wtl-archive

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New Walk the Line lore just dopped: Druid confirmed androgynous bisexual

remember when they were saying that bisexuals couldn't be butch or femme and we had to be like. deer

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Yeah y'all can have this too. it's my blog i do what I want

Free WTL spoiler for you guys /hj

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Loss.jpeg

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Intermission | KISMET 2

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[Masterpost]

Shoving this much Lore into nine pages was not an easy feat lol. Part two of two.

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*looking at my followers* you should see this too

Great question! so, in theory, there's two types of answers here, one about the process itself and then one about the Everything Else beyond that

My favorite part of the comic making process is either doing the sketches or what I call "conceptualizing", where I have a fat 5k canvas open and just do rough, quick doodles of what happens that look like this:

That big dark box on the side is the outline for this part of the chapter (sometimes I do more detailed outlines and sometimes I don't. Just depends on how i feel; a lot of Druid's chapter didn't have any kind of outline because I was basically doing the same story as a few years ago but cleaner). I use that as reference when I'm working on the sketches. there's dialogue on some of these sketches, but that's very rare for me to do and i usually dont write the dialogue until it needs to be added to the page itself. Sometimes if a part of a chapter is very dialogue heavy (like Purloin) I will l do a script, but since this part (Leonine) is split between a conversation and a fight scene, I've been adding the vague ideas for dialogue on these sketches instead

Once I've got a bunch of those ready to go, they get added to a page and cleaned up:

You can see that sometimes I have backgrounds ready to use and sometimes I dont lol

If a scene is just "characters are in one spot but the camera goes back n forth" then usually I will worry about backgrounds later, but if the scenery is going to flip flop around a lot then it's better to know definitively where the characters will be ahead of time

Depending on how firmly i have the dialogue in my head, I also put where the bubbles will be. If i just have Vibes of a convo or I'm not sure where it'll go (Leo is singing "Open Arms" but i haven't decided what lyrics go where yet) then I leave extra space for words and sort it out later

Then I have to do line art and my progress slows to a crawl XD easily my least liked part of art period, 0/10 do not recommend

BUT as far as the Other Stuff goes, my favorite part is getting comments about the story, especially from people who mainly follow just what's posted on Tapas, because I get to see if what I'm trying to do translates well. Most of the ones I get are positive, sometimes I get negative ones, and sometimes I get comments that make me wonder if I'm not being blunt enough about certain plot beats / character moments (I'm looking directly at Tiffany Stone who everyone tends to forget about)

I also find a lot of joy in getting to see how I've improved! Comic-making is a great way to get better at art. there's a lot of things it forces you to git gud with, i.e. framing, composition, characters interaction, posing, backgrounds, layouts, writing. I'm better at some of those things than others but still, making comics since i was four is what's made me into the artist I am today

Fun fact, before I was an SU fan i was a Pokémon fan, and I had a comic I was working on for that too featuring my own Pokémon OCs. the pages are very different but the point is, I've always wanted to tell a story~

my inner furry is showing but shhhh

Also do NOT shade comics unless you want them to take 10 times longer, god. can't believe I used to do that

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Intermission | KISMET 1

[Table of Contents]

[Masterpost]

I just finished up with posting this intermission on Tapas so now it's Tumblr's turn. Part one of two.

Is this too on the nose? sometimes I'm worried I'm being too blunt

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Oh yeah you guys should see this too

If Druid ever got to talk his past self proper, I think it would go like this

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Leo continues to find way to be the hardest sell in this comic

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This old man and his tragic ass backstory makes me want to chew asbestos

Fanart for @nugatorysheep of one of the many AU Steebs from their Walk the Line AU

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Hard to say who is my favorite, because I obviously love all my lil goobers. I feel like the most appropriate answer is Druid, I've made more art and side AUs with him than with any other character. He was the second AU version of Steven I ever made (first was EINF, but… we don’t talk about Bruno if yknow what I mean lol). I'm just tragic Connvere trash at heart I guess XD Something about that old man just gets me…… his wet and pathetic charm is unmatched…..

