Spoiler below! scroll down to skip the text and see art :D
I watched madoka magica with Sepia and it was so fucking ridiculous I’m glad I watched it with someone, otherwise it would’ve caused a helpless civilian to be spammed by me on msn or aim going like OMGLOLWTF. It’s so maihime I hope it doesn’t pull a maihime ending because that was really stupid for its good development. Sepia also pointed out how much of a low budget anime it is AND IT’S TRUE, all the recycled scenes and retarded art in general… I feel a little sad inside watching an anime with shitty art since my #1 requirement for anime/manga is eye candy LMAO.
I hate like everyone in the series, which is pretty normal for me lmao… for the grand total of three episodes Mami’s been around I kept expecting her to be a closet bad guy. Sayaka wouldn’t stop talking about Mami, and Madoka is retarded and is the reason why everyone is dead. Although it’s about a bunch of girls psyching out and getting karmabombed, it moved quickly and it was a good watch! The only logical people in the series is Homura and Kyubey, but Homura didn’t exactly choose the smartest solutions and Kyubey is fucked up overdosed on logic lmfao. Kyubey is like Aizen on crack adn without the narcissism… I think he’s like the creepiest anime character I can remember right now.
But I do love the ending song!
Onto Blackbird stuff:
Someone wanted to see Meron’s colours!
And more alt world bb lol, I bet if I came up with a story for it it would be more popular than current bb because it’d be set in a modern world ffffff. I’ve always hated how rough my scraps are, since I go at it with a rough mindset, so I decided to see if I could make them look marginally acceptable if I put in a little bit more effort. Clearly I have no self control because I ended up spending too much time on it and it’s practically a finished picture lol. well actually I don’t know how much time I spent on it because I drew it in between waiting for Sepia to watch madoka together, but I do know it’s too long for a scrap! I’ll probably (try to) simplify it next time. I do like doing cel shading for scraps because it’s easy and I can rely on layermode on everything! I’ll have to learn to pull back though because I’m still in the holy crap this is so cool must spam indiscriminately stage.
I had a really hard time choosing an additional background element to toss into the picture, flowers water or chains, but then I realized the reason why everything I draw is so cluttered is because I don’t know when to stop adding shit and it looks mighty busy as is lmfao. I was doing line art for this originally but like 3 hours afterwards, I realized the lineart looked like shit and I really didnt want to continue. So I scribbled the rest on loosely, filled it with red and just used it as guidelines for painting lmao. This takes SO MUCH LESS TIME than painstakingly outlining all the ornaments on her boots and hair and shit, but I think–and friends agree–that my lined style is the prettier of the two lol ): A HEFTY PRICE MUST BE PAID TO MAKE THINGS ALL PRETTY AND ANIMU… I’ll probably try to give the colours a wash when I’m done to try to lighten up the grudgy feeling that it has now.
I recorded most of the process here, although there is a gap between the second video and the WIP I posted above comprised of a lot of bodypart cutting/free transforming lolol. I was going to record the entire process from start to finish but I realized anything beyond this point would just be me blending like a nut, and it’s going to probably take like 5 more videos or something so MAYBE IT’S NOT A GOOD IDEA TO DO THAT LMAO.
Click through the video to view it in a bigger frame!
part 1:
part 2:
I also saw a touhou remix from a tumblr I follow and found this while looking for that song on youtube… I love the base figure this guy wrote for the intro part but I wish he did something about the melody’s accompaniment LOL… I wish I had time to to arrange it myself ): that and I wish he posted the midi instead of sheet music HAHA. THIS TOUHOU MUSIC BUSINESS IS GETTING TO ME
So I don’t really feel like drawing my other Blackbird characters like ever–I’m sure I will in the future when they get more feature, so I won’t force it and I’ll just wait for it–and I’ve been seeing more RO stuff from artist friends I love so I’ve been wanting to draw RO stuff myself. Being the productivitywhore that I am though, I really hate the fact that I can’t do anything with the high priest character because it’s technically not original, so any thing I do with them is a waste of time. I do like my RO characters enough to want to develop them more, too, so I decided to alter them into non-RO characters. I ended up stemming the design from the awefulbishop atrocity because I’m so content with my original high priest mod I don’t want to touch it ):
The colours were so hard and I’m still not happy about it. I’m bad with colour palettes to begin with and I couldn’t use a lot of nice contrasting colours because it wouldn’t suit her character. I wanted to preserve the red, but it’s really difficult to work around and it’s probably the colour that’s ruining everything lol
Here is the original disastrous palettes that I went through… none of them worked because I just juggled around colours that don’t work together HAHA
As for the “monarch” title, it came from the orc hero helm alteration because my hp is not my hp without that brick on her head. It looked like imp midna’s headgear at first but eventually I went with this butterfly shape. I’ll probably incorporate that into the rest of my RO characters’ original designs (if I ever get to it LOL) as a symbol for their group, the “Monarchs” LOLDONTHITME They’ll probably a bunch of influential figures in some random world, serving under a queen-like figure who gave them super awesome powers in exchange for their memories in the same fashion as the 4-page RO test pages I did ages ago.
