbow Company. 

She notices Elina is *technically* unaffected by whatever is causing the paralysis and is functioning at a normal level because she was already in a wheelchair to begin with. She decides to sit down and talk with Elina despite the crazy hospital around her. Azura is starting to tire and go numb, so she decides to trust Elina and her determination on one last ditch effort. She gives Elina a butterfly USB necklace stick containing all the research available on the toxin causing the paralysis. Elina loads her chair into Hugh's ambulance, Hugh and the other ambulance drivers have been in almost hazmat suits since the toxin was known and at least a few of them are still running. 

Hugh and Elina are instructed to drive up into Wildering Point, a brilliant scientist, Dahlia, is living out there and might be able to help. She was good friends with both Laverna and Azura as they all worked in medical fields. They set off onto the barely there road, running the ambulance really rough. Reaching Dahlia who apparently has none of the toxin in her area. She is reluctant to help until she sees Azura's research and recognizes it as Laverna's work. Dahlia can synthesize an antidote but she would need a pure sample of the original. After Hugh recovers a little and suits Dahlia up against the toxin (Elina refuses because it's not bothering her right now anyways) the three pile back into the Ambulance and head back into Farytown to the Rainbow Company's headquarter building. Dahlia wants to access Laverna's lab there for the toxin sample and the equipment. 

Unfortunately Laverna is already there, she and her goons have already taken the antidote to the toxin and are still able to move. Dahlia and Hugh are overpowered and forcefully sprayed with the toxin, immediately putting them into paralysis. Elina managed to find a spare bottle of the antidote, the paralyzed CEO Iris, and Laverna's brewing(?) supply line for the toxin. Laverna enters, and explains she manufactured the toxin only as an accident at first, trying to synthesize helpful compounds originally. She wanted to patent the toxin and sell it to the military, using the Rainbow Company's reputation as a launch for a more commercial version of her and her sister's efforts. After all, she only wanted her fair share of the company, Iris pushed her out unfairly. 

She congratulates Elina for getting this far considering her condition, and if Elina gives her the antidote, Laverna might be able to help Elina get better accommodations and equipment, maybe even a compound that will "fix" her legs completely. Elina is swayed for a few moments, being disabled in a society that doesn't prioritize her access or comfort is fucking ROUGH and of course she wishes she didn't have it so hard. But the idea of "fixing" her legs completely snaps her out of it, one: that's not medically possible, two: Elina is strong enough the way she is, and three: she deserves to be treated better by society, not be the exception to the rule.

 Elina shoves the antidote into Iris's hands. She flips Laverna off, and the just absolutely HURLS the fuck out of the butterfly USB into Laverna's chemical production set up, shattering it into a million pieces. This causes a giant chemical reaction directed towards Laverna and her goons, Elina and Iris are partially shielded by desks or something. Laverna and her goons are paralyzed themselves (as the chemical reaction produced a slightly different compound than the antidote was effective against). 

Yeah so Iris and Elina get Dahlia and Hugh up, Dahlia synthesizes the antidote en masse and Hugh ties up Laverna and her goons. (Dhalia also synthesizes an antidote for them eventually) Laverna is tried in a court of law but manages to weasel her way out of serious punishment and is instead placed on house arrest in an isolated place near Hinterland Lake. Everybody recovers! Elina goes back to living innocuously until Azura and Iris show up with an offer for Elia to join the Rainbow Company as Azura's (fairly paid) intern, as well as the community liaison for disability. Elina eagerly accepts! Iris also has a new, proper, wheelchair for Elina and starts a prosthetics study within the Rainbow Company and her wider contacts. Elina gets some dope brand new semi-experimental prosthetics that use those electrical sense-y pad things to hook up with her leg's muscle movements in her knees/thighs (the socks under the prosthetic caps(?) have sense-y things in them and go up to about mid thigh. I HAVE NO CLUE IF THIS WOULD ACTUALLY WORK) Elina goes through physical therapy and starts learning to walk with them, its EXHAUSTING, but Elina is determined as ever. 

I will have more to add after my Mermaidia illustration!! So I'll come back to this then ^-^

[ikkydikky]

Here it comes! Time for an end of the year “Here’s what I drew this year” list. Mainly just to archive my art now for future’s sake and tell myself my thought process and how I felt about it now.

I’m skipping over sketches and going straight to stuff that was finished and polished and I’ll explain each image as we go. Buckle up boys its going to be a long one. 

We’re going to go to the first image I did this year and explain how things went from there!

Drawing #1, Scrubbed off Katia Managan 

March 3rd 2017

Art is actually kind of hard when you don’t know what form, line consistency, anatomy, or any of those things are! In fact I only know about two of them right now! And how to put into practice one of them! This image shows what its really like to start out with base-nothing. The idea is cute! And I’ll probably redo it later on when I am probably a years worth better. It marks however the first thing I really posted online. To me, that makes it special.

