Another old Neopian Times comic. I'm not sure this one scores many points in the humor department, but I just loved drawing manic Hyren in the first panel. There's always got to be one insane sports fanatic in every household. And yes, I am aware that the background Usul's eyes change between panels. I was trying to not make the background characters look static but actually it just turned out distracting. Ugh, I had so much to learn about illustration. I still do.

 Also, Hyren is a big fat liar. His rivalry with fellow Virtupets commanders Garoo and Gormos was practically legendary in the corps. I suspect that with his military days behind him, sports is the only outlet he can find for his competitive streak.

Another old Neopets comic. This one was written by another user and I drew the artwork. I rather like how this one turned out. Maybe don't put Dr. Frank Sloth in charge of anything ever.

 For some odd reason, I find Dr. Sloth really fun to draw/write. I think in large part it's because of the fun of putting my own unique spin on his personality. Canonically, despite being portrayed as the biggest and baddest of all Neopian villains, he's never really been given much in the way of background or character development--pretty much all we know about him is that he's a genius who specializes in genetic engineering and wants to take over Neopia for unspecified reasons.

As he was a major player in Worth Fighting For, however, I took the opportunity to really delve deep into his personality. My vision for Sloth is that of a hyperintelligent being who's always at least ten steps ahead of everyone else mentally, and has no qualms about using that to his advantage. He's calculating and ruthless, but usually not so much malicious as just really dedicated to expanding his galactic empire and ensuring it runs smoothly and efficiently. If you do get on his bad side, though, he's quite adept at psychological manipulation (as Hyren finds out the hard way in Worth Fighting For). Still, being a Virtupets citizen isn't all that bad as long as you know your place in the system.

I actually wrote a long-form Neopets fic that I never bothered to submit to the Neopian Times that's all about Hyren, his family, a rogue Virtupets officer, and Sophix II traversing the galaxy in an attempt to free Sloth from the Space Faerie Token so he can resume leadership of Virtupets, because after he was trapped inside the token, Commander Garoo took over and became an unbearable despot, and at the end of the day, nobody can run Virtupets better than Sloth.

In this fic, we learn that Sloth created Virtupets and conquered most of the galaxy out of a twisted drive to ensure his own survival, after he was left the last living member of his species when they were eradicated by a freak illness (which he had been working to develop the cure for). He's especially interested in conquering Neopia because it's implied that Neopia is the only world in the galaxy that has magic, a novel energy source that Sloth is keenly interested in.

As for how it all turns out, well, you'll have to wait until I get to posting that fic here.

Okay yes Sloth experiences a change of heart and becomes a good guy. I know that will irritate a lot of Virtupets fans. But I really wanted Sloth and Hyren to get some closure after the events of Worth Fighting For, and I personally prefer the idea of Sloth using all that brainpower for good.

Another old Neopian Times comic. Looking at these now, I feel like at times the composition could have been better; in this comic, there's a lot of empty space and relatively tiny characters (and those hands in the second panel could have been positioned way better). To be fair, though, it can be difficult to find composition that works when you've got a main cast consisting of a 170cm-tall human and roughly meter-tall creatures. (It's also slightly implied in my Neopian Times writing that unmutated!Hyren is on the short side even for a Grundo. Wait, I'm not sure if I ever actually implied that anywhere in writing, or if it's just my headcanon.)

(Actually, another reason why the composition was on the strugglebus was because for these comics, I used art software called Manga Studio that had a lot of handy features, but I often never bothered to customize the panel size. So these panels were much wider than they could have been.)

 Oh, right, about the actual comic. On the site there's a game called Pick Your Own where you go into a Meridellian berry field, click random bushes, and hope you get something good. (Most of the time you don't.) Half-Eaten Berries, despite their appearance, are perfectly acceptable food items that your pets can eat without any ill effects. However, Hyren (due to a quirk in the site's programming) won't eat them. He also won't eat Spiced Apple Pie, but that's another story. :)

Another old Neopian Times comic exploring the oddities of random item generation methods on the site.

