Commission for Tabbiewolf and Spotweld. She wanted their characters in their basement tiki bar.
My tiki bar reference mostly consisted of typing ‘shag tiki bar’ into Google Images. People used to compare my stuff to his a lot, because we both have that 1950s animation concept art flat color kind of thing going on, but I haven’t heard that in a while. I guess his star has faded or something.
A sequel to the previous picture, with my ex-with-benefits’ rubber jackal Hesire fucking succubus-Kellyn.
Afterwards, there was dinner and a movie. And lazily prepared breakfast. Succubi are much more likely to return when you treat them right.
Also included: the earlier rough I sent my XWB as a way to say “ok which one of your characters do you think would be hot to see stuffing it in succubus-Kellyn”.
After drawing that other picture, I found myself thinking about my various characters, and decided to change Kelvin’s name to Kellyn. I don’t know how many years I was drawing her as a girl but still using her old boy name; she kinda vanished for a while during my transition, with only the most sporadic appearances.
(Well, actually, she kinda vanished and reappeared as a cobra named Kalinda, who changed into a bird for a while, and now seems to be a raccoon again. Complicated things happen to fursonas sometimes.)
Illustrator, about 2:30.
So there I was riding on top of a car, on my way back to the house I grew up in. I'd lost my socks on the way and my feet were chafing inside my shoes.
It was a bit of a post-apocalyptic hellscape but there were still a lot of cars on the road. Nobody was turning down onto Press, though. Everyone was staying on Chef Menteur. I hopped off the car and stood on the neutral ground, looking about. Even the fast food chains were abandoned on boarded up. Nobody wanted to live in this area any more.
But I went in. Passed a couple people walking. Got hassled by a dude on a bicycle with a lot of attitude. Who clearly was looking for someone to kill but I managed to get him to give up with the force of charisma. Hey, it was my dream, I can be incredibly charismatic if I like.
I made it to the house I grew up in. It was a giant mess. But my mom was there. Well, mostly. Her bedroom was dark and there was a vague shape on the bed, and a couple of things I was pretty sure were store-bought Get Well Soon balloons attached to various weights. But I couldn't see a damn thing in there. She was also puttering about the house, pointedly ignoring the fact that we both suspected that was her corpse in there.
Between intermittent attempts by that guy to kill me (and rollbacks when he succeeded, sometimes by really over the top methods like four airplanes firing grapples into the house and dragging it up off into the sky to uncertain doom), my mother took me up to a second floor that didn't exist in reality and showed me an old Bible. It was my grandfather's, and she wanted me to have it. I wouldn't read it, you know, I told her. And that was okay with her. She didn't care. But it meant something to her that I should take it. I dithered a bit, and accepted it.
Briefly it looked like things were getting better for the neighborhood – we thought we saw a taxi, there was a big crowd of policemen on bicycles passing through – but then it was just us and the guy who wanted to kill me, and the IR-sensing killer robot in the guise of a 3' tall grey-fur-covered rabbit, and his missile launcher. Cue a bunch of rapid rollbacks where I managed to evade this combo for about ten seconds longer each time, while trying to explain what was going on to my mother and pull her to safety too.
I woke up in the middle of that.
I'm going back to sleep. I don't feel ready to deal with the world after a dream like that.
A friend drew some naked furry ladies, including a raccoon. Which made me want to draw a naked raccoon. Who was not Absinthe.
This is probably Kelvin. Either as a demon, or cosplaying a demon. It’s hard to tell; she’s been both.
Illustrator, 1:30.
I seem to have succubi on the mind lately. Probably because of spending a week throwing together a story about a witch and a succubus for the Beyond 2 anthology.
This was also interesting to do: the power is out right now, due to high winds. I sat in a nearly pitch-dark bedroom with my computer in my lap, burning through half my battery and drawing this. Hopefully the power will be restored when I wake up tomorrow; if not, I guess I’ll be going to a cafe and actually looking for a seat near a wall socket for once.
That dirty lady who draws scarily like me but is totally not me, honest, dropped by and left me this. She described it as “late night vaguely sequential doodling of kalinda as an imperious robot queen ordering her robot servant noelle to refill and pleasure her.”
Click for full-size.
This morning, a friend was muttering on Twitter about how she always uses the same cute-Disney shapes for her stuff. And I was like, okay, take your same familiar characters, and draw them with *different* shapes and proportions, see what happens.