Drawing #2, Sigrid, but smug.

September 9th, 2017

BIG gap between the two! And not a lot of improvement, or maybe a lot of improvement? Who knows. I think this image was the first thing I did digitally that I put up for other people to see, and it was exciting! There’s absolutely no construction to this. Prior to this image being done I was basically drawing people’s heads and circles. Like, pages upon pages of circle grinding to actually know how to draw a circle digitally.

The main reason why there was such a gap between March and September was due to me graduating high school. I basically didn’t feel like drawing at all when I already had the work load of school ontop of me. But the art starts coming a lot faster now. Yes you can see there was a huge prequel influence. 

Drawing #3, Blushin Bob

September 29th, 2017

Art is something that you can really do a lot of, but you can easily get burnt out on. Animal crossing is actually one of my favorite games out there, and to try to pay tribute I drew this. Not uh, not exactly my favorite. 

This image has me trying basically 3 new things I’ve never done before. Shading, clothes, fur tufts, and bodies. Yeah. Not exactly my best job at any of those. The shadows are, very inconsistent and its clear I didn’t really know how to do it properly. The fur is atrocious with it looking like spiked tumors, and the shirt rides up way too high like hes wearing a shirt thats way too short! Also he might be a bit too skinny. 

This is kind of an image that broke me. At the time I was trying to fix every error when I just couldn’t, from the arm in the first attempt being god awful, to how the shading and shirt looks. I genuinely think this is the worst image in my library, and I knew it at the time since I drew nothing for all of October. You know. The month that’s meant to be the most inspiring artistically?

Drawing #4, Gondola The Peaceful Giant

November 12th, 2017

This was actually just a shitty paint up I did of a sketch practicing perspective. It was mainly for a draw thread on 8chan’s /v/ and probably my only work I’ve posted to an image board. I think generally doing art for anonymous people is a bit thankless. Its great for practicing but it really gives back no validation.

Keep in your memory these clouds, I’ll be talking about those later. 

Drawing #5, Bunny, The space mechanic.

November 12th, 2017

This character was a mistake, not the drawing but the character! This is my first actual tabletop character and boy I flubbed it. But this is art retrospective. Not roleplay retrospective. Anyway. A portrait done with a new pen style that I don’t think worked out too well. It comes off a bit too rough and gritty. But it makes for unique coloring when it comes to painting. I’ll actually have some more to say about that in a bit too! This also marks the point where I really got into drawing again. See. The table top group I’m in rewards you for drawing pictures of your characters, no matter how shitty it is, as long as you do your best, you get a reward in game. Its actually a really, really neat system!

Drawing #6, Oh dear god why.

November 16th, 2017

This is going to be a reoccurring character, so. Lets get to talking about it here. This character was as far as I know, a joke character made by a friend that got turned into a full blown character for a campaign, she is nonsensical, random, actually crazy, and worst of all, vibrantly colored. She is the Deviant Art Sparkledog as a character. Which funny enough, is her character name. This was my first attempt at really going ‘sexy’ and ‘nude’. And actually I think Sparkledog is a perfect candidate for it because its already cringy and god awful to look at! So it hides my bad attempts at a sexy lady behind an already cringy character. Thanks friend.

Anyway to talk about the art its self. It was done with no ref or pose. And I think it kind of shows. Everything’s proportionate to a degree but something about the perspective of the whole thing feels... off. Of course the background is just slapped together with glue but I mean on the character. She’s laying on the ground but not in a way that I think is possible or comfortable.

This also goes as my second attempt at fur, it’s, better. But definitely not good. Ontop of that this is probably my first attempt at an actual muzzle! Pic below related.

Muzzles are really hard to do. For some reason. If you ever read Loomis’ Fun with a Pencil it becomes slightly easier, but it also kind of isn’t. A month later and I still struggle with them, A lot of my joke sketches I often forgo any sort of attempt at drawing a muzzle and go for round head shapes, this works out if the character’s species is a prey type, as the eyes for herbivores are often on the side of the head, while for predators, its facing dead ahead. On another note, apparently I can just *do legs* with almost ease. I’ll touch on this more in a bit.

Drawing #7, A background for the end.

December 2nd, 2017

Tabletop is a wonderful thing, art groups are also an amazing experience to ever be apart of. The group I’ve been with has been an amazing experience for me artistically as I’ve learned to grow so much more. This is an image I did as soon as I woke up on my birthday. Friend A. did the character sketch. Friend b. did the coloring of the characters, and I got to practice something that I’ve wanted to do for ages.

Environmental art.

Ontop of character art and such, one thing that always draws my attention is environment art. Its something you can always get lost in. Your eyes can search to every corner imagining what it would be like to be there. Genuinely amazing works of art is often environment art. 