I'm also very, very fond of Sven, my poor tired disaster of a lad… But I also project on him the most so that's to be expected

Oooo boy this will be a long one. Strap in

As it turns out, I have made a doc about my inspirations for each timeline/AU of mine specially, so I'll be pulling a lot from that. But as for the whole thing; originally I described it as a love letter to SU's community, and that's still partially true, but it's a little more than that now. It's like... my answer to all the bullshit AND a love letter to SU as a whole.

Believe it or not it's not based on the Spiderverse movies, but I have taken some tidbits of Across the Spiderverse and woven them into some of the worldbuilding

When I first came up with the idea in like 2021 it was just "hey wouldn’t it be fun to do a crossover?" (first post that mentions it can be found here, please forgive my old art lol) and I didn’t have much beyond that. But then I really sat down and thought about it… and slowly this grand idea started to form in my head of something spectacular.

I came up with a method to travel across timelines, then picked canon Steven as the lens this story could be told through

So I formulated six different "timelines" or "Lines", alternate stories about what couldve happened with SU, and they were kinda meant as generic blueprints to expand upon, common ideas I had seen across the fandom but with my own take/twist on it. I came up with Druid's first, then Heartbreak, then Sven, then so on and so on over the span of a few days. At the start, I had six timelines: Heartbreak, Beyond Bliss, 63rd, Zoology, Mirror, and Monster.

One of those may sound out of place, and it's because, at the time, 63rd wasnt unique enough to justify sticking around, so it got dropped very quickly. Eventually it did get repurposed for Sab's Nora in this rebooted version uwu

I wanted this idea of mine to be a place where all of SU's creators could work on something together. I was very surprised at the positive reception to the idea, and also woefully unprepared. It was real rough at the start but I hodgepodged something together and made it work

Then the Year of Hell happened.... yada yada yada

Fast forward to now, and I've finally gotten what I want to say solidified. I know what I want to tackle with each timeline, especially now that it's basically just me doing this comic and I can keep the story cohesive and focused

So, generally speaking, these are the inspirations / ideas behind each timeline:

Monster - Wanted to take the "steven is immortal" concept that sometimes crops up in fan content and expand it into something bigger. the DNA of the monster line is three things: a fancomic, a Tumblr post, and the entire Caretaker discography. (so sorry to all my friends who have to hear me glaze the fuck out of that project constantly)

At first it was just like, very vaguely touching on those themes of grief, but it's grown to be so much more than that. It's the nostalgia, the loss, the fading of memories. It's the feeling of seeing an empty playground. It's the static in your grandparent's television. It's the crackle of a record player after the song is over.

Obviously in the comic itself it's hard to really nail down that vibe because i do still have a Plot to deal with and I need to cram in a lot in a short amount of time, but hopefully the general feeling is there even if I just dont have the time to set the scene as much as I'd like.

Zoology - I'm still on this chapter (Kismet specifically) at the time of this post so I might be kinda vague on specifics to keep the Mystique lol

For a very, very long time Leo was my black sheep (pun unintended) and I had no damn clue what to do with him. He was dangerously close to getting cut out of the AU entirely, because besides being part cat nothing about him was all that different from Prime (WTL's canon Steven stand-in). Finally I sat my ass down and rebuilt him from the ground up.

He's MAGIC now and the furry part is a bonus. But that wasnt quite enough, I needed more.

Okay, make this an oppression story. I have p l e n t y to say about that. But now it feels weird to project so much of my own racial struggles onto a character that isnt actually my own race. Okay fuck it, he can be black. Why not? He's already a cat, might as well

So now he's my soapbox for racial oppression lol

Tho there is something very specific that I hope people can see unfold in this comic and maybe a few can even directly relate to; something that I'm sure plenty of POC, black people especially, have had to deal with time and time again

Leo can come off as incredibly aggressive, more so that even WTL's antagonist, but it's an internal rage that grew over time. You can see that he's not at all like that as a child.

In a world where your buttons are getting pushed over and over again, but any expression of your frustration is a death sentence, anger is a feeling you get you know intimately. Leo doesn't enjoy being angry, he doesnt like to fight, but he was never given much of a choice. People dont listen to you when they see you as an animal, they dont respect your words. But your actions are always going to be taken in the worst possible light, and any move you make is justification for how evil you are inside.

