#I'll alt text later

[epic-and-kitty]

Introducing my fan Splat Band - Shine On, Sea Dogs!

The first pic are their first designs and the head shots are the updated ones.

The super colorful one is Sparkle (she prefers Sparky), a firefly squid with the same ink condition as Yoko (but with more control over the colors) and rainbow vitiligo.

The octoling is Pubby, who's more lovecore than scene. She's got multiple pins holding her afro up

And the Sharkling is Doug, a forty year old dogfish who's only in the band to keep the girls safe from weirdos. (His was design was too perfect to change, he's just a guy and I love him so much.)

Ask me about these goobers if you want, I love them 🥺

[bobthedragon2]

I still love Autonauts and so far this is still my best build for throwing out old robots

[vivitur-moritur]

Fanart for @artsarasp's amazing System Possession AU!!! I told myself that I was just going to make a quick little sketch then I animated it??? Wild. Anyway, I really love artsarasp's au, it's fascinating and it Compels Me!!!

[sparklingsora]

so thanks to this polyvees server i joined recently i found out that apparently theres a polyvees week happening over on twitter. this is for day 1: duo. and it's veeswap au because i'm me

[ladybugboots]

[sualne]

meme redraw with the AUs brothers

[nutmeg-mayonnaise]

A sketch I cleaned up for Father's Day! ✩°｡ ⋆

One thing that draws me to this AU personally is exploring how Nick would handle raise Gregory as a toddler, especially while still working as a lawyer! He was very lucky Trucy was so smart and talented when he adopted her. ^^

[doodle-girl]

So what're we thinkin, girlies? /gn

Side note: You will probably have to click on the image and zoom in

Side note 2: we still do not know where the hell Jack and Klaus come into this

[cashmere-caveman]

they shouldve been a weird sex cult (more terror text post memes)

[ubercharge]

full colour mia ref! \o/ silver eyes as a nod to people liking the silver hair look on her, though i kept the blonde hair! i draw her tail as a pretty inconsistent size but really as long as it looks big and squishy and huggable i consider that a win

[raytorosaurus]

geoff and john naclerio about ray in 2002 from not the life it seems/norman brannon about ray and geoff on his instagram story in 2022

like one of the really remarkable things about ray is not just how talented he is, because there are hundreds of insane guitar freaks out there, but how he's that talented and also capable of cooperating as a single element of a band for such a long long time. he went around confusing hardcore/punk kids who drew false conclusions about him because of his metal roots, he obsessively lay down like a dozen guitar tracks for the songs on bullets but also adamantly refused to let geoff and alex saavedra secretly retrack otter's messy drum tracks because they were friends, he was fully supportive of mikey learning bass from scratch to be in the band, and, despite some initial nerves about frank joining, he went on to form one of the most interesting and cooperative dual guitar partnerships i've ever heard with him and has never expressed anything less than deep admiration at frank's playing...he's a rare specimen for sure. truly in his lane, unbothered, focused, flourishing lol

[igamer12]

my htf humanizations \(^o^)/ girls and theys edition

^^^ original sketches! still kinda proud of them but there have been many design changes and improvements since then hahahah (especially in regards to giggles and lammy)

anyways!! additional info :-3 this is kind of an au but also i don't want to do much with it other than design the characters so idk lol BUT: they're supposed to be like. vague college students age-wise. i like to think doing childish things in their universe is just socially acceptable. at least in my au. also: petunia goes by she/they, giggles and lammy go by she/her, and flaky goes by any but mostly they/she/he ^_^ petunia is bi (with a girl preference), giggles is pan, lammy is aroace and flaky is nonbinary and questioning. also petunia and flaky are autistic now. hi

might make more in the future btw hehe :-3 i already have some ideas for splendid cuddles and toothy so they may be next

[abyssalzones]

What's your comic writing process like? I'm starting to get into making my own comics and I really admire your work!!! Any advice?

Ah, intrepid traveler, you've done well to journey to this secluded mountaintop spire, in search of the answers you seek. I indeed can provide such forbidden comicmancy knowledge... at the cost of your mortal soul...

coughs. anyway, I'm going to warn you immediately that what works for me does not work for everyone else, and in my experience the way I do things can prove very slow and discouraging for anyone who is more interested in the actual "drawing the damn comic" part of the process. I only do it this way because I enjoy weaving a narrative web that feels not only fully contained but re-readable, but my projects are often so long and my memory so shitty that I can't just keep all of it in my head! It would spill all over the place and make a really embarrassing mess of brain-juice. Not ideal.

but as for my own process, uhh... I suppose a comic would be fitting, right?

a little choppy but you get the idea.

as for turning words into art, I've been experimenting with figuring out the best way to do that for a little while now. Originally what I was doing for something like Ad Astra Per Aspera was to take my "script" and sketch it out on paper very loosely, before transposing that onto my canvas and working from there:

...but, I've found that can make it kind of difficult to space everything around on your standard page-size, and the thing I'm having the most problems with currently seems to be finding the sweet spot of panel-size proportions. So, I've taken to printing out standard thumbnail templates (you can just find these on google) and sketching very tiny panels in those, which seems to give me a slightly better sense of scale... (mild chapter 5 spoilers, sorry ad astra fans)

but I have yet to totally pull through on this, so who knows, maybe I'll try something else in the future!

