#zanshlou

[csleko]

Happy birthday, @zanshlou!

I low-poly'd you.

[zanshlou]

Hey been a while since I’ve posted any art I’ve done on here and like I’ve done A LOT this year already. I’m even taking commissions now! Check out my twitter @ Zanshlou for status on open slots.

These stained glass style pieces have been a lot of fun. Made a set based on the player character’s of JoCat’s Heart of Elynthi campaign and they got some good traction and attention. I’m glad my work has found an audience and the commissions have been keeping me busy enough to make it hard to find time for my own pieces but I’m having so much fun with the style.

[fedoraspooky]

zanshlou replied to your post: zadea replied to your post: ...

I know that feeling of “have backstory but no plot to follow” something will click eventually. Just do what I do when I have a character like that and try to shove them into every idea you have and see if you can make them logically fit :P

Oh deffo, I was able to fit some of my earlier characters into Kilroy that way! (Like Trevor, for example!) It’ll just take some time and lots of brainstorming. Thankfully I’ll have plenty of time there, because I still have like 11-12 chapters of Kilroy left to go before it’s complete. XD ; I guess if I wanted, I could throw my more out-there character ideas into ATFYAM in the meantime, they’d actually fit in pretty well there.

[sprite-o-verse]

Episode 38

[bhryn-art]

zanshlou

 “Maya doodle, from Borderlands 2 - September 13th for BL3 and I’ll be...”

Need to add you on PS4! If I remember right you like to do first play through solo but would love to play some BL3 with you sometime :)

Woah well remembered :O - I do love doing as many of my first plays of anything solo. If my friend Becca had time off and dusted off her ps4 and got BL3 I’d be doing it with her, but I think she’s busy so it’ll be a solo first play for me sadly! After that though, yes absolutely!

[keelime-xiv]

◇◆

It’s okay to be shy because I am incredibly shy too, we can be shy together~!

Also, hello! ♥

Thank you for the prompt, @zanshlou ♥[Why aren’t we role playing yet~?]

[bhryn]

I'm not too late to snag a commission slot am I?

You may have one dear - my submission box is open, drop me some details :)

[csleko]

What if Comic Shorts...but Star Wars?

Random idea I had a little while ago to redesign Comic Shorts characters as if they were from the Star Wars universe. I started with Tailii, and eventually made the rest in Hero Forge, so that's what's going on in this post.

Tailii Raisa, human female. Throughout her career as a "treasure hunter" she has built up quite a collection of curiosities such as a Nightsister sword, a beskar pauldron, a restored antique blaster, pieces of Phase I Clone Trooper armor (painted to match her look), and a "lucky vest" she stole from an auction (the seller dubiously claimed it originally belonged to a famous smuggler).

Zanshlou, Mirialan male. Raised on exciting stories of bounty hunter adventures, Zan entered the profession at a young age hoping to find an epic story of his own to some day tell. Unfortunately, though he is competent, the ever growing number of bounty hunters in the galaxy is making it quite challenging to stand out.

---

I originally had Zan as another human, but I figured he needed a little something to be more Star Wars-y and not just "kinda cyberpunky version of his original design." Mirialans (usually) have greenish skin, dark hair and face tattoos, so I thought that'd be perfect for Zan who's trying to build his brand as a mysterious ninja.

York, Duros male. An experimental treatment for the rare skin condition that robbed him of his species' typical blue/green pigmentation has left him with significant memory loss. After assassinating the head of the medical company responsible, York went on to become a prolific hitman preferring to take jobs targeting shady corporate officers who believe their wealth makes them untouchable. He is all too happy to prove them wrong.

---

York and Buddy were a challenge. In our canon universe, they're the same type of creature. (That being a faceless pale humanoid with large black eyes.) There's not really an equivalent in the Star Wars universe, so I had to get really creative here. I ended up making York a Duros since they *kind of* have the look I wanted to go for, but their coloration is in the blue to green range, so I decided he could just have a skin condition that makes it white. My main concern is he comes off as too Cad Bane-like with his signature hat and being the same species, but whatever. Everything's a ripoff of something.

"Buddy," Umbaran male. The creature known to the group only as "Buddy" is an oddity among oddities. Unbeknownst to his companions (and even himself), rather than being simply "Force sensitive" he is actually Force *hypersensitive* to the point where his mind is completely overrun by a seemingly infinite number of voices constantly feeding him conflicting interpretations of the "will of the Force." While able to speak and understand Basic, the majority of his speech comes out as unintelligible gibberish, though during brief moments of near lucidity he does express a consistent delusion of being a Jedi Knight. Zan has given him a "lightsaber" (a metal pipe painted blue) to hopefully shut him up for a while.

