pieces-by-py

[pieces-by-py]

I've had fake videogames and perhaps concepts for real video games on my mind lately. There was this video on youtube about fake video games by Supereyepatchwolf that kind of. Further opened my eyes to that fact that I can litterally make concepts for anything I want while pretending they are real and inffering a grander story with more labour behind it. Mock covers, game manuals, screenshots ect. I was already a big fan of projects like this with many unfiction projects really serving as inspiration for how stories can be told. I think it's just INCREDIBLY cool.

But I have two particular games of my own in mind that I've been thinking about quite a lot as of late.

The first is 'DESTIN'. This would be a text based adventure, and probably the most feasible project I can make on my own at the moment. We follow Dustin, an astronaut in training who wakes after a van crash in a snowy woodlands and has to brave and survive the wilds crawling with dangerous mutants. It's going to be a survival psychological horror game. It's based off of the things I learned about survival psychology years ago because the base things that people require to survive and prioritize in these situations are very fascinating to me. For instance, one of the greatest enemies of survival is actually boredom/loneliness. To counteract this you are recommended to keep busy even when you aren't serving other needs like hunting or building shelter. You accomplish this through bushcraft. Amongst the things you can craft, it helps to make a 'bush buddy' an object that you can talk to, and Dustin is given this option in the game. Without giving too much away, all the run throughs will be connected, even if you get a game over, it feeds back into landing at the start again. Over the course of the game Dustin will unravel the secrets behind the mutagenic virus, it's various effects and recall things himself that had been forgotten. Increasingly, the question that will be asked is what makes someone human? What are the limits of humanity? Can this even be truely answered?

The second has the working title 'Frigid'. It is a fantasy RPG that begins when the Winter Lord; the entity that controls winters in this world re-emerges with an onslaught on all of humanity as vengeance for it's attempted murder. This onslaught is first unleashed on a small village established near it's lair and one of the victims, frozen alive is the fiance of the descendant of one of the original swordsmen who slayed the winter lord. He sets off on his quest to exact his own vengeance and slay the Winter Lord once more and once and for all.

...Unbeknownst to him however, is the resurrection of his fiance by her own force of will. She absorbs a fragment of the winter lord's power and re-animates herself. This is Daphne. The true protagonist of our game. With her new power, she too sets off on a quest to stop the winter lord. But along the way she is met with the hostility of the winter lord's thralls and human warriors alike. Resembling a thrall herself and wielding the same power, some have begun to claim that she is The Winter's Knight, created by the Winter Lord. There are multiple routes in this game based on the choices that Daphne makes in her situation, and there are other companions she may meet along the way such as a were-hyena bard and a sorcerer of darkness. As Daphne progresses, she realizes more and more that things in this world are not all as they seem and are told to be...

I have in mind some pieces I want to make for each. I was thinking about fake screenshots and box art for DESTIN and sprite art for Frigid as well as heaps of character, prop and set design concepts.

It all actually reminds me of when I was really young and I drafted up a concept for an MMO with notes about character customization, pets, different areas that you could visit and so on. It didn't really matter if it was something I could never make. I certainly wasn't considering the logistics of running an MMO - I just really enjoyed MMO's like Adventure Quest and Runescape and I wanted to make one myself.

It's been easy to feel as I'd gotten older and began considering those logistics that I shouldn't really bother with concepts for things that will never be. Like there's really no point to it if I can't make the thing myself or ever amass a team to make it happen...But I have since realized that there is so much beauty in concept work alone and so much to be inferred from a few convincing scraps. Those little pieces alone can tell you so much. And the world is better having seen these pieces, however small they may be. Our creative expression, our own ideas and our art matters, and it deserves to be seen, shared and communicated.

If I can manage to organize myself a little better, I think I can make both of these projects happen in some conceptual form. I've been thinking about them each a lot lately and I feel like im bursting at the seams to tell the stories that I am thinking of and the concepts inside of them. I want to share the affinity that I feel for my characters and explore poignant scenes. I feel at times like the best way I can do that is through the visual medium, which is why I feel such determination to create illustrations and concept drawings, but I thought that writing about it might help me get it off my chest a little bit.

[pieces-by-py]

In an effort to convince myself to use this blog as the creative hub I intended, here are some character thoughts I had lately!

I have been thinking about my character Taylor Kit: an idol android that started existence as an automaton.

In my original concepts from 2008 Taylor had wings and I had likened her to a moth in a drabble I wrote about her, but now I really want to go all into that association and I think it would be interesting to make her more robotic build look like a human skeleton and a bug's exoskeleton all rolled into one.

I realized that a lot of robots do have that kind of skeletal framework and then some of them get padded up like they've been given a skin of sorts.

The way this design comes into the story is that Taylor goes through certain eras that reflect her physical and mental development. One of her earliest albums, 'Titania' is the era when she first obtained sapience and being robotic was part of the gimmick. The whole album and the tour associated with it had this very etheral feeling to it, where the robotic timbre of her voice was part of what added to that otherworldly feeling. She was outfitted with a pair of fairy wings and at that point in her development she had more of that exoskeleton sort of appearance going on.

Since then, the production team that controls almost every aspect of Taylor's existence had aimed to make her more human so that they could boast about it, but Taylor misses the way that she was. She doesn't really understand why she has to conform to human standards for her appearance or why they thought her previous form was anything to be corrected.