Its also time we talk about the clouds. I hope you remembered them from the gondola picture. See. Clouds are all about layers, and layers, and layers. Especially when done in a thunder storm. They’re something I might recommend painting if you ever want to start out! I do however think the clouds in the gondola image work a lot better. But I think that might be from the several things I did to trick myself to think they look better.

 And that’s all there really is to say on this image. Which is a problem. I learned a bit more about perspective and how floors work when under character’s feet... and how to do lightning kind of. But there isn’t much else. If I were to do this more I’d probably add another cliff to the background. A mountain, a landscape just beyond the fog, because it seems unfinished as it stands. 

Drawing #8, Oh dear god why, Revengeance.

December 5th? 2017

Probably the only unfinished image that gets posted! So lets talk about it. I think fur is my least favorite detail to make ever.Yet it also is my favorite when its done. The tail also might not be the best but its league’s better than my first attempt! But lets talk about the main thing about this image.

PAWS.

I don’t have a thing for paws, or feet, that’s not my kink. I think footjobs are sort of appealing sure but I don’t care much for it. so this was my first attempt at paws, and I think I did damn well. However, digitigrade legs are something I still have an issue with, and I am working towards fixing that. I don’t think furry characters look great when their legs are humans, but with paws. As well I think legs are the easiest part of the body to draw in some ways, that might just be me.

The face also is a bit of a mistake? Its better than its.. original incarnation...

[NOT EVEN THE DEAD KNOW PEACE FROM THIS EVIL]

Animal faces with human features is the proper way to do things, but human faces with animal features is... Hell incarnate.

Also that ass took me like 30 tries to get right god damn. 

Drawing #9, The last hoot for today.

December 18th, 2017

The last one for today. Some point after Christmas I’ll post probably another three drawings. But this is the final one. Lets talk about a few things about myself.

Art style is all about inspiration. You pick up inspiration from everywhere. Specifically from art styles you really, genuinely enjoy. You might have noticed the art style at first was I Wanna Be The Kazerad and then to something completely different from Kazerad but not distinct from anyone else. This is the process I think to finding your own art style. Emulation.

You might also noticed I ditched aliased (pixely) lines in favor of smooth lines, this was because I was having a tiny issue with drawing at large scale. For some reason I always liked zooming in real close on my 2000x2000 canvas and drawing tiny little things. The bunny picture is a really good example of this. He only took up the tiny corner of my much, much larger canvas. Speaking of his part of this post, lets get into color.

There’s been 3 ways I colored things, the first was plain flats, second was with a sort of homemade crayon brush (Ala Bunny and Gondola), and third was a unique way in how I did the eyes of this image. Looking at them closer you can see theres, actually a lot of rich detail in them!

This was a pretty easy thing to do and it has such amazing results that, I want to do a full image using it just to try it. For how I did it, I use krita, and how it handles gigantic brushes is like most art programs, by automatically raising the spacing between each ‘use’ (for a lack of a better term.)

Here’s what the blue part looks like with a white background behind it and the layer count to make this beside it. (Only one of them visible.)

It also kind of hits close to to another artist I’ve been following pretty closely as of lately. (And more recently on tumblr.)

You might not have heard of @jamdrawers , and you should definitely check them out if you haven’t. They are someone who, in my eyes, has such a wonderful art style. Other artists that do a style with pixelly, aliased lines don’t even come close in my opinion. I bring jam up here because of a few things, the art style he presents has thoroughly inspired me to pick back up trying to draw in aliased lines again, and because going forward I’ll continue looking to him for inspiration. Also if you read this jam tell winrarphile I said thanks for getting me into your art. 

Now, when it comes to the owl its self. I regret not adding a thicker outline to all of her character, and instead kept it to just the head shape, as well I do think she comes out a bit bland. Of course color wise its to keep in theme with the rest of the table top groups color theme. But outline wise? Definitely needs work. I tried a ‘hair style’ for her but that didn’t really work out either. So I kept it to the three feathers at the top of the head. I also think I spent more time on this image than I did any other, to quote myself “I’ll finish this owl up in about an hour or two”, which quickly lead to 8 days instead, just through procrastination.

Don’t do something in art if you really don’t want to do it. You can easily, easily get fatigued and burnt out with out delay, but among this procrastination came other sketches that, I don’t think I’ll post here, but helped me learn hands somewhat. So there is that.

Thus ends this posts governing topic. If you read this whole thing, good job. If you didn’t and skimmed to the end. That’s fine too! I understand I got a bit wordy but, I genuinely wanted to lay out my thoughts about all this.

In conclusion, I think the rate at which I’m getting better is decent, Mistakes are being ironed out each new drawing I take on. Each study and figure drawing adds onto the many experiences I’ll use for later in my artistic career, and I think the rate at which I’m drawing is far too slow for my own tastes, as such its a goal for the upcoming year to get a lot faster with finishing each drawing so I can quickly move onto the next. Thank you for reading this.

Have a noid chewin’ some pizza as a reward for coming down to the end.