Mostly I like this one because the spacescapes were fun to draw. The last panel could have been clearer; the idea is that Mira has been going around tossing space food onto (into?) objects in the Neopian planetary system apparently just for fun.

I could go into a whole lot of unnecessary speculation about how many small planetary system bodies are loose agglomerations of smaller components; therefore it is conceivable that an artificial object, upon impact, could easily become buried in the substrate. #overthinkingeverything

 

 I've previously posted some comics that I never got around to submitting to the Neopian Times, but I realized I'd never posted the comics that did get into the Times, so I thought it would be fun to do that for the next little while. Especially considering the NT archive is huge nowadays, and you've got to be pretty bored to go through past issues and eventually stumble upon these.

First off, here's the logo for it. Squid are kind of a running joke with me. (I also really wanted to have a title that did not at all incorporate some variety of "crazy" or "insanity" because those sorts of comic titles had been way, way overdone in the NT.)

On the site, keeping a Neopet's HP full could be kind of a hassle, especially when said Neopet had a lot of HP, and the more potent Healing Potions were really expensive. Training a Neopet's stats was also extremely tedious and resource-consuming. I feel like the Battledome and training Neopets could have been implemented a lot better (although they did eventually make some good improvements to the system); even though battling wasn't really the biggest aspect of the site most of the time, it played an important role in a lot of events and there were also some much-sought-after awards for it, so they could have made the system a lot less painstaking.

Here are some older sketches that didn't turn out too lousy. Basically just a bunch of random creature design.

 Actually, here's one last thing from school--a character design from my Flash animation class. Our final project in that class was to make a short animation about someone who gets abducted by aliens. For my alien design, I wanted something really otherworldly and definitely not carbon-based, and also something that would be fun to animate in Flash with a lot of moving parts (for example, I used plenty of looping animation for the head components).

I no longer have the actual animation, but honestly it wasn't really something worth showing off, in my opinion. The gist of the plot was that a businessman is commuting down the highway in his gas-guzzling car, and he gets abducted by an alien who tries to preach environmentalism to him. The guy doesn't want to hear it and walks out, and when he shows up at the office, he explains in a very jaded and exasperated tone that he's late because he was abducted by aliens. There are some messages in there.

Part of the class was learning how to insert voice acting into an animation, but the students had to do their own voice acting, so I'm kind of glad the video no longer exists because it means I don't have to share my super cringey attempts at voice acting.

Here's my coup de grâce as far as posting old work from college--my animation class final project. It didn't have to be in color. It didn't have to have backgrounds or sound effects or music. It didn't have to involve giant robots with complicated designs. I just decided to go all out. Again.

Like the midterm, I animated this in Flash using traditional animation techniques. It took me about a month of working pretty much almost every waking hour from the time the teacher announced the specifications for the final, to about a week before the due date, after which point I'm pretty sure I collapsed in a delirious stupor.

Looking at it now, it's really rough, and there are some definite pacing issues, but I think I deserve points for being ambitious.

I recently went through my storage bin full of old art and found some stuff that either was actually pretty good and I never posted here, or is just kind of amusing, so maybe I'll start taking pictures and posting those.

 Just playing around with more graphic design. I need this on a t-shirt.

(Yes, that is my cat, a.k.a. His Most High Excellency Lord Sir Chewbacca Alfred, 15th Earl of Crumpkin, a.k.a. Mommy's Precious Pumpkin Predator Pants.)

 More work from college that turned out pretty decently; the assignment was to draw an accessory belonging to a character we had previously chosen to do a detailed design process for, so I did a different view of the cane belonging to this guy.

I told you I have a weird paleontology-fueled obsession with skulls.

 More stuff from character design class, including a goblin enjoying spaghetti and a hypothetical storyboard frame from that Western project that I complained too much about and this is why I'm not allowed to work with people. (I loved drawing that dog though.)

