zoejayw

[zoejayw]

As part of my big neopets review I decided to take a crack at redrawing the royalgirl jetsam. on the left is the original and on the right is me taking a crack at it. i had a ton of fun and might end up doing more of these at some point if the mood strikes me

[zoejayw]

I drew a comic about Iris's time living as Dahlia at Ivy U for @aawomenzine! The zine is now open for leftover sales, so definitely check it out if you're interested in some #girls. Some extra thoughts below the cut.

This is probably the single most difficult time I've had working on a zine piece, which is really something. I put dozens of hours of work into this, probably around 60, definitely at least 50. I thought I would be saving myself some time by doing a lineart style of comic instead of flat limited palette like I normally do; more work on the front end that serves to simplify the finishing significantly by making it easier to color. This was completely wrong and I ended up really floundering. Well, that's drawing for you. Sometimes you spend what amounts to a week and a half of full time work on something and it looks worse than things you've drawn with a tenth of the effort. That said I had fun playing around with all of my little paper scrap and ribbon photo pngs, and it was great to get to draw a headcanon I've had for a really long time but haven't had the chance to do anything with up until this point.

There was a bunch of additional stuff I wanted to add but couldn't figure out how to cram in here because I have a lot of thoughts on this period of the canon. The snippets interspersed throughout the last couple of pages are bits of senryu poetry, which dahlia was studying while at ivy, but my headcanon is that dahlia was some kind of undeclared humanities major just kind of coasting through general credits, and specializing in senryu is something iris has a real passion for and decided to pusure while she was impersonating dahlia. I think dahlia stuck with it mostly for the sake of not rocking the boat too much and because studying poetry is something she felt she could coast with. i don't see her as caring all that much about her academics, certainly.

i think that dahlia spent this time living it up on a beach in mexico somewhere living off the money she got from fencing the diamond she stole as part of the earlier kidnapping scheme, and once it ran out she crossed back over the border to go see where things stood for 'dahlia hawthorne' legally. i think she was 100% expecting the cops to come for her and send iris to prison in her stead, and was pretty surprised to find her just sort of chumming around with her college friends when she got back. shes gotta do EVERYTHING around here jeez!!!

[zoejayw]

No home collab with my friend @dopingues! they did the original sketch which ill post below the cut and i colored it :)

[zoejayw]

some franema from last night. wasn't originally sure if i wanted to post it but femslash rarepairs always need all the crumbs they can gt

[zoejayw]

I would love to hear more about your Trucy Gavin AU! I’m very intrigued by it. I loved the art as well!! Wonder how she and Klavier would get along. Loved seeing the way you combined her magical look with Kristoph’s suit

Thank you! I had a lot of fun trying to think up an alt character design for her. Her relationship with klavier... this is definitely something I thought about when i was workshopping ideas but I'm not sure how fully realized any of my conclusions are. I feel like I'm long overdue for an aa4 replay in general (i spend a lot of time in the transcripts, but i havent gone straight through the whole thing in years at this point) and pay a bit more attention to klavier and kristoph's dynamic with each other. most importantly, when and how they talk to/about each other because there's a lot to unpack with what scraps of that we get.

ultimately i think in a world where kristoph was trucy's guardian her relationship with klavier would be heavily effected by the way each person is filtered through kristoph, since i don't imagine they'd be interacting directly much at all, and certainly would very rarely be interacting 1 on 1. given that in aa4 apollo doesn't even know who klavier is, it's safe to assume that kristoph doesn't bring him up in professional contexts essentially at all. Which means I think when he does come up to trucy the framing is less as a prosecutor or as a musician and more as Kristoph's Little Brother. i think kristoph probably tends to anecdotally portray klavier as on the flakier and more emotional side, since he's clearly interested in exerting a level of control over klavier's behavior and either genuinely believing him to be less of a rational actor than he is or just putting on airs about it gives that more legitimacy.

