I keep getting reminded how much of an aural person I am recently. My dad’s family has been trying to buy this apartment together in China so he’s been doing hour-long phone calls every night checking out places on google maps. BEHIND ME. My workdesk is big and my mom is usually asleep due to her schedule, so I told him he should move his laptop in my room and work here instead. except I didn’t expect this kind of calls LOL. I cannot think if I hear someone else talking in a language I understand… I can’t even write a simple e-mail because I’d forget what I just wrote a few seconds ago in the same sentence because my mind is being flooded by the sound ): Same thing for songs that I haven’t heard before; I would just start focusing on the musical materials of the song. I can’t do the same for visual things, I can tune out visual information so easily even if I’m staring straight at it, and usually I can’t remember what I just saw for beans LMAO (so whenever I ref character design I literally have to tab back and forth stroke by stroke or put the images side by side) I’m totally not meant to be an artist man ):

And how is it July? I will have cons every other week starting less than 2 weeks from now (leaving next thursday for Ai-kon) and every con is gonna take me at least 4 days… My force-myself-to-go-to-cons ambition has died down HAHA all I want to do now is sit at home and get shit done ): I think I am aiming to finish Blackbird’s character profile this week (not doing Iriel anymore LOLOL FORGET THAT), do this week and next week’s updates, and then do… something… with my remaining time LOL maybe start on another CG :D and rebuild my AA display stand. I’m pretty nervous for ai-kon because It’s a small con, I’m going alone and I dont think I’m meeting up anyone I already know there. It was kind of a SHILIN MAKE YOURSELF DO SOMETHING THIS SUMMER thing when I applied for artist alley. I’ll be staying at Rensing‘s place for the duration of the con (thank you sooooo much ;;;;;) I hope I won’t be a boring annoying guest HAHAHA /socially inept

OTHERWISE, HAVE SOME MORE DRAFTS!!!!

I believe they’re more fun to look at before you see final pages, and I can’t do this with CP for obvious reasons so I thought I’d do this for the AU storyline instead! I was going to use these as test pages for complete digital creation, but I don’t know if I’ll have time anytime soon to do them ): So in the mean time please have some ridiculous thumbnails. As I said before I only go as far as making it comprehensible to me because, well, no one else really need to see my thumbnails. So I won’t be surprised if no one can figure it out LOLOLOL

And more drawing videos! this picture is really simple, and I made it a little slower than the rest so it’s possible to see my blending process if you’re interested. Click through to youtube for a bigger and maybe clearer version (:

and of course I had to ruin my streak of having a little variation in my rep by drawing a bunch of veloce faces sigh LOL. I am pretty bad with faces so I thought I should do something like this for practice or something. I’m so backwards from most people where they draw faces so well and the rest shitty

I wanted to draw a realistic face so I did this. I reffed kristen stewart’s photos for this piece due to my lack of facial feature understanding. And then I realized I don’t like drawing realistic faces LOL because the amount of realism I want to achieve makes me ultimately feel like I’m copying someone rather than drawing as I wish

The last pic is a “wip” again that’s really finished LOL. I didn’t want the picture to be over the top since it’s the artbook cover, but right now I really really want to add extra elements to it, but I know if I do it will be too much so I’m just very blarg about it. Usually I know I should paint covers last but I decided to colour this first so that I can sit on it and improve it over the next few months. Hopefully it will be better towards the end but I will probably get super pissed off about it LMAO ffffff

I’m also considering updating CP twice a week (4 pages) instead of once right now. I want to be able to keep up at least 1 book per year, and 4 pages a week would guaranty that. I noticed I’ve been able to complete pages faster nowadays. I used to take 2 days regardless of page simplicity, usually an extra day or two if the page is complicated; but now complex pages take me a day per page and less than a day if the pages are simple. However being the greedy ass that I am, I want to work out something where this extra work I put in would reward me. I’ve seen comics do donation goals for bonus pages (amya, artifice, red string) but I don’t really feel comfortable accepting donations, plus I don’t have enough readership to do it consistently. The other option I was considering was to continue posting at the current rate, but draw 1 book per year anyway so that those who don’t want to wait for updates can opt to buy the book to read the remainder of the pages in book form. (eg. I sell volume 2 now with complete chapter 6 even though web updates are still at chapter 5.) But this is also a problem  because the site will only lag further and further behind in updates and there is really no way for it to catch up. Also those who bought the book could ruin the story for those who didn’t. If you have an idea, please do share it here! I appreciate your help (:

but that’s ok I remembered today

auresque yay! I wanted to draw a slutty woman and I was like do I want to make veloce look even worse lol… THEN I WAS LIKE WAIT HER MOM IS PERFECT! but somehow I made her look demonic lol ]: she’s not actually evil as this picture looks. she is just your typical superficial, remorseless and self-centered woman who happened to be terrifyingly powerful and decently smart. She has no meaningful goal or motive because she gives less than a shit about the workings of the world and only wants to enjoy herself and have a good time. she loves asserting her absolute superiority in the world, making those powerful figures who refuse to submit to her suffer utter failure and humiliation. Just to do this she trolled a dude who tried to take her down in a 30-year war, switching sides so much that the guy had to give up in the end because his country couldn’t keep up, and his alliances were shattered due to her messing around.