The character on the top right was inspired by the frankly terrifying yard monitors at my school in junior high. I'm not sure who was in charge of hiring the staff at that school, but apparently hating children was one of the major qualifications for getting a job there.

 I was digging through storage, and found something I'd completely forgotten about--the "lore bible" for Tales of Lethe, my attempt in college at coming up with my own tabletop roleplaying game, complete with ridiculous amounts of worldbuilding. The game never really went anywhere (after a few test campaigns with friends, I realized that DMing actually exhausts me, and that was the end of that brilliant idea), but for a few years it was my big project. I even ran a message board dedicated to playing the game over the Internet (that was before I realized that running message boards exhausts me too).

It had some interesting innovations for a tabletop RPG, such as each character being probabilistically assigned an element upon generation (with the odds for each element differing by species), and that was the element the character was stuck with for life. The magic system was also extremely flexible, with less of an emphasis on preexisting spells/techniques, the players instead being encouraged to come up with their own uses for each element and the DM (or Lorekeeper) determining how many magic points a given technique would cost.

It was a pretty ambitious project, and an interesting early foray into worldbuilding, but I had a lot to learn about effective storytelling. I also learned that the success of any multiplayer game is highly dependent on other people actually wanting to play it, and aside from the aforementioned handful of friends, I just couldn't really get anybody else interested.

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to revisit what I wrote about Lethe with some scathing critique modern commentary. Read on after the jump if you're interested.

(I also have to apologize in advance for the hideous artwork. I honestly did not get good at drawing until taking art and animation classes in college. I was not one of those people who seriously work on their art since childhood and are amazing by the time they're teenagers. Whenever my nieces get discouraged about their art skills, I remind them that it takes practice and learning to get good at something--I was definitely not born knowing things like human proportions and perspective and color theory.

Also, the style is wonky because after high school, I went through a bit of an artistic crisis phase where I didn't want to draw anime-style art anymore and attempted to make my drawings look more realistic without the appropriate training, and it just turned out awful. I reneged on that quite a bit when I started taking animation classes and realized it was okay to go for a more stylized aesthetic. It's not how photorealistic you can get your art to look--it's having the backbone of fundamental technical skills that makes for effective illustration.)

 Another graphic I made just because no one else has yet but it's one of those things that should exist. I also want this hanging on my office wall.

My great-great-grandfather was born in County Durham and emigrated to the US as a boy with his family. The story goes that his parents bought him a new pair of shoes for the sea voyage, and as soon as they got on the ship, he promptly took off his shoes and dropped them overboard, just for fun.

Now I see where my nieces got it.

 I was sitting around, thinking about how great space is (as one does), and I was like, "I wish I had a sign on my wall with a picture of the Lovell Telescope that says 'Radio astronomy is my love language'".

And then I was like "right, I'm an illustrator, I don't have to wait around for someone else to make my ideas".

 I've been fangirling radiodonts since I was 9. I'll never look at a pineapple ring the same way again.

A few more old sketches from my character design class. Mostly I just really love the idea of a two-headed dragon whose heads don't get along. The stripes were fun to draw too.

The Zelda timeline explained (possibly)

I've been sitting around, clearly with too much time on my hands and reading too much Legend of Zelda info, and it suddenly occurred to me how the Zelda timeline might possibly make sense in-universe. I sent a big long text-message essay to my sister about it, and she thought it made sense too, so I thought I might as well write it up.

Now, this isn't really anything mind-blowing. I'm not going to speculate on the meaning of some obscure half-hidden graphic asset, or invoke the hypothetical missing fourth piece of the Triforce, or put together a Tolkien-esque three-volume history of Hyrule that I'll insist is way better than anything Eiji Aonuma can come up with. I'm just going to apply some real-world historical analysis principles and invite the reader to reexamine the entire idea of the timeline from a different angle. If you disagree with my stance, that's totally okay. I'm just putting some thoughts out there.

Read on after the jump (spoilers ahead)!