i think trucy probably buys into this for a decent amount of time because i think when she's younger klaviers interactions with her would come across as pretty condescending. I feel like klavier would be inclined to treat her more like a child to try and balance out the fact that kristoph wouldnt treat her much like a child at all. its very easy to see their relationship dynamic as one that would mirror MVK + edgeworth's mentorship, although where von karma is a bit of a hammer i think kristoph is more of a scalpel in that department. i think klavier is acutely aware that kristoph is not someone who should have unchecked power over anyone but especially not a child who he is grooming into a prodigy defense attorney. but i also don't think he takes his own concerns about kristoph seriously enough to intervene because accepting that this situation is Bad For Real would require coming to some conclusions about his own life that he is not ready to have yet. and so until kristoph ends up in prison for zak's murder that's just all simmering.

i think once they did start spending any amount of time together they'd both quickly realize they were underestimating the other person. i think klavier is far more shrewd and calculated than trucy initially believes him to be, and trucy is much more critical and wary of kristoph than klavier was giving her credit for. in this version of events i imagine trucy would be the one serving as phoenix's defense attorney in trump and apollo would be assisting her. since I see trucy as being kristoph's protegee i think apollo ends up as essentially her understudy. once the two switch over to working with phoenix i think apollo starts taking the reins on the legal side of things because she does not actually have any real passion for being a lawyer and considers her business there concluded once kristoph is out of the picture.

which means i think apollo would end up sort of replacing kristoph as the mediating party in klavier and trucy's relationship, not because he's trying to or anything but by just naturally being the third person present. they're so used to doing their respective Bits in front of another person with each other that i think interacting 1 on 1 for them would be very stilted and strange. they're not family, but they're not not family, and the elephant of kristoph gavin is still very much in the room even when he is no longer literally in the room. i think she leverages his connections and guilt to help her transition from law into showbusiness and things start to improve between them after that

[zoejayw]

My piece for the @aa-spring-swap! I love a nice fandom exchange when the time permits it. This gift is for @krowmanticism, who gave the prompt:

this one's totally insane and self indulgent, but i've been thinking about an aa4 ghost trick au with vera misham as the protagonist, who communicates with the living through paintings!! it'd be so cool to see what someone might come up for this. :]]

Vera's a side character I'm really fond of but haven't done anything with before, so I thought this would be fun to work on. It definitely was! More below the cut.

I think there's a lot of good potential here I could probably spend a month straight just jotting down notes for how this would all work narratively and logistically. So I just put together some fun conversational snippets until I ran out of space in tumblr's image limit.

Sprites and backgrounds are here should anyone want to play with these toys themselves.

Working on the background was probably the trickiest part; originally I wanted to try and redraw the drew studios background in the ghost trick style, but I realized pretty quickly I wouldn't be able to finish something like that within the time constraints for this event, so I tried to collage a little something together out of the actual game's assets. It was a bit finnicky but I feel like it came together well! Hope you enjoy!

[zoejayw]

trucy sketches from the past couple nights

[zoejayw]

and so i find myself somehow on the other end of 5 years of working on this comic. not really sure where the time has gone. i didn't draw much this past year, but it's been a rough year. things are looking similarly unstable going forward. ah well! a sincere thank you to everyone who has taken the time to read it over the years.

[zoejayw]

A print I did for @grizzcozine! I love salmon run it was an absolute blast to get to participate in this zine

[zoejayw]

My full piece for @aatrucyzine! This was a free digital zine and you can download the whole thing right now. I wanted to draw a Trucy Gavin because it just seemed like a fun time. Thoughts on that below ⬇

I honestly am not sure what circumstances I think would need to happen in order for Kristoph to be interested in raising Trucy. I think he'd need to know about the perceive ability for it to happen but under those circumstances I can absolutely see him leveraging that shamelessly in court. I think he'd pressure her to give up on magic and go in to law, and I think she'd be very good at it and would not like it at all.