As for advice, this is probably most applicable to me, but as a disabled artist I have a very hard time managing my workload without literally working myself into injury. I don't think I talked about this publicly but when I was working on that ten year anniversary comic I was literally drawing every single day for 3 solid months. Sometimes, in my case, I really can't bring myself to stop once I've latched onto an idea, and sometimes I find the most rewarding thing I can do with my time is to draw- but I seriously cannot overstate: Do not fucking do this.

You will fuck up your wrist, your back, your neck, your eyes, and probably your mental health. It's a well-known fact that mangaka have a lower life expectancy than the average japanese person due to the intense workload imposed on them by deadlines and personal expectations. Comics are a very demanding artform, and even though I'm not on any sort of mandated schedule there are times where I've toiled away at something when I likely should have been exercising or taking vision-breaks. Therefore the best advice I can give you is to chill the hell out.

Namely, find parts of the process you can be lazy about, and embrace the laziness! You don't like digitally sketching? Don't do it! Skip it, or maybe find a way to traditionally sketch things out in advance like I do. Hate lineart? Don't fucking do it. You really don't feel like wasting your time writing 72k words of comic scripts? ...then, don't be like me. skip that part. I'm a flawed human being and what works for me might not work for you.

The second most important piece of advice I could give is to read comics. Of all kinds. The reason for this is pretty self explanatory: In order to figure out your own comic-making style, you should first pick out bits and pieces from the artist's buffet to add to your plate. Manga, graphic novels, american comics, european comics, weird niche little webcomics, funny papers, anything and everything. This advice rings true of pretty much any art form, but I find it to be essential to honing comic-making skills because so many things you feel will just come intuitively often don't. and that's okay! nobody is born knowing how to leave space for speech bubbles or shape their panels in a way that imitates stretches of time. The best way to figure out stuff like this, in my experience, is to study the "masters", and then after becoming well accustomed to the basics, figure out what rules you want to bend or break to create your own style.

I consider myself to be in equal parts a writer and an artist, which lends itself well to making narrative comics, but maybe you're a bit more of an artist and want to focus on panel-by-panel visual storytelling. Or, conversely, maybe your talents lean closer towards writing, and the art itself is more of a secondary skill. Regardless of your unique blend of talents you can and should make a comic, you should just also be aware of your strengths and try to hone in on those- there will always be opportunities to build up skills you lack, but focusing on what you do best will always lead you in the right direction.

Anyway, that being said, here are some recommendations in no particular order:

Monster, Naoki Urasawa (!!)

Bone, Jeff Smith

Witch Hat Atelier, Kamome Shirahama

The first IDW run of Transformers comics (namely More Than Meets the Eye and Lost Light)

Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi (!!)

Through the Woods, Emily Carroll (really any Emily Carroll comics)

Kill Six Billion Demons (webcomic) (!!)

Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo

The Third Person, Emma Grove

Tintin, Hergé (can be super racist please be wary)

Dungeon Meshi, Ryoko Kui

Calvin & Hobbes, Bill Watterson

Maus, Art Spiegelman

Cucumber Quest (webcomic)

Jellyfish Princess, Akiko Higashimura

Golden Kamuy, Satoru Noda (!!)

Note that I did not grow up with manga so I am seriously behind on a lot of extremely influential japanese comics such as Dragon Ball, One Piece, basically any of the original Shonen Jump comics, but they're widely considered building blocks of the genre so if you love the artform I think you should give them a try! Same goes for classic non-shonen manga genres like various Shoujo, Josei, Yuri, Gekiga, ETC.

same as above applies to a lot of classic DC and Marvel works, I unfortunately am just not a big fan of superhero comics... but I'm sure there's good stuff in there. a couple of my mutuals talk about booster gold and the blue beetle all the time so I'm assuming there has to be something worthwhile.

...and many, many, many more that I'm forgetting! I noticed as I made this list that, to my knowledge, hardly any of these are made by black or just non-japanese-mangaka BIPOC artists, which makes me sad about the gaps in my own comic collection. Therefore, anyone is welcome to add their own recommendations in the replies!

now go forth, and combine images with text!!!!!!!!!!!

[voruna]

@thesevagoth and I with Warframe brainrot <3

Inspired by his own Warframe art of us

[sparklingsora]

warmup sketch with @mutiniir's boy pablo because i love him. what a charming fellow

[ladybugboots]

thank you everyone for your donations so far! if you're interested in getting a Pokemon drawing for donating an e-Sim to someone in Gaza, refer to this post!