More old art!

Neopets had several paint brush colours in the early days (before even I started playing) that were rather swiftly retired and converted into a completely different aesthetic (such as Glass becoming Tyrannian) as the art style of the site became more polished. Unicorn (down at the bottom of the page) was a colour with some cool potential, but in reality it was just... a white Neopet with a doofy horn sticking out of its head.

So, I thought it would be fun to play around with ideas for a "revamped" Unicorn style that actually altered a pet's appearance more and... looked better. Man, I'd love a qilin Moehog!

Also featuring my redesign for Grarrl physiology, because as a paleoartist, the canon designs for Grarrls and Chombies are a huge pet peeve of mine (or were when I still played the website, I guess). I hate that they have all the paleontological accuracy of a 1960's Saturday morning cartoon, and I'm a huge advocate for taking the time and effort to make sure current representations of dinosaurs in the media are scientifically-informed. 

Dinosaurs are not fantasy creatures that exist only in popular imagination--they are as real as living animals, just a few million years removed from us. I'm not saying everyone's got to keep up with the latest scientific literature, but would it kill filmmakers and toy designers to, say, put feathers on theropods, make sure their sauropods aren't dragging their tails, and just stop pronating those wrists pleaseandthanks?

I'm barely letting the Jurassic Park/World franchise slide with this, simply because in the original book/film, it's made clear that the "dinosaurs" in the park are actually dinosaur-shaped genetic chimeras created for entertainment purposes, and Dr. Hammond invited professional paleontologists to the park to see if these chimeras looked close enough to the then-current image of dinos. But everybody else needs a better excuse than "well, this is what dinosaurs looked like when I was a kid".

It's probably something silly to expect from a cartoony virtual pet website, but considering how gorgeous the rest of the Neopets artwork is, and the incredible amount of depth and lore the site contains that really make Neopia come alive, it's just too weird to me to have blobby kid-drawing-style dinosaurs waddling around an otherwise really sophisticated and well-designed world.

I mean no offense to Donna Williams and all the work she put in as the original (and at first only) Neopets artist, but as the franchise's aesthetic evolved and became more polished, Grarrls and Chombies should have gotten a glow-up as well. Many (actually most) Neopets species underwent redesigns before the advent of pet customisation, and to me it just feels like those two Tyrannian species are painfully still stuck in the site's Stone Age (pun intended).

/nerdy rant

 More doodling! This is a concept sketch for Saturos, one of the main characters of a novel I'm working on. He's basically a goat-demigod, and while he likes to make an intimidating first impression and generally thinks lowly of humans for being so xenophobic, he is really a benevolent ruler and caring person.

When Saturos kidnaps entitled teenager Tam's sickly older sister, Tam follows him into another world populated entirely by inhuman creatures. On her quest to reach Castle Ravenscrag, Tam discovers that she has the ability to undo the seals binding powerful elementals who join her in her journey, and learns a few life lessons along the way. But these seemingly friendly elementals may not be telling her the whole story behind why Saturos sealed them away in the first place. Can Tam figure out who to trust before it's too late for both worlds?

Meanwhile, Tam's overstressed college student sister Carrie finds herself a "guest" in the foreboding Castle Ravenscrag. Not content to simply be a damsel in distress while her sister gets to go on a character-building epic quest, Carrie discovers that she possesses mysterious powers, and those powers are the reason Saturos brought her to his world. She also finds that he isn't nearly as villainous as he originally seemed, and he needs her help restoring the balance of his world before everything falls to ruin and chaos. Carrie's life at Castle Ravenscrag is much more fulfilling than back on Earth, and she will ultimately have to choose between meeting her parents' and society's expectations, or being happy.

It's been a fun story to work on. I enjoyed twisting some overdone stock character roles, and incorporating important messages about gratitude, selflessness, priorities, and following your heart instead of automatically letting everyone else dictate how your life should go.

The other day I sat and did something I haven't done in a while--free doodling where I just sketched whatever was on my mind.