In other news I finished both my manga commission and Blackbird compilation this week, and they took up the majority of my daily life for the past… year. So all of a sudden I am free to work on the drawings I’ve wanted to paint, character designs I’ve wanted to do, script writing that Blackbird needed. I DON’T KNOW IT’S JUST SO WEIRD THAT I PRETTY MUCH LOOK FORWARD TO EVERYTHING I HAVE TO DO… The next 2 weeks will be even better; my super secret charms will be arriving and if my estimates are correct, I will have Blackbird book 1 (the proof) in my hands by the end of it. I bet something horrible is going to happen when everything is almost coming together lmfao THINGS ARE WORKING OUT SUSPICIOUSLY WELL.
layer spamming makes rough colours sooo quick and hassle-free LOL :D I don’t feel inclined to over-detail at this stage of colouring (which does no good anyway) and it sets down a nice and consistent palette for me to eyedrop when I move onto details. I’ll probably forget how to pick colours without layer modes in a few months HAHAH. or maybe I’ll actually pick colours better because I’ll get used to seeing how colours interact with one another?
sketching on computer gives me more freedom to change things around, but I can’t make it as neat and detailed as my pencil sketches. in fact my computer sketches are all crude and gross because I don’t want to waste time fixing anything at this stage lol ): hopefully the final products won’t suffer! I was trying to compare my computer scraps vs scanned sketches that I coloured in the past, but I noticed I didn’t do very many of them LMAO. probably because they take so damn long with my old method.
This last one almost made it to my nice and pretty picture goal, but I just had to change hanging stars into bird cages and ruin it for myself SIGHHHH. I kind of want to CG them both but I don’t think filling my entire convention table with Veloce prints is a sound business strategy, so I’ll probably change the 2nd picture into someone else… maybe… lol ): I do feel rather motivated lately to work towards a blackbird/veloce artbook sometime in the distant future though, because I enjoy drawing them–together or separate–very much. I remember years ago my young ambitious self wanted to make a Blackbird (story) artbook. I had planned out the content so that most characters get balanced features to justify the book’s content, but then I asked myself, do I really give enough of a shit about these other characters to paint extravagant illustrations for them? LOLsla;djfshdsgkldj
ending with a picture I drew when I was like 5 on my Grimm brothers book… I was a total sailor moon fag, I had stickers plastered all over my bedpost and stationery and bags and stuff. So this is like obviously sailor moon even though it says snow white on the castle in the back HAHA. And I wrote snow backwards but THAT’S OK I WAS 5
So all the artist alley talk made me want to draw my next piece with consideration to public reception, something I rarely do, and I’ve decided that I should do something that’s more on the soft and pretty side since those kind of prints sold well but the pieces I have that fit in that category are really old/not well done. Maybe I am disabled in this area or something because I tried for like 2 days and couldn’t draw up something decent that fits the category. Usually when I start on a new drawing without a clear image in mind, I draw a figure and let it grow/change on its own until I reach something I like. Sometimes the final image has nothing to do with what I had started with. In this case all of my attempts ended up as sad/angry pictures… LOL I DONT KNOW HOW THIS IS POSSIBLE BECAUSE I START THEM ALL WITH FLOWERS AND FLOWY DRESSES AND WAVY HAIR IN MIND ): I think I’m just going to give up and do what I do best
livestream from today; I failed for like 40 minutes and erased 2 shitty sketches before giving up the whole pretty drawing thing and worked on this abomination instead. click for fullview
and here are 2 of the failures from yesterday. Usually artists only post presentable pictures but I’ve always thought I should let people know the truth about my art, that not everything I do works out effortlessly and works out nicely. The second one was as happy as things got but it’s not very soft/pretty since it’s just going to be a mountain of books. the first one was just tragic LMAO I was drawing in disbelief that what was supposed to be a happy picture turned into a fucking cross over a grave.