More work from my character design class in college, including practicing aging characters, making up our own superhero, an alien rock star, and an agricultural faun.

 Also, more fleshed-out character designs for that Western cast project I mentioned in my last post.

Honestly that project got on my nerves in more ways than one, because aside from the cliché characters, the story pitch specified that it took place in South Dakota in the 1840's, and South Dakota did not become a state until 1889 (to say nothing of the fact that it did not start to be extensively settled until the latter half of the 19th century). The characters definitely gave off more of the vibe of a stereotypical turn-of-the-century Western setting than early frontier America, so that threw me off a bit.

To add to my OCD, when we did a class roundtable discussing everyone's designs for the young female lead (upper left of the image), the teacher commented that the ringlets on my character's design made her look juvenile. This irked me because I had actually spent time researching 1840's women's fashion and yes, women of every age wore their hair like this back then. I was just trying to stay true to the specified historical period. And yet the teacher didn't have any critical comments when some of my classmates showed designs that looked like modern cowgirls. Am I the only stickler for historical accuracy around here?! Five minutes of research. That's all I'm asking of people. Five minutes of research would have told you that South Dakota as such did not exist in the 1840's.

I'll... I'll just be over here in my fussbudget corner.

A smattering of miscellaneous classwork from my character design class in college.

 Most of these are just extremely random character designs based on directions from the teacher, but that is Saturos at the top! I'm so glad I finally found a storyline to put him in years later. Yes, he does use those energy blades at one point in the novel. He doesn't often have opportunities to use his combat skills (and he prefers it that way), but when push comes to shove he can unleash some serious fury and is capable of single-handedly taking down skyscraper-sized elementals.

Down at the bottom is a cast lineup from a hypothetical story pitch we worked on for part of the semester about characters in an old Western town. The lineup was supposed to be about practicing utilizing different character shapes to create a visually varied cast, and also using visual cues to inform the audience of the personality and role of each character. For example, the villainous sheriff is drawn with sharp angles to suggest a sinister edge, while his brawny deputy is built with square shapes to depict physical solidarity. The token girl's rounded features give her an air of friendliness and innocence, while the beanpole unlikely hero is basically made of spaghetti to emphasize his total lack of physical might, which he presumably makes up for by having plenty of heart or something like that. (Honestly my favorite character to design was the female lead's dog.)

Video game ramblings: prices, princesses, and the casual/hardcore divide

 No, there's no typo in the title. Today I want to discuss a sustainable video game industry, appeasing two very different subtypes of gamer, and my thoughts on Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom.

Read on after the jump!

 Here's my midterm project from one of my animation classes. I believe the assignment was to animate a character entering the frame, interacting with a box and then jumping away. It absolutely did not have to be in color or include backgrounds. #overachiever #everyclassneedsaHermioneGranger

I animated this in Flash*, but converted it to a GIF for easy viewing. Once again featuring Toko and a generically gritty cyberpunk environment.

*This isn't to say I employed Flash**-style animation and used tools like tweening, rigging, and shape drawing. I did that stuff in my Flash class. Everything here is hand-drawn frame-by-frame. I just executed this in Flash because that was the animation software I had on my computer at the time, and it had some helpful features that made frame-by-frame animation much easier, like onion skinning and the ability to easily manipulate objects on the frame (which I used for the motion of the box at the end, because who wants to hand-draw twenty frames of a rectangle wobbling back and forth).

**Yes, I said Flash. I'm old.

I'll be totally honest, at the risk of sounding self-important, I disliked days when the teacher showed everyone's completed assignments to the whole class for commentary and critique, because I felt really self-conscious about turning out pretty polished stuff like this when some of my classmates could barely draw. I wasn't out to make anyone feel inferior--I was just determined to do my absolute best and earn that A. I tried hard to be charitable in my assessments of their work and find something nice to say about each of them. I often felt like there was some tension between my classmates and I when they made noises like they felt I was purposely trying to upstage them, which I wasn't. 