And that is Leo's dilemma. He has a lot of anger, a very justified anger, and no way to release it. He's not allowed to be upset, or loud, or passionate, because that's just an excuse for why he doesnt deserve to exist.

He has to subdue himself constantly to appease other people. So when he's got the chance to not make himself small for the sake of others or he's given a reason to blow off steam, he often pushes a little too far to compensate. He gets himself into trouble, instigates fights and causes problems on purpose to take off the edge of his frustration- buuut that leads into some things that I want to reveal later, so I'll shut up about that for now

Heartbreak - HB exists almost exclusively as the worlds biggest middle finger to every person in SU's fandom that somehow watched five seasons, a movie, and an epilogue series and still missed the point of it all. He is also my take on "Evil" or "Homeworld Steven", who I have seen many fan iterations of, but only one or two that felt like they really nailed the concept with respect to canon.

My litmus test for who will Get WTL and who will Not is entirely based on what they will understand about HB when the time comes for him to make his appearance.

If you didnt like SUF, wanted the Diamonds to be punished/shattered, or ever thought SU's take of restorative justice and redemption was a bad one, you will not like this character and you will hate this AU. Heartbreak is the answer to so many of SU's critics, to so many of the people that want to "fix" SU by taking away what made it so unique and wonderful in the first place.

From a character standpoint: HB's timeline is one that follows Murphy's law, i.e. if it can go wrong, it does. While he still ends up getting his CYM moment, it's a struggle to get there, and several key moments play out differently for him compared to canon. He also doesnt experience the events of the Movie or SUF, but you'll get to see more details of that in the comic

I knew when I made him that I wanted an evil Steven that still felt like Steven, so despite his edgy demeanor he is still a big softie at his core. He is not the kicking puppies type of evil, in fact if if saw someone doing that he'd punt that person into orbit lmao When push comes to shove he is still Steven. He's stupid, a crybaby, a big goofy loser in pain pretending to be something he's not. He's also still obsessed with helping, with fixing, but all of the things that made him such a good hero are being twisted into something sinister here

Mirror - At the most basic level, Sven is an "alternate Diamond" Steven, a very popular AU idea. Hell, the biggest AU in this fandom is exactly that.

Sven is interesting, because unlike some of the other characters, he wasnt always meant to play the integral role he does now. For the first few months of this project he was entirely out of the story until the end, and his timeline was nothing but vibes

Now of course he's expanded quite a bit, built up over time by myself and others. Chipping this bugger out of stone into something tangible has been a journey, but it's been a worthwhile one. I love how he turned out and wouldn't change him for anything.

Even from day one the idea behind him was that he was to be a 'mirrored' version of Steven, taking all the things from the show and flipping them to the opposite. Rose's positives became Black's flaws, White's flaws became Moss's positives. Instead of a colorful batch of Diamonds, his are monochrome. Instead of the sunny American town of Beach City, he lives in the snowy Scandinavian village of Mountain Town. Rather than being fueled by emotions he's fueled by logic.

Of course I still want Sven to feel like Steven, so despite all the opposites in parts of the thematics, the overall messages in his version of events is the same; the restorative justice, the importance of Sven being himself and not his mother. Those all still happen even with opposing ideas being explored.

I find that sometimes, alt Diamond AUs dont quite feel like a true "SU but with this other Diamond" story for meta reasons... that I will not get into here. Dont have the time

Sven, in WTL, is still in his Movie Era, so all the events of SUF haven't happened for him yet. In a way WTL is a divergence AU for him, because if this AU didnt happen, his version of canon would've gone differently. Funny that Sven is technically just an AU of and AU, in a weird roundabout way

Beyond Bliss - Sonny at first was just excuse to have Rose be alive as I felt that would make for good character interactions. I never was a fan of the "bringing Rose back" type AUs though because it feels like it misses one of the main points of CYM: Rose is gone. Steven's gem literally screams this at the top of his lungs, it could not be clearer

My solution for that was to never have Rose be gone in the first place, and by following that thread to its logical conclusion, you get Sonny's timeline. So many AUs have things be horrible for the characters… so why not have an AU where everything is perfect?