I've seen a lot of stories where robots seek to be more human, but I think in Taylor's case it's almost completely opposite and the irony is that giving her a will of her own and self awareness means that she becomes more and more resistant to what they've done to her and can look back on times where things were simpler and yearn for that but although obtaining the capacity to yearn for better things was against her will, she cannot shake the longing for a future where she can finally decide things for herself.

She doesn't feel like she can go back, to the point where even when that is offered to her, she can't take it because it will destroy who she has become and she will cease to live.

But maybe in her future she can find a way to consolidate all that she's become and find herself and a body that befits her...I think that's going to be an important part of her progression in her story.

It's also been a fun exercise for me to design more android designs myself! I haven't quite figured her out but I had a breakthrough last night about her mouth parts, which felt particularly difficult to figure out before. I'm kind of building her piece by piece and thinking about the different mechanisms in her and how they'd work..

[pieces-by-py]

Little light shining...little light guide them to me...

This is one of my favourite pieces I've made in recent time! An illustration made as I listened to Kate Bush's The 9th wave; An absolutely beautiful experience of a concept album that inspired me so much. I really love a variety of storytelling mediums and music is absolutely no exception to this.

Some more notes about my process and feelings about this piece under the cut!:

I am working on a visual arts project inspired and heavily based on the structure of concept albums and so I was looking for more concept albums to listen to.

A wonderful friend of mine recommended that I listen to Kate Bush's The 9th wave because it's a concept album they personally love and I came to really love it myself!!

I was drawing this while listening to the album because it helps me to really sit with the music and feel it. I like to have something to keep my hands busy so that I don't wander off, but I wanted to make sure I was engaging very directly with the music so drawing what I was imagining and feeling was the best thing I could think of.

It was a very cathartic experience to start with a blank canvas and let the imagery that the lyrics and instrumentals evoked guide me. I really love the way that music stimulates these images and feelings, and that's precisely why I feel so inspired to try to echo that in my more visual projects.

This is most certainly fanart for the album, but it was very revitalizing to create something with direct inspiration like this. I really want to do more of this in the future!

Drawn on: Procreate

[pieces-by-py]

I feel like...since I've got a lot of original characters and fan characters I like to provide some context for when I share my art of them, I should post some simple character bios to give a little overview of my characters!

I want to host these on my neocities website eventually, but I think that for the time being it would be alright to put some bios up on this blog and I'll create a master link page for all of them so that you can find the bios and the tags I use for them.

I also intend to label each of my projects because I have so much on the go and personally I really love to find everything related to it in one place.

[pieces-by-py]

Did some cleaned up bust sketches of Cheapskate-ler and Rich recently!

I haven't got too much to say about these, just that while these aren't really all that ambitious for me, it's really relaxing to just draw some expressions on characters I've had for a long time! I really like the way they turned out too!

I have so many different versions of Cheap and Rich, including a bunch where I tweaked their designs slightly to make them more original, but I will confess I sometimes miss drawing these hairstyles on them as much as I used to.

[pieces-by-py]

Magical guardian Py!! This is my magical girl sona design ✨

This is the page I drew when finalizing the concept and to serve as reference, but I plan to draw this design a lot more to represent myself! The little fox there is a little magical mascot/familiar based on an imaginary friend I made when I was little kid. I got some more notes about my process below!

A few years back I made a magical girl outfit design for myself because I love magical girl stories and designs, and you can do whatever you want forever! I HIGHLY recommend that anybody who feels comfortable depicting themselves to make a sona based around something you absolutely love. It's a lot of fun!!! I think at this point this design has gone through about 4 main iterations? I expect more tweaks in the future because I always like to have a design that reflects me and currently this is what I'm really vibing with! Tweaking this took SUCH a long time to get to something I really love right now, so this really feels like a triumph. When I set out to design this, I had created a bit of a wishlist of aesthetics and other elements I wanted, and then it was a matter of balancing everything visually and making some choices to remove and heavily tweak aspects of it so it wouldn't be too cluttered or lose visual harmony. I also played around with the lengths of different parts of the outfit for visual interest.

In this design are a few nods to some magical girl designs I still really love, but in recent time I feel like there's been a bit more inspiration from european renaissance fashion seeping in because I've been dabbling into period accurate costuming! Now, it's not at ALL accurate in this design but that's not really the point; I just wanted to give the sleeves and breeches that extra poof 👌 The rest of it just just really self indulgent, like the big butterfly wing cape was an ABSOLUTE must for me. My favourite colour is featured prominently. I wanted the inner wings and bow to look like the night sky or kind of galactic so that all those sparkles would really show up and evoke stars, but the orange pinks on other elements of the outfit compliment the blue-greens and give the look and overall sunset/sunrise at twilight vibe.

Drawn with: Procreate

[pieces-by-py]

This is the official kickoff for my tumblr art blog! This blog will serve as the current main hub for updates on my creative projects. Thank you for coming over to check out some of my pieces! 👋✨

I go by Pylime but you can call me Py! I'm an illustrator and story artist who loves to create surreal imagery in my art and writing and I have a heavy focus on outfit design, symbolism and exploration of a character's psyche through my works.

I like to work in a variety of different mediums; primarily a breadth of digital mediums but I also dabble in traditional media and different art forms like bead weaving.

I have a multitude of projects on the go at any given moment, so I will be categorizing my longer projects and one off projects so each one can be found easily enough!

I haven't been posting my art much in recent times, so it is my hope that I will be sharing my art freely and showing off and discussing works in progress. I find seeing the process of doing art very interesting and humbling, so in theory, I shouldn't be having any problem putting out into the world more of what I want to see!