I guess the takeaway from this is that college is a lose-lose situation socially.

 A project from my storyboarding class; my memory of those long-ago days is fuzzy, but I think we were just supposed to storyboard a humorous action scene with no further requirements.

Cats are the best weapons. Especially the ones who decide to wake you up at 5 in the morning by sitting right next to you and meowing incessantly until you get them breakfast. Not naming any names.

Project from my character design class back in college.

For a portion of the course, we focused on designing a cast of characters for a hypothetical TV show. Students were individually given the option to either develop their own original cast and story pitch, or work from a premade concept that the teacher came up with. 

At that point I was not feeling particularly confident in my own story ideas*, so I opted for the latter. The plot revolved around a suburban American kid and his Leave-It-to-Beaver family who get mixed up with the owner of a shop that sells monsters. It wasn't really the sort of thing that appealed to me, but I soldiered through because 90% of working in the animation industry is just doing the job that's handed to you regardless of how much you personally like the project, because money.**

Probably because of this, most of my design work for the project turned out pretty lackluster, but I did enjoy designing the old monster shop owner. Sketchy, eccentric, grotesque old men with mismatched argyle socks are fun to draw.

*Honestly I think this lack of confidence was somewhat justified, as up to that point I had no training in story development and my story ideas were half-baked at best. For example, the story involving Toko that I mentioned a few posts ago had all the sophistication of a really forgettable manga, and the plot outline was essentially "the good guys defeat the bad guys, and then justice or something". It wasn't until I started taking my writing seriously after college that I started to really learn how stories work and what makes them work well. I guess the entire point of this rambly footnote is that I promise I'm better at writing now.

**Frankly, this was a large part of the reason why, after college, I opted to go freelance (and started to focus on novel writing) instead of trying to fit myself into the industry; I just couldn't bring myself to care more about money than about artistic integrity, and I was also very tired of being forced to work on other people's ideas that I didn't particularly care for, and work and associate with groups of people not of my choosing. I may not be making tons of money with my writing, but I'm definitely way less stressed.

 I'm really enjoying the (long-awaited) finale of the dragon storyline in Cookie Run: OvenBreak, and I just had to draw Lychee Dragon and Rambutan Cookie hanging out together, because their friendship is adorable. I feel like Lychee Dragon has the most compelling character arc in the entire game up to this point, going from a twisted manipulator to a sympathetically lonely figure whose betrayal of Longan Dragon to ally with the Cookies felt really satisfying to watch. Nicely done, writers!

Remember how a few weeks ago I mentioned I'd like to get my niece into My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic? Well, in a twist of irony (I've learned God likes those), I was able to spend some time with her and her sister this summer, and now they're fans of the show. So of course I had to draw them as ponies (along with their cat Fred, whom I have previously depicted as a dromaeosaur because why not).

I imagine their pony names are Cosmic Swirl (she wants to be an astronaut when she grows up) and Milky Puff (do not run out of chocolate milk when this toddler is around, or there will be terrifying consequences).

Another animation assignment that I think turned out nicely; this time, we had to animate a jump cycle. I can't remember if there was a frame count limit or not, but these are obviously just keyframes. (It loops, if you're bored enough to click through the thumbnails over and over.)

 

For this assignment, and a few others in the class, I used Toko, a character I made up in high school for a not-very-well-thought-out story idea* involving heroes fighting for justice on a lawless desert planet. Toko was a young hacker who used his skills to take down criminal computer networks and obtain valuable intel. The story was super corny and uninteresting and I eventually scrapped it, but who knows, maybe someday I'll find another story to fit Toko into.

*Does anybody ever actually have any well-thought-out ideas in high school, though?

Another animation from college; we were practicing the good old bouncing ball subject that most animation courses start with. If I recall correctly, there was nothing in the assignment about anthropomorphizing the balls and making it into a fight scene, but I overachieved again.

The rest of the frames are after the jump because there are quite a few frames in this one and I didn't want it to stretch out the main blog page.