These first two are character designs for a Digimon OC made up by a friend of mine who started a Digimon RP way back in high school. The RP never finished because the guy suddenly went AWOL and never came back, as Internet friends are wont to do. But our group still had a fun time and made some good memories.

This character, Taki, I found really interesting from a development standpoint. She started out as an antagonist hunting down the Digidestined (the roleplayers' characters) for an unknown reason. Eventually it was revealed that Taki had been accidentally transported to the Digital World as an infant, and raised as a warrior by Goldramon, the ruler of this version of the Digital World. When Goldramon was infected by a virus due to the actions of the real villains, he began acting erratically and ordered Taki to destroy the Digidestined. 

Eventually the heroes had to defeat Goldramon in battle and free him from the virus by deleting him, but not before he revealed to Taki her true origins, and told her that she was in fact also a Digidestined, at which point she joined the group  to take down the bad guys behind the Digital World's problems. I got to make up her Digimon partner, who was pretty much a purple bat version of Renamon. Maybe I'll do a redesign sketch of her one of these days.

The reason there are two character designs is because the first one was my initial design for her when I doodled stuff about the RP. The second design is actually closer to the RP creator's design for her, which he showed us a few months in to the RP when he finally managed to get some of his artwork onto the Internet. This was in the Stone Age before smartphones and social media, when that kind of thing was much more difficult, especially for teenagers who couldn't afford digital cameras, flatbed scanners, or drawing tablets (and there were maybe like one or two types of good free art software available).

These days I'm more into writing solo, but these old character designs bring back a lot of nostalgia for me. (Also, more Digimon games need to come out. Including the ones that are already out in Asia and the rest of the world isn't getting for some reason.)

And here's a sketch for a story idea I've been working on. Kitsuko "Kit" Nonaka is a 350-year-old kitsune who is fascinated by human culture. When she's not working to preserve the tenuous peace between humans and youkai in cyberpunk Kyoto, she's busy geeking out on the Internet--the one place where nobody has to know that she herself is a youkai.

 Here's another old character design. I came up with this girl in high school; she was supposed to be a combination swordswoman-ninja, and her storyline involved her being the only source of justice on a lawless desert planet. The overall concept was kind of boring, but maybe one day I'll find a better story to put her in.

 Couple old Pokémon illustrations.

Having just finished Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and started Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (the Switch remaster, which makes me feel really really old because I played the original when it first came out), I've had game design on the brain. It got me to pondering what Pokémon can do better moving forward, so we don't get another title with the weaknesses of Scarlet and Violet.

 I wrote two articles for the Neopian Times where Blynn reviewed Neopian books under the alias of the Scrivener, a mysterious rogue who skulked about in the shadows leaving book reviews in the name of literary enlightenment. They were fun, but ultimately I was more interested in writing short stories and series. I still love the idea of Blynn as the Scrivener though. She gets up to all sorts of shenanigans when she's bored.

 Here's an old character design that I'm still rather fond of. 

This character, a shadow dragon who can assume a human form, has a long design history that stretches all the way back to high school, where I drew a short manga (I won't post it here because it's eye-burningly lame) about three dragon brothers (who could also turn into humans) who defeated a shadow dragon who was threatening the city, and then they all went out to lunch for some reason. Their conversation vaguely alluded to something having happened to the other shadow dragons, and then the dragon girl ran off in a bout of mysterious teen angst (requisite for manga)... and that was really as far as I got with the storyline. I think later I also threw in some stuff about dragon hunters threatening the dragons, and this character's sister secretly working with the hunters to destroy her own people for some unclear reason, but it never really got anywhere coherent. Boy was I bad at story development back then. (Her dragon form was pretty unique though, basically a large theropod with raven wings.)

Some years later, I retooled and rebooted the whole concept into a historical fantasy that takes place during the Middle Ages, where this character is a spunky young Persian dragon with a djinn companion, and the two of them must travel to hopelessly backwards Europe to find other dragons who have been masquerading as humans and enlist their help with a problem that threatens all dragonkind. It's a story I'm still working on fleshing out. Should be fun, but I've got other novel ideas to work through first.