Product of yesterday’s 9+ hour stream. I was hoping to finish it but I guess I forgot I’m colouring 2 character ): sadly the remaining business will have to wait til next week. I hate blackbird’s -3- face LOL IT’S SO WEIRD TO DRAW AND IT LOOKS SO DUMB
I was going to complete the designs of the 2 main characters in the next part of Blackbird today, but so far the only thing I finalized is Rae’s hair… (which btw is just a mess of curls because that’s how I roll) I forgot how limited my costume design vocabulary is and I can’t come up with any catchy looking oriental clothing ): This next arc has soooo many kind of important but not quite charaters that I have to put effort into designing… I guess it will be a good character design exercise lol, I can’t even remember when the last time I designed a new character was.
Rae is a very Blackbird-like character, minus the killing people part. He is in his early 40s, but his personality and attitude saved him from looking the part. He is unmarried and has no romantic interest, mostly due to lack of time and and attention in this area because of his position as the lord of Arenscura. Arenscura is a pretty chill country overall, but at the same time it is plagued by a lot of trivial problems, enough to keep him occupied almost to no end. He takes it as a blessing that it’s not disasters and catastrophes that he has to deal with, and generally does a good job ruling his country. His people love his charisma, EVERYTHING IS SUPER HAPPY DESU
“Return”: composed by me! completed version. (stopped myself before I go out of control with OCD editting)
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I originally wanted to name this song something along the lines of “distant homeland”, I envision some utopia or a homeland that one has long left and can never return to. But I thought it was too long and specific (but ironically not descriptive enough…), and I remembered the segment in the music documentary about a Rachmaninoff prelude with the program of “exile”, where they described it as a return. So I settled for “return” instead, a desire to go back to a familiar place, the peace before change, to be surrounded by pleasantness again.
The picture is to illustrate the program of the piece. I didn’t say anything about it while drawing the picture because it would sound ridiculously narcissistic… who do I think I am listening to my own song while illustrating it LOL. But the scenery takes place sometime in the future where the world is in chaos. Throughout the story it becomes more and more clear to Veloce she wants to return “home”–that place as I described, not the home she left. But as she treads towards this goal she passes by nothing but scorched remains of land that were once peaceful homes of many. The world was war-torn by the struggles of the immortals who wants to be freed from their imprisonment in the mortal realms and return to heaven, where they are from. It reminded her of the catastrophe centuries past where a god, driven by the same wish, almost destroyed the world. The vision of this unreachable homeland is glorious, but again and again the trail left by its pursuers is always one of destruction. It causes her to doubt whether she will end up the same.
So I’ve been wasting a lot of time on Reason because it’s so goddamn fun it almost made me regret playing RO instead of playing on Reason. almost. But yeah! I’m just digging up super old midis I wrote and importing them into reason to play around. IT’S KINDA LIKE PHOTOSHOPPING A SHITTY PICTURE, where you totally trash it with filters and layer modes and textures to make it look cool even though the base picture is shit.
If you’ve frequented my sites in… 2005? 2006? you might remember this song haha. I made it to be veloce’s theme song or something but I don’t think it fits anymore, too depressing LMFAO. One thing I love about reason is it makes seamless LOOPS. so I’ve been lazy about beginnings and endings since I just loop the songs forever lol
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ok back to drawing blackbird pages LOL IM SO DISTRACTED
I haven’t drawn lineart in ages and I hate it even more now that I’m painted without lineart. I wasted so much time today free transforming body parts because the sketch was so bogus, like I have done in the past. Totally not doing this next time ):
Oh wait… I kind of do have to draw lineart for bookcovers…
… and 2 character profiles that I have to do…
But at least I have SAI this time which took so much hell out of the process because the pen brush is so solid and smooth and doesn’t make me look like I’m high on coffee . I don’t understand why it’s so hard to implement this kind of brush on Photoshop (unless there already is one, I am still using CS lmfao) because I mean while precision is good, I think most people would ZOOM IN when they need that kind of microsensitivity ):
In other news I took another 1 hr and wrote down the other half of the song today. I’ve worked with choral music too much obviously, because it sounds just like lame choral music right now… I was going to post the lyrics but then I remembered how hopelessly SAPPY it is so I decided not to LMFAO. I wish I have more time to finish thissss
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