I saved a few projects from my animation classes; I did a program in animation production, which covered not just actual animating, but just about everything else involved in producing animation for film and television, including storyboarding, character design, and screenplays. The only other animation-related degrees at the school had more to do with animating for video games and general 3D animation, which mainly just involved learning how to use 3D animation software. The animation production program gave a much more well-rounded education, and I also really loved that it included a couple of courses on good old-fashioned drawn animation (which I like better than 3D animation, but that's a rant for another time).

This assignment was to animate a dance in 10 frames; typically for me, I got carried away. The end is a bit truncated because of the 10-frame limit. Anyway, because of the way Blogger displays images, if you click on any of these thumbnails, you should be able to click through the other pictures sequentially and get a good feel for what it looks like "animated". (This character is just a random character design from back when I used to make up random character designs.)

 Before I get anyone asking me if I can animate such-and-such for them: I'm actually a really bad animator, so you're better off asking someone else. Also, I don't have any animation software on my computer right now.

Now for some real blasts from the past--I was rooting around my hard drive and found the folder with all my old projects from my animation classes in college! I thought I'd share the good ones here. 

I'm particularly fond of this assignment from my storyboarding class; we had to storyboard a commercial for a fictional breakfast cereal. (The technology in the first panel really dates me.) I got to make up my own cereal, and, well, it's not a kids' breakfast cereal* without an over-the-top mascot and questionable nutritional value.

*I'm pretty sure breakfast cereals "for kids" are primarily consumed by 18-24-year-olds no longer under their parents' thumbs.

 Back in college, I had an extravagant idea for a tactical video game set in a fantasy version of historical Asia, where various cultures and communities were represented by humans with animal features (Shaolin monk rabbits, samurai dogs, etc.). The idea never really got off the ground (I'm an artist, not a programmer), but I like this piece of concept art that I did for it. The qilin in the game were supposed to be very rare, demigodly creatures who would be difficult, but worthwhile to recruit. I know the proportions are a little off, but, I dunno. I just like things with deer faces I guess.

More old art, namely a character design for a Digimon roleplay I did with a friend back in college. My character was a scrappy swordswoman who chose to stay behind in the Digital World when it was disconnected from the real world because she disliked her "real" life. She trained as a warrior under Leomon and Ogremon, and continued to wear this getup even when she returned to the real world years later, not caring how many heads it turned.

(Yes, she does greatly resemble Terra from my Neopets fics. I did a lot of character recycling in college, before I started taking my writing seriously.)

 Another wildly reinterpreted player character outfit from Kingdom Hearts Union χ (which I really hope they someday re-release in some capacity). I feel like she looks like a character from some 80's cartoon that never existed, but should have.

 Another doodle from back when Pokémon GO first came out and I was like "finally I can romp around with monsters in real life sorta". I'd be a pretty terrifying Pokémon trainer actually.

 I doodled this back in the day when Neopets was still good, because there were a few editions of the Neopian Times editorial where the editor decided to have some fun and let site characters King Jazan and Hanso answer player-submitted questions... much to their consternation. It was hilarious.

I've actually written multiple Neopian Times short stories about the misadventures of the long-suffering Jazan and the Ixi thieves who keep him on his toes (i.e. both Hanso and his wife Queen Nabile). I haven't been putting them on this site because I wanted to keep focused on my main Neopian Times cast, but maybe I'll add them to the collection someday.

I also wrote an NT short story that's a series of correspondences between a desperately penitent Jazan and a very vindictive Princess Amira, in which she makes his life miserable as politely as possible and he tries very hard to be diplomatic about it. It's got a Jane Austen-esque vibe to it and I had a lot of fun writing it, so I'll have to post it here eventually.

(To be clear, I like Jazan; I thought he had a really interesting character arc in the Lost Desert plot and I loved further developments of his character in subsequent plotlines. His high-strung personality and complicated relationships with other characters just make him really amusing to write situational comedy about.)