T. K. Arispe

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.