Older drawings between October and December 2023! A couple experiments, some stuff I like, some stuff I really don't...but hey, the return of my badger boy, Cammy! God, I love him.
Boomer Seb - December 23, 2023
Gasp, the first time I've drawn a Pennyverse character with my new eye style! I always intend to draw these full sketch sheets, but I'm really bad at them. This is the only Seb that came out of wanting to do something like that. The can of Monster is a reference to an old piece of Seb fanart from the Districts days, where someone drew Seb on a lawnmower with a can of white Monster. Hellgradeer, wherever you are—how does it feel to still be influencing Pennyverse canon five assfucking years later?
Christmas Somnolescent - December 20, 2023
Aha, shit. I still don't particularly like this one. I had an idea to homage the old Somnol Christmas tree drawings with our new set of folks, because I am ambitious to a fault. (To be fair, they were a lot simpler when there was only four of us.) I figured I had a lot better artistic stamina now, able to draw more things and people interacting and all that. Funnier still, I wanted to get this one done for the 20th, which was Somnolescent's fifth anniversary, and blow it up across the front page of the site for the occasion, so time constraints! Which I always enjoy.
There's a couple reasons why I don't like looking at this thing, so here's a few:
- This was the first time I tried drawing most people in the group. Trys is easy because all capybaras are just rectangles and I've drawn Caby before, but when was the last time I tried drawing a pine marten? Ever? (Apologies, Nicholas. I will draw you eventually.)
- Poses are hard, finding shit for people to do in the drawing is hard. I have no idea what Jake is doing, and Berry was a compromise because I couldn't figure out a scampering pose that made sense with the space of the room. I didn't know how to make the tree react to someone being in it either, due to never having drawn a tree before.
- I also had to try and fit everything into my canvas, so it's pretty crowded. It'd be crowded anyway because it was set indoors.
- My initial sketch lines always suck. Usually I blow the sketch up and use a crunchier brush to reline and refine what I put down initially, and I nearly always like that a lot better. I didn't do that here.
- Everyone was busy in the group at the time, understandably so, so most folks didn't react to it when I posted it. No one's fault there, I'm sure some people just didn't see, but after struggling with it for weeks, not exactly what I wanted. (I am proud of that ES-335, and guitars are much fun to draw, but it's half-obscured by Trys' gigantic fucking head, so it was another thing no one noticed.)
It's not all bad, I guess. Parts of it are cute! I like how Caby and dcb came out, and it was nice to bring back the cookies thing she used to have Caby holding in basically all her Christmas pics. Trys is also pretty funny—because he likes to abuse chatbots, I imagined one gaining sentience specifically to kill him. It was fun to do Christmas hats for sure. I'll find it charming someday, I'm sure.
I mostly regard this one as a learning experience though at the moment. If I were to do another as of writing this, I'd probably set it outdoors and go for some more dynamic action-y poses, like Somnolians being nuisances in town or something. It's a lot easier to fit seven people into a drawing that way.
Miranda - November 30, 2023
Another attempt at trying to draw the kitty librarian girl I adopted from Caby back in the Spring, and another I didn't post anywhere. I still like this one. I'm trying to lean into her looking a little older, call her a cat from the old Internet.
I was experimenting with just coloring in what I sketched here, but I never particularly like how that comes out, so I don't do it anymore. (See above about my dissatisfaction with my sketch lines.) I intended for this to be a ref, hence the text, but it wound up just being more shading practice with my new method (purple really is a great shading color, for the record) and now I could do a lot better anyway. Ah well!
Wintry Pinede Caby - November 17, 2023
I never posted this one anywhere! This was basically just an excuse to draw Caby in slippers and a bathrobe, not gonna lie. Keeping warm!
Welcome Back Devon (no colors version) - November 9, 2023
Ah, what phenomenal timing on this one... This was Devon's sona, uh, Devon, and I really like her. Stripey kitty, comfy clothes, big glasses, all that, Cammycore. I wanted to do some gift art, I wanted to practice small cats (since my attempts at drawing them thusfar were proving confusing and more tiger-like than anything), and I figured, since Devon had just come back into the group from a bit of a leave of absence, it'd be a good time to draw her sona.
