I've been busy 👀

published April 17, 2025

I have lots of baggage, but for now I'm just gonna dump out the art part. ART DUMP!!!!!!!!1!!!!!!!

This was actually done on March 10!!! This is how long I have been keeping secrets from you.... (Unless you've seen my artwork in a Discord channel, in which case hiiiii!!!!!!! 👋🏼👋🏼👋🏼👋🏼👋🏼)

Every time I wanna try to draw something, I end up looking to the fictional versions of it for reference first. I wanna draw people?? I imitate other people's drawings of fictional people. I wanna draw animals?? I draw...the fucking...FICTIONAL animals.

But ig it's not that bad, since I've been wanting to be able to draw more than just people for a while now. Motivated by the Pokémon D&D videos I mentioned in the previous post, as well as the fascinatingly-peculiar roster of Gens 1 and 2, and a certain commitment I've made, I practiced to find a method for drawing the mouse that is Pichu, and the whatever-the-hell that is Magmar. I actually had a drawing idea in mind that included Magmar, Jynx, and Electabuzz, which form one of older Pokémon's classic "elemental trios", but that has withered as the weeks passed 😔 Maybe that idea will revive someday, or find its way into something else without me realizing.

Speaking of Jynx, I've never shown people this one since I haven't gotten Jynx nailed down yet. Wtf is it with Pokémon designs being weirdly complicated...Jynx has no clearly-defined head shape since it's covered by that massive 'do, and said 'do also covers her frigging arms, so I struggled to keep it from looking like she has no upper arm, or some kind of too-short upper arm. I made some progress though. I exported this one on March 22, a whole 12 days later *wheezes*

Now here's something I finished 10 days earlier from today, and...oh boy...it's happening...it's...the furry art.

Or at least it's my pathetic excuse for it 🥲 If the head doesn't look right, the entire figure looks cringe, so I spent many hours feeling really embarrassed at what felt like awkward aimless scribbles that kept turning out lopsided 😩 The reason I wanna get this right is because I have some character ideas of my own that I want to be able to draw successfully, and I also want to be able to draw fanarts of super-cool media like Lackadaisy (read the comic NOW, it is INCREDIBLE), and also just get better at drawing animals in general since I'm not that good at it 😓

With the confessions over with, I do think I've made some progress??? I did an actual intentional study for the first time in my life, of cat images on Wikipedia specifically (since image search is tainted with AI results now 🤢 which means literal fake cats that are not accurate to reality), and I think the key lies in the head shapes and the arrangement of facial features. Before seeking out references, I kept trying to draw anthropomorph heads as human heads with a bit extra, but that's how I kept getting those cringe results. I think that developing a consistent "base" head shape for different animals could help a lot with that, but more importantly I noticed that the nose and mouth are sort of bunched-up in the oval-shaped muzzle, with the eyes above and close together, whereas I was trying to keep drawing the nose in the middle and the eyes to the sides and farther apart. I need to find the right balance between human-like and animal-like, and it seems animal-leaning is what actually works.

So I tried applying that to something. And because I was still feeling embarrassed, I figured I'd delay drawing my own character ideas and try drawing a fanart of the well-established Lackadaisy webcomic (btw watch the animation NOW, it is INCREDIBLE). I think it worked out worse?? 😓 Just because Lackadaisy's style is not only SO incredible that it feels out of my league to even attempt to imitate it (which is also how I feel about Studio Ghibli tbh), but also because heads in Tracy Butler's style are a LOT different and more varied in their face shapes than what works for me. So for several attempts, I tried going after what seemed to be the important details in a few characters' designs, before wondering if maybe I'm trying too hard to imitate the specific methods of someone else when I should be working with my own methods first. That has produced the result in the lower-left corner of the above image, which I'd give a grade of C or D, but still call my first-ever successful Lackadaisy fanart.

This is too much writing 😭 Okey-dokey, I am super-sleepy super-early, and I need to be getting rest, so I'mma wrap this up here. Forgive me for the overly-long blog post, if you care, and also forgive me for sounding weird, and...g'nite 🛌