In general, I find that there are a few major ways to construct drawings: you can build them out of spheres and ovoids, out of rectangular blocks, or out of triangles. All of these methods have their advantages and disadvantages, and a pro is likely to use some or all of them at different points of the construction phase (and, to be honest, probably does a lot of it on ther head instead of on the page). But different characters have definite biases to certain shapes.
You probably have a default that all your characters trend towards if you’re not thinking too hard. A certain number of heads high. A bias towards ovals, triangles, or rectangles. Quite possibly this bias has something to do with what you see in the mirror; I know mine does.
So thinking about this suggested an exercise: get a little drunk (so you have an excuse to not care about making a “good drawing”) and draw some stuff that deliberately uses different shapes and proportions than your usual stuff. Were you weaned on three head tall Sonic character made out of spheres? Draw some nine head tall anime boys made out of triangles. Did you grow up drawing seven head tall superheros made out of bricks? Draw some rounded cuddly things. Mix it up, learn to draw some new shapes so that everything doesn’t kind of blend into this endless parade of the same two or three bodies with different hats and hairdos over and over again.
I was not willing to do this exercise too much myself today, but here’s a quick attempt at it: my dragon character Peganthyrus, who is all about the tall skinny triangular shapes, with the corners smoothed off, reinterpreted as a short assemblage of ovals, and a squat series of rectangles.
(Because I am a horrible person, it quickly became established that Short, Rounded Peggy is an utterly vicious person who will as soon eat your arm as talk to you. Dragons are like that.)
At Further Confusion, one of my Patron backers noted that she’d actually probably not been paying me anything for a while, because the credit card that she was using expired. And I was like, ooh, that probably happened to other people – hell, I’d had to replace my credit card recently when I thought I lost my wallet.
So if you are one of my patrons who has been getting denied messages from the place, and you want to keep on supporting me in whatever the heck my future comic endeavors are, then maybe go here and type in your new credit card info. If you feel like you’re done giving me money now that Rita’s done, that’s cool too. I don’t buy everything by every creator I like either.
I will also note that I just posted a Patreon-exclusive teaser of a short story I’ve been working on this past week. AM I TRYING TO TEMPT YOU. Well, it’s about a witch and her succubus familiar-with-benefits, so probably.
I just sold some bitcoin so I could pay for continued work on a LED-festooned dragon head and for my booth at Emerald City Comic Con.
As always, this is not the dark cyberpunk future I was promised.
Today, I had a brainstorm.
See, like most civilized people, I never use the Caps Lock key on my keyboard. But I have so many keyboard shortcuts in Illustrator that I frequently find myself having to mash down command-opt-shift-something. Which is annoying because it always requires two hands to press, and I’d really rather keep my right hand on my stylus.
So I brought up Karabiner, which I was already using to map the \ key to ‘forwards delete’, and told it to map Caps Lock to command-opt-shift. Which required visiting the system prefs to map Caps Lock to ’no effect’, then installing another piece of software from the same author to remap the key to a non-existant key, and writing a bit of XML to tell Karabiner to remap this fictional key to command-opt-shift. But I did it.
And now I can hit caps lock plus a letter key and bring up some very useful Illustrator shortcuts that I use on a pretty regular basis.
I am highly tempted to paint over ‘caps lock’ and draw ‘☆’ on the key instead, because I no longer have a caps lock. I have a new meta key.
Now if only I could tell OSX to show “⌥⇧⌘” prefixes to menu shortcuts as “☆” instead…
(I have some half-baked ideas involving adding a custom ligature to the font OSX uses for the menu bar, but that starts to sound like work.)
(Appendix: here is my custom.xml for Karabiner…
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
<item>
<name>PC 'Menu' to ⌘-⌥-shift</name>
<identifier>remap.pc_menu_to_cmd_opt_shift</identifier>
<autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::PC_APPLICATION, KeyCode::COMMAND_L, ModifierFlag::OPTION_L | ModifierFlag::SHIFT_L</autogen>
</item>
</root>
…and a link to my current .kys file.)
Last night I was trying to work on a new website design but got, ah, distracted by the model sheet of a friend’s very curvy character I have in one the test post on the local copy of my site. Wanking off to it felt kinda weird so I drew my cobra/archaeopteryx character Kalinda with similar proportions instead.
There is a layer in the source file that has nothing but her junk on it. It is called “fuck”. I thought you might want to know that.
And this is from a couple days ago, this cute “furpent” showed up on my dash and I decided to draw her.