Buddy wears a helmet of unknown make that seems to keep him in a constant state of audiovisual overload in an attempt to drown out the voices. Whether it actually works or not is impossible to tell, but he refuses to remove it under any circumstance. L3-K0 was only able to determine Buddy's species through a genetic scan.

---

If there's not at least one character in a mysterious face-concealing helmet, are you even making Star Wars content? Buddy's backstory was actually surprisingly easy to adapt to this setting. Just instead of "weird multiverse energy broke his mind and made him immortal" it's "The Force broke his mind and made him immortal." (And yeah, there wasn't really a good place up there to throw that detail in, but Buddy is basically immortal.)

I had a couple of ideas to explain the helmet, and it's actually the reason I decided to make him Umbaran. They're pale, extremely sensitive to sunlight, and also tend to be psychic, so I thought maybe he wears the helmet to protect himself from the sun and it helps keep him from constantly the minds of everyone around him since he's a lot more psychic than the average Umbaran.

L3-K0, A.K.A. "Leko," droid. A prototype tactical analysis droid, L3-K0 gained sentience when his developers were unable to find a way to memory-wipe him without also resetting his analytical effectiveness. Reasoning that the best way to improve the droid's capabilities was to allow it to accumulate experience without limits, Leko convinced his creators to allow him to freely travel the galaxy with the goal of simply learning all there is to learn about it.

Throughout his travels, Leko met and recruited several interesting individuals to form a sort of mercenary team and perform various jobs across the galaxy.

-------

So there you have it! If you want the HF links to any of these for whatever reason, here they are:

Tailii

Zan

York

Buddy

Leko

[csleko]

Leko: I’ve been expecting you, Zan...

Zan: How’d you do that without turning around?

Leko: To be perfectly honest, the first couple of people I did that to were not you.

———

The blog I was getting these from has unfortunately ceased operations. I still have a few saved from them that I’d like to get around to doing some day, but there’s also a site that lets you put in character names and generates random quotes.

That site would be found here.

So yeah. Might get back to doing these a little more frequently in the near future.

[csleko]

Proof of concept for making Sprite-O-Verse episodes with Blender.

The actual comic making part of this process is WAAAAAAY faster than Photoshop! Like, yeah, I spent hours making the set and it’s still not totally done, but moving the characters and camera around, rendering out each panel, throwing it into Photoshop and slapping some speech bubbles on it? Like an hour? Maybe?

I’m seriously considering committing to this style change. Besides looking 1000x better in general, you might actually see more than 1-2 episodes a year from me!

[csleko]

SO I HAD A THOUGHT...

That since I was thinking about doing more Sprite-O-Verse backgrounds with Blender instead of trying to chop things together in Photoshop...

And since alpha mapping is so much more straightforward...

And since I have a decent handle on UV mapping now...

I could theoretically do just about the entire comic in Blender except for the speech bubbles and other text.

Pro:

Characters fit into the scene better because they’re actually physically there and are being lit by the same light setup and effects.

Scaling and rotating the characters would be much cleaner and less harsh on the pixels.

I can compose more interesting shots and angles with the 3D camera and environment instead of having everyone just flat and shot straight on.

Con:

I would have to make ALL the backgrounds in Blender, both new scenes and ones I’ve already used before.

Mapping all the character sprite sheets will be time consuming and tedious, but only needs to be done once. They’re a single polygon apiece, so hardly resource intensive.

Certain effects I like to do with Photoshop might be more difficult or even impossible if I make the panels like this.

I did promise when I rebooted the series that I wouldn’t make any more major stylistic changes, and this would be pretty much a complete overhaul.

[csleko]

Woah! Is that another “incorrect quote” from @incorrectocquotations ? Yeah. Yeah it is. I need more excuses to draw and less excuses to not post things. Zan’s head looks like a stepped-on jellybean in the last panel because I suck at profile views, and I’m okay with that.

[bhryn-art]

zanshlou

 “Oh what tangled webs we weave…” - Sin Eater Tomoe (the heart is...”

any chance you'll do shirts in addition to standard prints?

I could do! Easy enough to enable :D

[csleko]

Who would win? A ninja, a robot, a thief, and a gangster? Or one shadowy boi? I might be addicted to @incorrectocquotations

[csleko]

T-T-T-TRIPLE DRAW of @incorrectocquotations bits!

I got bored waiting on myself to redraw the ones I said I was gonna do, so I went through my likes and just did a few.

I guess these three kind of make a story if you think 4th-dimensionally enough.

THEY’RE SUPER SKETCHY AND I COULDN’T DRAW A DECENT CAR IF YOU LITERALLY HAD A GUN TO MY HEAD.

[sprite-o-verse]

Episode 34