She got kicked out of the group eleven days later for being a political whackjob. I still really like how this came out, super cute—it's just a shame it's Devon. (Thankfully, Miranda has pretty much all the same aesthetic qualities as kitty Devon, so I can just draw her if I'm in the mood.) On the topic of the shading, I experimented with doing multiple layers of shading to get gradually darker areas of the drawing, and I've used that a ton since then because it comes out super 3D and textured. I think all my time spent in level editors placing lights has given me a nice head start on those kinds of things.
But hey, if you didn't know Devon, you'll probably have the best reaction to it. I've had multiple people tell me she looks like she came from an old CD-ROM edutainment game, which is a super fun thing to be reminded of. I actually showed this to some other artsy, much more skilled folks at work closing the night after drawing it—should've seen their faces light up, it was such a weird feeling, seeing people react that way to my art. But a really good feeling!
(I did do full colors on this girl, but I've posted that version elsewhere, so here's an exclusive for the site gallery. This is the "mat_fullbright 2" version, if you will (that's a console command in Source games that replaces all the textures with grey so you just see the lightmaps on top). I shaded with purple on Savannah's suggestion, and paired with the color mask yellow (which is Devon's palest palette color), I think it's a really cool mixture—Caby says it kinda looks like she's made of clay.)
Sleepy Computer Tinker Hours... - October 31, 2023
Another Cammy to capitalize on the hype of being able to draw my main sona now! This one, I made bigger and properly lined (with the canvas pencil brush, which is my go-to for cammy.somnol assets and probably mari.somnol assets when it comes time to draw those as well, because I figured he might make a good site asset). My day job involves fixing computers, so I figured Cammy would do well doing that as well—this one's probably one of his own though, given how clean it is (do people not feel shame bringing in a grimy, crusty laptop for us to work on?).
I've recently started experimenting more with coloring and shading—I focused really hard on fundamentals for the first year or so, and I can get a lad looking pretty solid nearly every time, so I want to go more stylized, dreamy, textured to make what I'm drawing a little more fun to look at. This was done the same way as a couple of my pieces this year, starting with the Lince I stuck in that Vansire cassette to surprise dcb, using the airbrush to paint colors on and just implying the shadows and highlights. Tried to be a little neater with this one—doing it in strips makes all the difference. Absolutely one of my favorite pieces I've done this year.
Cammy! - October 26, 2023
I'm gonna be honest, I basically started drawing just to be able to draw Cammy. Back when Caby and I first met, the first couple times she drew Cammy being all soft and wandering in nature and whatnot, it basically changed my life. For one thing, it was the first time anyone saw me as anything other than an annoying spastic, but also, I just really identified with him! People said I was like a honey badger before then, but I dunno, didn't identify with them as much. European badgers, especially ginger badgers? Yeah, that's me. They're sleepy and a little chunky and they dig comfy burrows and will destroy your shit if you provoke them.
Problem is, for a long time, I didn't really understand how snoots worked, especially long ones like Cammy has. Every time I tried to draw him, it was a lot of very wonky guesswork. I've figured a lot of that stuff out this summer, so here's a shot at a new design for him. Wanted to dress him up a little more, since Setter's got the t-shirts and jeans thing now, but still have him look comfy (Cammy doesn't wear shoes, it's a rule). God, I love him. He is my favorite boy ever and I am so stoked I can draw him now. I also tried doing a scribbly Yoshi's Island thing with the coloring? It kinda worked, sorta! That part does need a bit more refining, admittedly.
Adventure! - October 13, 2023
The holdup on the Wales trip diary (which is finished and you should read it and no I will not shut up about it because it's so big and took so long) was that I wanted to illustrate it a little more. I felt like I was finally comfy drawing my girl and here I was doing not enough of that for these pages, especially for the beginnings and ends of the trip where I wasn't taking as many photos.
Here's me fixing that! Some of the BunnySetters came out kinda meh, but this one is just awesome. Bunny's wearing the mages' robes from Skyrim (specifically requested by Caby~), and I stole Setter's outfit off of some gross overdetailed fetish art that didn't deserve such a kickass outfit in it. These lads are on day sixteen's page, when we visited some castle ruins tucked away in the Welsh countryside. It was a ton of fun.