The biggest difference in behavior I'd picture for her is that rather than acting a little younger than she actually is to get people to write her off, she pivots the other way; transparently trying too hard to make herself seem older and more sophisticated than she actually is, which gets her underestimated in a completely different way.

i like to imagine that she's spent a decent amount of time at the borscht bowl club with phoenix and kristoph and has developed some fondness for phoenix over time. Maybe she will still help him cheat at poker as a favor. I think once zak gets murdered Phoenix might still ask for apollo as his lawyer because I can't see him feeling particularly good about asking a young girl to send her own adoptive father to prison, so it's much easier to send a complete stranger into that meat grinder. I do think trucy would be champing at the bit to send kristoph to jail, contrary to phoenix's beliefs, so i think she forcibly inserts herself into the courtoom as apollo's co-counsel with the argument that she's his senior, which is true. He's probably happy to have her there until shit starts getting real weird.

I have more things I could type about this but that's long enough for now

[zoejayw]

hunter x hunter sketchbook dump mostly from tonight a couple from a few days ago

i tried to draw some kurapikas but hes so hard for me to draw. i aint posting that shit i got my ass beat

[zoejayw]

Part 18 | Comic Archive

And we're back! These pages were done in collaboration with my dear friend mia @demonkix who took the script I gave her and did the page layouts, which I then finished off myself. She's so so so much better at laying out long conversations than I am and these pages would not have looked even a fraction as good without her help. If you want to see her original sketches, she's going to be posting them herself.

[zoejayw]

Hello! I realized that your asks were on on this blog, and Im very Shy, but I wanted to say that I love your art and colors theyre all very pleasing 🥺💞

thank you so much! coloring is my favorite thing to do... i'm always very happy when other people like my colors

[zoejayw]

for @aawomenzine i drew a comic about iris living as dahlia during her time at ivy u. preorders are open until november 12th, so take a look if you're interested

[zoejayw]

Hi, I feel like you mentioned it at some point on your main, but what tablet do you use? Also I'm a huge fan of the way your sketches look, something so fluid and like, masterful about the way you draw.

thank you so much it means a lot! for the past several years ive been almost exclusively using an ipad in procreate. i cant really sit at a desk for any extended period of time without pretty bad pain and discomfort so it's really limited my ability to use other tablets. it can be as cheap as a couple hundred dollars to get a refurb ipad pro from just a couple gens back with decent storage, and the convenience of being able to like work on a full drawing without having to Set Up at all really can't be overstated. i resist buying into apple's product ecosystem in literally every other area of my life but unfortunately they got me here.

before that i used a ugee 1910b which was a budget screen display tablet that they dont make anymore and before that for yeaaaars and years i used the monoprice 10x6.25 which was also a budget tablet they dont make anymore but this one wasnt a display tablet. off brand / budget tablets are awesome and id recommend them to anyone

[zoejayw]

More stuff from my patreon that I don't think ever made it onto tumblr in full. these are color palettes i was testing out ages ago for some comic stuff i will eventually get to in the future. i've got my current palette up there along with 7 alternate variations, which i eventually refined down to my favorite after testing them on a few different drawings and eliminating whichever ones i liked least

it's probably not necessary to do this many palette tests and may in fact be kind of excessive but i find recoloring the same images repeatedly meditative and like to know i'll be able to fully control my value scale even within a palette's limitations so i think it's time well spent

[zoejayw]

70ish PNGs of lineart and clean sketches for free download on my ko-fi!

Hi guys, now that I'm not running a Patreon anymore I figured I'd finally get around to redistributing this stuff for free. Here's a boatload of my drawings ranging from pretty much all levels of complexity that you can play around with as you like. Color em, collage em, draw more things onto them, go crazy. No strings attached. I've just got a couple of requests about crediting any redistribution that you can find in the readme.txt in the zip file.

Have fun, and feel free to tag me if you end up doing anything with them.