#tangymod

[phantomarts]

The beginning of Art and Friendship

With the return of @askthecookies​ in full swing (and seeing as these pieces arnt currently available anywhere since my old account got deleted) I figured this could be a fun time to go over my journey of not only my relation with the mod for cookie blog but the beginning of my journey into art in general, at least on the digital side.(Prepare for a LONG post)

So having gotten invested into the series a good few years into the series, what might have been the first item to act as the metaphorical spark towards this eventual friendship and starting of digital art? MEMEs!

Very simple stuff at first, cutting out the heads of cookie characters and posting them onto memes, some of you who have been around a while might remember the remake of one I made a few years back.

By here my OC had showed up a handful of times in the cookie verse from all the ask interactions, so some talking had started happening. As time went on, ideas for various extra gags came to mind that would require a bit more then just cut out heads, so I began to make very simple stick figures completely ripping off similar in style to cookie chibis seem at times.

Some of which not even being original backgrounds. As they began to get a bit more complex the model for the chibis evolved to be a bit more flexible and gags became more elaborate, even stemming into full blown comics at times, and by this point the mod and I were tossing ideas back and forth both for my gags, and their blog, some idea which even made it in as side gags, or even some story details. On some occasions even making some elaborate comics which worked as filler for when cookie mod needed some extra time for updates or long animations.

Art stuck to these figures for quite some time, I always thought they worked well for gags, but if I ever wanted to do a bit more serious or complex work they might not do the job. So at some point further in the future, I decided to make them a bit more complex, and this was just in time to make some larger scale side stories which ended up turning into a long running mini series to fill time as cookie mod took a break.

This simple gag somehow ended up turning into a long running strange side adventure involving Tangerine breaking out of the forth wall into Anon space for wacky misadventures, including meeting the @the-green-anon​ , @askbananapie​ an alternate tangerine from another universe! It was half way through this series where I would evolve the style a final time to polish it up a bit.

This series continued for a time until Tangy Mod had the series of incidents leading to their time away. This series continued for a time before falling off with its original purpose now gone. But with it fading out, the empty slot eventually made way for the series that was teased a few times throughout the fourth wall break series.

And thus began the run of the @askdarkriders​ . Even with Cookie Mod away, I would frequently update them with the adventures and gags made in this series, which seemed to have helped in eventually resparking their interest in finishing the cookies story again.

And there you have a short look at my fun little journey. Thanks for reading, and a big thanks to Cookie Mod for sparking the art journey and being a close friend, as well as all askers and interactors for helping all these stories and gags move along over the many years.

[coco-kyoko]

The Future of AskTheCookies or Poké vs Pony

Good morning, I am uncovering a massive scoop on @askthecookies​ and @tangymod​ regarding the future.

Tangy (the mod of ATC) has actually burnt out on ponies. There came a point in Season 6 where he just didn’t really enjoy the series as much and that spark never came back.

Also, ATC has been going on for years now. 5 years, daily updates. I don’t have the exact numbers, but it’s likely somewhere near 2000 posts. I was there at the beginning and I’ve been following the blog for ages but Tangy deserves a break.

A big problem Tangy’s had is engagement. A lot of the time, he’s writing a story that few people are following. Even within the in-group, hardly anyone really gets the plot. This is in part because of all the characters overflowing all over the place.

So yeah, a combination of trying to be subtle with plot developments and a scattered distribution of characters has made ATC less engaged with. And that’s not good.

So, Pokémon.

Tangy is thinking about starting a new blog about Pokémon. It will be starring his OC Lavender, a Gardevoir he made.

The idea is that there will be an actual story. More of a traditional story format rather than one with scattered asks. Keeping it down to only a few main characters, with side characters getting less attention.

The plans for this blog are, well, in their infancy. We don’t know yet when this might happen, or even some of the general things. Tangy’s busy planning this out.

But after the story of ATC ends, expect to see more Pokémon coming from Tangy.

[coco-kyoko]

Reminder, there’s a lot of work that goes into the filming of @askthecookies . The pony behind the blog is learning and relearning a lot over the course of creating the blog for people’s enjoyment.

The use of 2D in a 3D environment is essentially to maintain the style of the blog and it works really well as long as the camera doesn’t have to rotate around it. It’s a simple solution and it works. Here’s an exclusive interview we had with him:

“And after all, 2D is just 3D but flat”

“Also the actual vectors are fuckhuge sized so they look good on zooms, since they are flat textures”

“The moving heads and hooves and stuff are actually marginally in front of the rest of the body”

“The walls are something hilarious like 4000x3000″

I mean really, I know that @tangymod is a friend* of mine but this blog really needs to get more attention. It’s a lot of work for him and he has updated consistently since he started the blog, only slowing down to one post a day due to the sheer amount of work it takes to build these scenes.