and these two… it’s so wrong but hey they care for each other so why not

Man I can’t believe I wasted a whole drawing sketches and stuff instead of CGing something I can post/sell/use ): but it sucks because I’m in sketch mood and if I try to paint, it will look like shit lol

man how was the last blog post posted on Friday? IT WAS A LONGASS POST AND EVERYTHING ON THIS POST WAS DRAWN ON FRIDAY TOO. I must be on crack. [EDIT: OH WAIT NM I PROBS POSTED IT AT LIKE 3AM LIKE I USUALLY DO LOL]

ANYWAY this is a continuation of my previous attempts to draw a fight between them. As you may remember I tried to do that a few times before, they were ok but I wasn’t really happy with any of them, and I wasn’t going to paint two full body characters in painful designs if I wasn’t ecstatic about the sketch LOL… but I was listening to this song–nicknamed “the duel”–on Friday and for some reason this image popped up? Maybe that’s what people call “inspiration” but really it felt like some sort of cheating. But whatever LOL I’m pretty happy with this sketch, and the people I respect the most all said nice things about it so I will probably cg it when I feel like torturing myself. click here for a very uninteresting wip gif

Then I coloured granny ross (so manry… do you see it as rose-ian or ross-ian? lol)

I was going to make her kimono a little fancier with patterns and things but I went for toning practicality and decided not to. The original idea for her was a lot more korean hanbok than japanese kimono; I accidentally drew a full kimono after I looked up how they work LOL (and realizing that I’ve been drawing it wrong all my life harhar) so I’ll probably make the bottom part more dress-like in future edits. I would keep it like this but this looks like it would be extremely challenging to keep up with walking behind Rae LOL. She used to be the general of Arenscura, then switched over to become the minister after the previous minister left, because of the extensive knowledge of Arenscura she accumulated after looking after the country for so long, and she was getting old. I might not go with this story though because it poses problems for how Rae should interact with her because she would have to be his mentor figure, but at the same time I want Rae to have absolute authority and an environment free of any restrain, so I don’t want anybody in the palace who he would have to show respect to.

and lastly a picture of bb with a srs face requested by Jenny… I was like dude it would just look like veloce dressing up as bb LOL. it was so weird and hard to do this kind of serious face because the way I distinguish bb is mostly with her eyebrows and eyes, which are killed by this expression LOL ):

YAAA SCENE FROM STORY GUESS WHO SHE IS SAYING THIS TO

I don’t think I’ve ever bothered to actually draw their differences much, but blackbird is supposed to have a smoother, rounder cheek/jawline and flatter face, whereas veloce has an angular one. blackbird has a little muscle tone but I never draw it because I don’t know anatomy and don’t know what is too much/too little HAHAH. Veloce’s body is like that of some lady who never does any work, and it doesn’t show at all that she can fight, because her abilities didn’t come from training, and her fuel is in her spirit not her physique.

I learned that phrase from my livestream OK ANYWAYS I’VE BEEN DRAWING MANGA THUMBNAILS ALL WEEK UNTIL LIKE YESTERDAY but the good news is, it’s done! The other good news is, vol.2 will only be 154 pages long :D that means I can put in another bonus story at the end YAY. I was sad though because there were a lot of places where I totally feel like more space and panels would make the flow a lot better, but I just had no choice due to page count. I hope I don’t run into this problem often ): My thumbnails are messy and funny because everyone has derpy faces and bodies (since it’s only a thumbnail), I don’t want to show them even if I don’t have to consider spoiler issues LMAO. But here are some screenshots! The dialogs are not here cus they’re written separately, and I only put in punctuation in the word bubbles to keep track.

So after I was done, I randomly sketched for fun and this happened

I put veloce on top this time but she’s still being dragged around SHE JUST FAILS OK

Then I thought I should really clear up my recent wtf trend of fap material art before I start looking awfully suspicious… so I decided to work on the Minister of Arenscura’s design. I intended it to be a grown up, pleasant looking woman at first, but Finni suggested that I use a completely different type of person since I was talking about the lack of diversity in my cast. She ended up being a generic little nanny :D LOL she only has like…. two or three speaking scenes and is really only there to establish the world setting, so I didn’t even want to waste a name on her, but I guess it would be easy to confuse her with Meron because they’re both ministers ): Her name is Rosien Keur(堕星 河), meaning the stream/river of falling stars. She’s a northerner descendant like Rae so her name is made using the pronunciation of the Chinese characters mentioned above. Her family name is Keur (river) and she was named after the reflection of a meteor shower in the river at the time of her birth. I’ll make a neater draft later for colours and stuff!