Parasol

This also started out life as a doodle. Parachuting suns because sol is Spanish for “sun.”

The original doodle.

This piece uses a lot of gradients. The sun’s bodies uses gradients to add a sense of temperature, and I also used them on the parachutes.

When exporting the characters, I exported the bodies separately from the parachutes and faces so that I could add outer glows to them later on. I pieced them back together, then added some inner shadows to the parachutes to – I guess – emulate the amount of light coming off the suns. The background is halftone again.

Did a doodle page today. A lot of creatures as you can see.

Another one that I started yesterday and just finished this morning.

I've developed a couple of these.

I don't know if I'm getting the shading right, particularly on the propeller.

This piece has not been submitted to the Art Portal.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

This is something that I wanted to do for a while, and threw together today. I found this meme on Tumblr, and knew that I could do something with it. I thought that these four would work for this. Friends? No. Four horsemen of the apocalypse? Yes.

The original meme.

I had some fun with it and colour-coordinated their outfits, and also tried to match the bracelets to each character and their personality/story:

Ray: War (served in the Gulf War and has an unparalleled love for weapons)

Pete: Death (paid Ray to kill a cop and shot him for failing to get his drugs)

The bum: Famine (is homeless)

Mike: Plague (carries a carton of cigarettes in his shirt pocket)

I don't think it's as sophisticated as my other stuff, so I haven't posted it to the portal.

New pfp for now. Not crazy about longer nights but I'm trying to find some magic in it.

I decided to polish it up and turn it into an actual piece. Tweaked a couple features like Ray's hairline and Pete's hand, then went with this layout.

never come back

Oh look - Creepypasta fanart before the spoopy month has even begun.

A quick little bit of fanart of the M A R I O creepypasta, featuring one of the angry Message Blocks from never come back (hence the name of the piece), formerly YOSHI'S ISLAND 1.

I originally drew the Message Block on my second doodle page earlier this month. I wanted to draw it at an angle, so for a reference, I threw together a rough model in Blender (I stuck some spheres onto a cube and rotated it a bit).

I are great modeller.

I used graphics from Super Mario World for reference when drawing and colouring the elements. The background was made using the circle and rectangle tools with some basic shading like the in-game background.

In post, I dulled things out to reflect the damage that Mario has dealt to the world in the creepypasta, and his dulled colour palette in the ROM hack.

I might feature this angry little guy in more pieces. Hmm.

Poutassium

My entry to the Pou Collab hosted by @joaovictorsilva

I thought it would be a fun little collab to join, but I had to think about how to put a spin on Pou. I was gonna go with Poutato but someone beat me to it. Finally I came up with Poutassium, and drew him as a banana.

I started out with the basic shape, then added the strands of peel. For the skin, I did basic shading with different colours to create the impression of ridges, then added some brown spots (since bananas sometimes have them.) For the detail on the skin, I drew a faint grid pattern in black, then set the opacity way low so that it would appear over the shading. I used the same technique on the underside of the peel, since you sometimes get residue there when peeling a banana. Since bananas usually have a small brand sticker on them, I added one in the shape of my avatar.

I just threw together a reference model for when I draw in the South Park style.

Breathtaking...

Even though it's a very simple and adoptable style, I still struggle with it at times, especially when drawing characters at angles. Hopefully this will help with that.

Tried shading in Animate but I don't know if it's working.

Still working on it and practicing light sources.

I'm liking the second version better.

This piece has not been submitted to the Art Portal.

Dingbats

My contribution to the Halloworm Collab being organised by @DieterTheuns.

Since it’s a Halloween collaboration I thought I’d go with something spooky. I thought I’d also go with something based off my previous works. Both routes led into the Dingbat caverns. I came up with these particular creatures because

1. Wingdings is classed as a dingbat font.

2. They derive from the Wingdings I created earlier this year.

This piece was a massive experiment regarding perspective and rendering. That's what those experiments above were about. I’ve said before that I hate and struggle with both of these things, but I wanted to see what I could do with them. Therefore I deliberately drew the Dingbats swooping at different angles. The Dingbats make heavy use of gradients for shading and lighting. Their patagia are semi-transparent, and feature “lorem ipsum” strings written in Wingdings for added details.

This piece had a significant amount of post production. I added semi-transparent black layers to darken the background layers and create a sense of depth within the cavern. This was so much easier than manually adding darker colours to each layer. The rays of light are trapeziums with a high gaussian blur. I also added the illusion of visible dust particles (most visible in the bottom left corner) by creating noise layers, erasing the background, and removing the excess.

I might be able to pull of this kind of perspective and rendering again, but I can’t make any promises. This was pretty exhausting.

Special thanks to the members of the Digital Artists Unite Discord server who provided feedback on this piece while I was working on it.

Starry Night

I'm not really a fan of how early it gets dark outside this time of year, so I thought I'd try and see some wonder in it. One day I got the idea of Kenny stargazing in a starry blue parka, and went for it.

I used a lot of masks on his clothing. First I painted some basic nebulae by painting white shapes of different transparencies, then converted them to symbols so that I could blur/blend them. Then I painted on some stars, making sure to cluster them in the white areas. I repeated this on the rest of his parka. For the white part of his hood, and his trousers, I just repeated the stars technique.

