September 2021
I’m writing this while my right hand is wrapped in bandages after a rogue blender attacked me. Kept all my digits, so I might as well still work on this blogpost before I forget.
September was a pretty productive month, and I’ve been feeling more confident with my art, which is nice. Here is a handful of pieces to show you a quick overview, as usual~
Starting simple, a quick and messy Eloise sketch I drew sometime near the start of the month. A while back I found a nice, soft pencil brush for Clip Studio, which I had been using on my laptop a bunch. Recently, however, I discovered a whole new dimension to the brush, as it turns out it supports a new feature Clip Studio introduced recently, which is the ability to tilt the brush to get a different texture. This brush, if you tilt it on a tablet that supports this action, makes a thicker, lighter brush, imitating using the side of the pencil when drawing traditionally.
I discovered this fun little detail after I transferred the brush over to my copy of Clip Studio on my pc, as my tablet over there supports tilting. This makes the brush so much fun to use, so I became a little obsessed with it,,, Worth it, though, as you can see from the results above. It was sketched out with that pencil brush, and coloured with my trusty watercolor brush.
Been on a bit of a MLP kick recently, a mixture of nostalgia for G3, and a general love of the aesthetic of G1. So, after seeing scans of a favourite MLP picture book from my childhood, ‘Wishes Do Come True’, I decided to draw these two favourites of mine! The pink horse is called Sky Wishes, and the white horse is Star Catcher.
I used my usual retro toon method of a good, inky brush, flat colours, and a background that took far more effort than anything else in the picture. I had a bunch of fun with this one though, deciding to just use abstract colours, shapes and pretty clouds instead of my usual nature scenes. Very pleased with how it turned out, and it did well online, so double win~
Well here’s a face we haven’t seen in a while! I realised this month that the reason I wasn’t drawing Kapy at all was because I wasn’t happy with her design. It had never been particularly stable, no one knew how to draw her, and I was gradually coming to the conclusion that I found her colours quite ugly. Every other sona of mine had been redesigned to some extent, even Caby, so it was definitely Kapy’s turn.
I made her colours warmer and softer, and made her white markings cover more of her body, as well as help smooth out the gradient by using the lighter orange as stripes as well. I also hope the face remains a bit more consistent, as that was always the biggest issue before. No one, including me, could get it right,,
Also! Plushie form, because they’re always good and adorable,,
It was a certain lynx/snake/bori boy’s birthday this month, and I always like to make an illustration to celebrate a friend’s birthday, so this year I made this for him! From left to right you have the neopetsonas of dcb, Borb, me, Cammy and mon, celebrating with party hats and a big ‘ol cake!
Little easter eggs are the cake itself, as it is in fact the design of the cake item released to celebrate Neopets’ 18th birthday, and the colours of our hats! I made them match with the role colours we have in the Somnol Discord server.
The gift went down well, so I’d say it’s a win!
So now for something completely autistic and super fun. It all started when Cammy was imagining having an otter sona, as he loves water and swimming. It gradually evolved into the idea that Cammy, who is usually a Eurasian Badger, has the ability to transform into other animals if he so wishes, though his colours remain the same. This specific Cammy happened because he had a wolf emote in his status on Discord, and it got me thinking about a wolf Cammy,,
I kinda love him, he looks like someone’s sona on Yerf or something. Real 90s furry boy. Cammy likes him too, which is much appreciated~
More Pinede! This time, a chunk of concept art for the big spooky dragon boye, AKA the blood dragon. The general idea is that he’s big, powerful and dangerous, but currently fast asleep under the core of the planet. If he tastes blood, he awakens, and wreaks havoc. It’s a great incentive for the people of Pinede to avoid war, and the world is overall very peaceful because of this. There’s evidence of ancient battles scattered across the landscape, old battlefields and castles, as well as the occasional piece of armour adorned with blood crystallum hidden in a dusty, old chest.
Drew him with a little ground dragon for size comparison. Might make the blood dragon a bit bigger, we’ll see. Also, thanks to Borb for the neat idea of the big veins down his sides! She designed a cool blood dragon version of Polaris which can be found here, and she included that detail, so I decided to use it for the big boye himself, too. Cool and gross and spooky, it’s perfect.
Bonus! Because talking about this month wouldn’t be accurate without mentioning the decent number of adoptables I made. I’ve been saving up for both a new guinea pig cage as well as the liners that go with it (might make a page about that, we’ll see), and adoptables have proven to be a fairly quick, effective way to make some cash. They’re also pretty fun to design. Have one I’ve yet to sell, a bookish tiger girl. Once again, fun with the pencil tool!
October 1st, 2021 at 2:08 pm
This sounds incredibly painful, hope you’ll get better soon! Lot of good stuff this month. Loving Kapy’s re-design, Eloise doodle is really vibey and gift for dcb is great! Seen few of adopts on twitter already and hippie goat is my favourite so far. Honestly it’s rare to see adopts of high quaility among lot of cookie-cutter garbage that usually is put up. I like idea of adopts when you are the one who does it since it’s just plain fun to design some characters and play with some ideas, not to forget that you get another source of money.