Rose, though a very convoluted series of butterfly effects, has made it to the present unscathed. The war is over. Humans and gems live in peace. Greg is a millionaire and international rock star.

Enter Sonny, a version of Steven who has always had his mom, never had to fight for anything, and has been spoiled his entire life. At first I planned to just have him be this pathetic mama's boy, clueless to any kind of struggle and obnoxiously happy go lucky all the time. If the rest of the timeline is perfect, Steven can be shitty to compensate. Over time though he got expanded upon and less one-note. But he still kinda sucks as a person at first lol

OKAY that is all the main timelines. I've got my silly little side timelines and of course Frame of Mind but I dont have time for that now I need to sleep! ask again another day

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Macaroon, is that catnip...?

Leo belongs to @nugatorysheep

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Chart for how I do speech bubbles for my characters and others.

Anime Ace, Forced Square, All Over Again, and (even though it's not listed on the chart itself I often use it for gem text) Glipervelz can be found for free on dafont.com

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Damn this is a good one

Depending on how long you've followed you've already seen the biggest retcon, Leo went gone though like a million versions before getting where he is now. Up until very recently he wasnt even black! (and unfortunately there's still whitewashed versions of him floating around lol I couldn't snipe 'em all). The oldest version of him is identical to Prime Steven down to the clothes but he's half furry.

It took some work but eventually i decided what I wanted to say with his story, what kind of topic i wanted to tackle, and I hope that someone else out there can relate to him

All of my characters have had SOME changes over the years though.

Sonny also used to look like Steven but with different clothes, and he was more like an older S1 Steven who was very spoiled and bratty VS. the secretly depressed rich playboy with internalized homophobia that he is now. Fun fact: his super speed came about from a single joke about him speedrunning getting Flower (his Connie) pregnant... prior to that his only power was auditory/visual illusions

HB's story is basically the same but he's had some visual changes. He's MUCH bulkier now. The scar was also not there at first, it got added because of the first DTIYS I did for the OG WTL and got incorporated to the plot. Funny that it wasnt there at first, cause it's a major plot point now, like a huge facet of HB and Druid's character development

Sven has had things added to him but not much has been retconned per se... He's grown. Part of that is the massive amount of projection on my part but some of it is also my old friends group building up parts of his worldbuilding

Really a lot of the characters have been added to by people who were/are passionate about them besides me. Whether I like it or not there's a bit of SU's community in each of them

But besides all that... I'd make Sven a little lighter in skin tone and give his gem the subtlest hints of blue

I'd give Druid some scars, maybe tweak his colors a bit. His story though is where I want it to be. I effectively did his retcon already by rebooting wtl and doing his chapter again lmao. I mostly refined his story over outright changing it, because i had a very strong vision for what i needed to say with him. the core is unchanged

The main boys are fine otherwise, not much else i'd mess with. They don't really need fixing now that I've already went and rebooted the whole project XD

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More pretty arrttttttt aaaaaaa

the vibes on Marrow are IMMACULATE.... I really should draw him more poor guy is always on the backburner

I know what my new icon is that HB is STUNNING

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Chapter Two | PURLOIN PT 3

[Table of Contents]

[Masterpost]

Last set of pages for this part. It ended up a lot shorter than I thought lol

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I feel like flower is the Connie we know the least about so

what’s she like?

CH 2 | Purloin | Askbox 1

I don't talk much about Flower because as of right now, her impact on the story is minimal. It's kind of a major plot point that Sonny has never met her XD

She can be summed up as "Rarity but really fucking mean" lol

Also FYI this ask box is about to be a little out of order in terms of posting, as there are some asks that take place in chapter one and some that take place later. Asks will always be titled for when they take place though, not when I post them (except for asks like these that are kind of outside of the timeline then it's whatever)

[Askbox Table of Contents / Rules]

[Comic Table of Contents]

[Comic Masterpost]

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Chapter Two | PURLOIN PT 2

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[Masterpost]

Bigass post since it's been so long since Tumblr got an update... AS ALWAYS if you wanna see pages on a consistent schedule they get posted weekly on Tapas, and if you wanna see pages the second they're done, then feel free to pop into the Discord server!

Part 3 is scheduled for tomorrow, then that'll be Purloin completed.