In post, I added shadows and glints of moonlight to Kenny with the inner shadow overlay. I also drew invisible shapes to cast light so that I could add additional shadows. This technique was also used on the mountains and treeline in the background.

HBD Stan

Just a little thing for his birthday. Also my second entry to my own collab.

Used that reference model I threw together in Blender then added some basic shading. Not as detailed as the previous one but still looks good imo.

The Ng heads are nice you have a refreshing look to your art style nice job

~X~

Thanks!

20 Years of Ray

Heads up: I have a lot to say about this one.

I scheduled this piece to be published on the 20th anniversary of Ray – Part 1. I thought that it was only fitting that I commemorate the artist – and the art – that have inspired me so much. Hopefully I’ve done them justice with this piece.

I settled on a scene set in Mikey’s Bar and Café, the local found in the series. Alongside Ray I put in Pete and the homeless guy, since they appear in all 3 parts, as well as named/supporting character who crop up in the different instalments:

Michelle, the hostage whom Ray rescues (Part 1)

Mike, another one of Pete’s men (Part 2)

Ray’s unnamed ex (Part 3 Intro)

Leeroy, their son (Part 3 Intro)

There were gonna be more characters but I couldn’t fit them all in without making everyone ridiculously small.

I also put a homage or two in the piece. A 20th anniversary is an emerald anniversary, so I gave Ray and emerald green shirt that also alludes to his Tommy Vercetti getup at the beginning of Part 1. I got carried away and gave some of the other characters custom outfits. The small green bird on the bar is Kiwi from Jumping Flash, who is currently the profile pic of Ray’s VA.

Everything here was drawn from reference, using frames from the games, right down to the bottles of Jim Beam.

The sheet cake was drawn referring to a rough model made in SketchUp featuring a silhouette of Ray’s signature Desert Eagle. And of course, I had to throw a pun on it: HAPPY ANNIVERSA-RAY!

This piece uses a lot of lighting and shadows. The candle flames were created in Animate using radial gradients, and were then enhanced with glow and gaussian blur effects in post. For the shadows on the characters, I drew translucent black shapes where I thought that they would fall. For the complex hairline shadows, I duplicated the symbol, broke it up, made it translucent, offset it, then duplicated it and deleted the coloured duplicate so it would appear under the character’s hairstyle. Each character was made into a movie clip so that I could add a drop shadow filter to them and adjust it accordingly.

There was the challenge of making sure that the character’s shadows fell on the back wall and other characters, but not on the windows. To resolve this, I created duplicates of some of the characters, and removed parts of them so that they would not cast shadows in certain places.

The San And-ray-as Fault.

To composite the scene, I extracted the characters and the bar, and the background separately, then reconstructed the scene. I used masks in Animate to cut off Mike, Ray, and Leeroy where they would be behind the bar, and placed the mask below their hands resting on the bar.

Now for the case of that guy in the cap. My guess is that he’s meant to be Dave, a character who at one point was in Part 3 but didn’t make it into the intro.

One night I was feeling both bored and melancholic, and decided to do some digging. I used the Wayback Machine to look at archived versions of CoFlash, Philljc’s old website. I found this screenshot of what would’ve been a scene from the full Part 3 dating back to December 2004.

Source

The guy who I suspect to be Dave is standing behind Ray.

Then from October 2005, I found this; the site had been turned into an .swf with a Ray theme. In the cast list I found the name Dave.

Source

Note: It’s highly likely that your browser will download the .swf instead of opening it,

even if you have a Flash emulator like Ruffle installed.

In the end, I don’t know if these are the same character – I couldn’t really confirm – but I think that it’s an intelligent guess.

Aaaaaaand I think that’s it.

Doodled some graffiti... sort of...

This piece has not been submitted to the Art Portal.

Ambersand

My entry for the & Collab hosted by @CoolMan349.

I was gonna draw an ampersand in sand, but someone kinda beat me to it by drawing one as an hourglass. After some thinking, I came up with an ampersand encased in amber – an ambersand.

Most of the shading was achieved by painting shapes and then converting them to symbols so that they could be blurred out. This is mainly seen in the highlight and shadow on the stone. I also used this technique to get some variation in colour.

The air bubbles are simply radial gradients with some transparency in the middle.

Also added some cracks and imperfections to give it some more detail.

Even though the ampersand has very simple shading, especially compared to the rest of the piece, I think it works.

All of this was done in Animate.

This piece has not been submitted to the Art Portal.

Dead Weight

My entry for the Boner Collab hosted by @TechnoCookie.

More of what I did on Ambersand: Shapes turned into symbols and blurred out, with a mix of simple and complex shading.

Decided to add some additional detail to the weight by drawing a load of scratches and slightly lowering their transparency.

Again, all done in Animate.

More graffiti.

I don't really know what I'm doing.

yup.

idk what im gonna do with it all

google had me feeling a certain way this morning

Quick shitty doodle of Boggy from The Impossible Quiz because I think he looks very friendly and polite.

Trying to develop some of these.

It's now on the Portal!