Click for fullsize. NSFW.
A long-delayed commission from RF2014. I am a slacker.
Tag Archives: art
Five Lips
Click for full-size because NSFW.
I dunno, looks like I just have lipples on the brain tonight?
Decide for yourself where the fifth set of lips is.
Also, thanks to a tumblr ask:
Unicorn Torture For Fun And Profit
yeah so the ex-with-benefits linked to a picture of a unicorn with her mouth where one nipple should be and then we kinda went off on a tangent of my cobra sorceress character doing Absolutely Horrible But Sexy Similar Things to the ex’s unicorn character, who is sometimes said cobra’s magically-altered sex toy.
Don’t worry, Noelle gets her arms back and her mouth where it normally belongs as soon as it stops being funny, or once the scene ends.
Applied Xenoarchaeology
Commission. And an experiment with pixelization brushes.
some pointillism
Fooling around with making Illustrator do stippling for me via the magic of a few scatter brushes. Because holy shit all those dots would be a ton of work. Especially when I decided to retroactively make them tiny little skulls once it turned into my Bloodborne character.
Illustrator, about ~30min to draw, plus another half hour fooling around with turning the dots into different things.
edit: here, have some brush settings. They’re all called “leaf” because I started with one of my standard toolkit brushes, a jaunty little rectangle scatter brush I use for abstracted leaves. I ended up replacing them with a skull made up of five paths (overall shape, each eye, nosehole, highlight) joined into a compound path. I made the others by just duplicating the first brush and changing the settings, mostly by either widening the scatter range to create a broader stroke, or by raising the spacing to make it lighter. You could easily make a few more if you wanted to take a stippled piece further than I did here. Things may start to get a little sluggish though. Use multiple layers, hide them and maybe make simple gradient proxies, consider writing up a feature request for something like Expression’s “freeze layer” function again. (Expression was a wonderful natural-media vector package that Illustrator is still trying to catch up to; one thing it could do was “freeze” a layer. Which was like locking it except it also rendered a moderately high-res bitmap, and used that for building the preview instead of rendering everything from scratch. It made working with complex drawings a lot faster.)
Parallax: Crew art, v2
(click for larger)
So. Nick and I have been working on the second version of the Parallax pitch bible for a while. I’m pretty happy with these versions of the cast, and will probably be using this as the art for each of them.
One thing constantly in the back of my mind is that I’d like to make it more representative of modern audiences than the straight white people most TV shows are aimed at. Gender and queerness is easy to do. One of these characters is trans. One of them is pansexual. Two of them are in a homosexual relationship. None of this is presented as a big deal in the show; it just is.
But ethnicity? The fact that they’re all cartoon animals makes that a little more oblique.
So I ask you, o Internet: Do any of these characters look like they should be voiced by someone of a particular ethnicity?
And then, a further question: would it be neat if the various characters were voiced by people whose ethnicities deliberately do not match the ones the characters look like they “should” have? With a distinct attempt to have a broad mix of voices, the US has more than enough cartoons with an entirely white voice cast.
I think that shuffling ethnic codes like this sounds like a good idea, but I also recognize that I am a middle-class white lady from a former Confederate state. If this idea is the hottest garbage fire you’ve heard of this week, then let me know so I can change it before I persuade someone to make a season’s worth of Garbage Fire: The Series.
(Also, if you are wondering, due to their Weird Names: Vaxenchalowroth is a lady; the Baron and Atber are guys.)
Twin: a fragment
A picture of my character Twin, a sentient black hole who likes to shape (her) event horizon into a vaguely femme monster-thing.
Lots and lots of barely-visible art brushes are layered to create the subtle texture of (her) body.
This has context but you ain’t getting it.
Cloak and Dagger
Today the section of Comics Twitter I follow keeps on talking about how terrible the costume of a Marvel lady hero named “Dagger”, who is basically wearing a white jumpsuit with a dagger-shaped cutout that goes all the way down to her belly-button, if not further. She’s got a themed partner named “Cloak”, who’s a big dude with some kind of shadow powers. And apparently people are talking about Dagger’s absurd costume because they’re going to be on a TV show soon, and trying to implement that full-body boob-window is going to either be a nightmare of glue, or a nightmare of Standards & Practices.
I googled them up and learnt a bit more: she’s a rich white girl, he’s a stuttering black boy, and they both got their powers from Tainted Comic-Book Heroin. Which may have been retconned to the heroin triggering their mutant genes, I dunno, whatever, I’m not gonna change their costumes to “Needle and Spoon” or anything like that.
Also I noticed that Dagger’s costume is basically designed to make it look like her head and neck are the hilt of a giant flesh-shaped dagger. Okay. That doesn’t sound dirty at all when I write it out like that.
So I asked myself “how can I make the dagger stand out against the white suit without making it be a giant cutout”, and the answer was pretty quick: make it pitch-black, and make Dagger’s skin pretty dark as well. Now she’s got a ton of internal contrast, the better to distract you when she pops out of the shadows, while her shadowy partner slips up behind you to kick your ass. I see no reason she can’t still be a rich kid. Also I gave her some shoulderpads because damn, she could use some armor. If I wanted to iterate on this a little more I’d make them work better as the dagger’s guard, but this is about as much work as I want to put into publicizing a Disney brand without being paid. Which is also the reason I left Cloak pretty much untouched, he’s a perfectly fine instance of the Shadow/Batman vibe with a nice little ‘repeated slightly-nervous lines’ thing going in his outfit.
Apparently there have been like four or five variants of Dagger’s costume and nobody’s thought to stop dressing the poor girl like a stripper. And they’ve wondered why girls never pick up her book. There sure are a bunch of geniuses working at Marvel.
And now I go back to drawing a commission of a dark-skinned nerdy girl beating up an alien with her xenobiology textbook.
Khatrici
My phone needed a new background. It got this business fox. Her name is Khatrici and she is a virtual assistant.
Illustrator, 2h, about half of which was spent on names and sigils.
Her Joy
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.