i was on vaycay for a bit but now im back n working on a shitty smtiv thing because YKNOW? i havent actually done any dumb elaborate fanart for it yet
GET YA BUTTS READY
Exciting!
im finishing a couple of would’ve-been commissions as time killers now that school’s out, and i started with waffles, who wanted eikichi !!
i kinda dig the idea that eikichi would draw up his own garish gig posters, especially if he never really…. gets any gigs;;
So I finally got around to playing Persona 4, specifically Persona 4: Golden for the Vita. As a result I’ve had this track stuck in my head for the last several months.
Persona 4’s been kinda hailed as one of the best JRPGs out there. Often this depends on the localisation quality, which is surprisingly top notch (There’s the occasional hammy overact but mostly it’s hilarious and well scripted). Couple it with a turn based battle system I can actually stand and mix in several bits Buffy, Scooby Doo and Friedrich Nietzsche and it’s all rather good. Though I’m worried it’s a bit telling that some of me favorite handheld games all have dating sims attached to the main gameplay (see also Rune Factory).
Oh, and it has one of the most awkwardly convoluted paths to get the true best final special ending ever, and I’ve played Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors!
And the Castlevanias!
Oh and Chrono Cross, that one was a bit crazy.
Final Fantasy X-2 might also qualify…
Wow, seeing that you liked the localization made my day! Thanks!
Much to my delight, Nich commissioned a full color alchemist from Etrian Odyssey, my favorite DS game!
e: Fixed some misplaced reflective lighting that was bothering me.
I had the great good fortune to watch Lexxy draw and digitally paint this for me today, over a barely-interrupted seven-hour stretch. (You can see it for yourself over at her livestream channel, if you’re in the mood.) Watching her work wasn’t just impressive, it was downright inspiring.
Setting aside her total mastery of the basic craft, from laying down un-guided lines during the sketch phase that ended up exactly where they needed to be; to her uncanny ability to render a recognizably ethnic human face with only the flattest, most cartoonish reference to work from; the thing that blew me away was the amount of thought, creativity, and care put into every aspect of it.
To demonstrate what I mean, here’s the request I made, in full: “I’d like you to draw her tinkering with the glove contraption on one hand, maybe optimizing it for an upcoming battle.” When I described what I was looking for, I thought maybe she would be just adjusting something with a screwdriver—and half an hour in, it seemed (watching the low-resolution stream) that was the exact direction Lexxy was going in. The only thing I couldn’t understand was why she’d drawn only the screwdriver’s handle, and kept fleshing the sketch out further and further without ever getting around to the blade.
As you can see by looking at the final piece, Lexxy was thinking miles ahead of me. When given an instruction as vague as “tinkering,” her approach from there was to get to the root of what an Alchemist is, and how her gloves relate to and enable her specialty function. The answers she came up with aren’t just a better illustration than “she has a screwdriver,” they tell a better story. From the final painting, you can deduce that she’s experimenting with an alchemical process to create compounds stored in the small vials, and is “tinkering” with the glove to implant a new batch of said compound. Without seeing the pads on the palms of either glove, which are shown emitting warm flames in one of the reference images, the molten liquid in the vials already tells you that she’s speccing herself to let loose with some flame attacks.
And I’m still on “just” the impressive parts of the painting. The genuinely inspiring part is hard to get across if you weren’t there watching the stream, but it boils down to Lexxy’s refusal to ever settle. There were six, seven times watching this piece come together that I thought “wow, this is perfect. Probably just a couple more touches to go, and this is ready to show the world.”
I was wrong every time; the piece was never “perfect.” Lexxy always found another way to go further, to do better, to push harder. There’s a lesson in that that I hope I can take to heart in my own work: keep a critical eye and employ it dispassionately on the areas where you can improve. Don’t settle or take shortcuts to the end when there’s more that you could be doing. Let imagination instead of assumptions rule your work, and it can shine as brilliantly as this painting does.
“Mad Science”, a new commission for funky and/or fresh mad scientists the world over! Requested by Nich Maragos.
This is exactly—exactly—what I wanted. I can’t believe how good it is.
*crickets*
I only made this tumblr to follow/comment on other tumblrs (mostly Homestuck-related). There will never be any original content here. Might I direct you to my website, which is also never updated?
