#WITH THE CHIBIS AND MATCHING SCARVES

[saintseiyasl]

Those chibis are everything to me now…

[kouyume]

New chibi cards from the latest Hakuoki event on Sephirot 🌱🐕

Part 2 with 6 more guys here! It's so cute that they gave all the dogs matching scarves 🌈

Image credits: Sephirot

[shima-draws]

~Pokemon Gijinka Commissions~

Hello, everyone! Since my Pokemon gijinka adopts have become quite a hit I decided I'd open commissions to design people's own custom gijinkas!! Hooray!

Chibi gijinkas are $25, and fullbody gijinkas are $45. (Do note that I usually put a lot of research and time into making these!) If you want both it comes at a discount for $60 rather than the full price of both together!

I don’t have a slot system for these right now but if I get too many at once I will start doing that ^^

Please take note that I only accept payment through PayPal, and I will be sending the invoice to you. You have to pay before you start your commission. You can be refunded, but not if the commission is 100% done. I’ll only give you your money back if I’m not finished with it yet, otherwise I would have done all the work for nothing! Everything will be in USD $.

To contact me about commissions, you can either IM this blog (shima-draws) or send an email to shimascommissions@gmail.com!

Please consider commissioning me or if you can’t afford it, signal boost this by reblogging! Thanks so much for your support!

Full info and guidelines are under the cut to save space!

Firstly just to be clear I’m only doing Pokemon gijinkas. This doesn’t apply to OCs or anything that isn’t a Pokemon lmao so please don’t ask me to make human designs for something else!

Some things to note:

*Please tell me upfront which Pokemon you'd like (obviously), whether they're male, female, nonbinary, etc, if they're shiny or have their regular color scheme and, most importantly, any miscellaneous details about their appearance, such as:

Hairstyle: Long or short? Any highlights/extra colors/gradients thrown in?

Eye color: Pretty self explanatory lol but if you want their eyes to be heterochromatic or have different shades of color inside of them, let me know!

Outfit: Anything you want them wearing in particular, i.e. any sort of fashion style? Big poofy dresses, something slim fitting, a tailcoat, etc, etc?

Accessories: Do you want them to wear any sort of earrings, headbands, goggles, scarves, capes, etc?

Style: Do you want their outfit to be extremely complex or more simplistic?

Anything else that I forgot to mention. Just let me know lol

*If you have references you’d like to show or a certain look you’re going for, please, send them my way, I’d be happy to base the design off of whatever you give me!

*If you don't clarify what you want beforehand I will design the gijinka according to my own vision! If you're okay with me winging it say that upfront and I'll get started right away. I will sketch out the design and send you a WIP for you to agree upon. Please tell me all the changes you want right away since I am not fond of going back and forth constantly with design updates. I’m only willing to send update sketches once or twice--so make sure everything looks good in your eyes! Once I start lining and coloring, that's it, the design is final and not open to changes! Normally I'm happy to tweak things for commissions but I'm trying to save time here lol so make sure you tell me what you want and get it confirmed before I go ahead and draw the whole thing.

*If you want to commission me for more than one gijinka of the same style there is also a discounted price for that too! For an extra chibi gijinka on top of the first one, it will be an additional $15. For an extra fullbody gijinka, it will be an additional $35. If you want to add more than two the discounted prices will be the same, for example: 1 chibi gijinka is $25, plus one more chibi is $15, and another one is $15, so the total price would be $55. You can also mix and match--if you want two chibis and one fullbody I can do that as well (with the discounted price, the total would be $75 for that example)! I hope that makes sense! If it’s unclear you can come ask me questions about it, I don’t mind ^^

*Friends/family/mutuals will automatically get a 20% discount!

And that’s it! Thanks so much for reading~

[smallwonderdolls]

Dolly doings, sewing, mod project

Here's my drawer of MSD clothes after the Great Reorganisation. (MSD added for scale, he doesn’t usually live in there XD;)  Now, all my MSD clothes, hats and scarves fit into this one drawer (originally built to hold my arch files for school - which I left a loooong time ago).

I was hoping to also fit my Yo-SD clothes in there, but I don’t think that will work, especially as I continue to sew more things.  I might be able to squeeze in one last baggie of MSD socks and stockings, though.

I’m currently working on a jinbei top for Tatsue, and it’s coming along swimmingly!  It’s very gratifying to return to something that used to give me trouble before (Japanese-style collars, in this case), and realise that I’ve now gotten enough experience that I can deal with them quite easily.  ^-^  For those interested, I’m using an SD13 boy pattern scaled down to MSD size, along with the (Japanese) sewing instructions provided at Usako’s sewing studio (linked in the “Resources” tab on my main Tumblr page).  

I’m a little afraid to think about the massive mod project that awaits me in getting Niella’s head to fit on my new Chibi Unoa body.  >_<  The Chibi Unoa body is the perfect size to be in scale with both my Volks minis and Yo-SD’s.  I really like how shapely it is, especially around the legs, and I think Niella will look adorable... once I manage to get him on it. To begin with, I’ll have to cut off a fair amount of resin from the neck, and then re-build it with epoxy or some other substance, before I even move on to making a neck connector for the MNF head (those inner edges are sharp!) and think about colour-matching...  Urk.  It’s intimidating, to say the least.  I guess I don’t mind the customisation aspect of this hobby, but I would much rather be spending my time making clothes or shoes, y’know?

Speaking of shoes, I really want to make some which are custom-fitted to the Chibi Unoa feet!  The soles of their feet are very contoured - I am wondering if I can somehow curve the insoles to fit them if I dampen the leather first??... :o  I’m eager to experiment.

I should also get around to putting my Bluefairy Junior body up for sale, since the Chibi Unoa has supplanted it.  Whilst I have it, though, I want to take some comparison photos of all the bodies I currently own.  I only owned one brand of doll for 15 years, and this year I suddenly have parts from five different companies in the house XD (Volks, Miyadoll, Fairyland, Bluefairy, Alchemic Lab).     

Credits: Micchi is a Volks FCS MSD F-10, his T-shirt is by dakko and his hat is by 28th Emporium/ @sols-crew on Tumblr.

[chaoticgoodcrow]

some context: they're meeting for a lunch break <3 mori's lab class just ended (there's a faint blue liquid stain on his coat cuff if u squint) and fukuzawa's studying in the library <3

right so! the lil details <3

matching scarves <3 and bags actually! the bag colours are more neutral versions of the other's scarf colour!! <3 and their little cat keychains on their bags aaaa <3 <3 matching little keychains <3 the cats are the other's hair colour and their fluffy lil tails are the other's shirt colour <3

their outfits are more or less what they wore in the flashback / bodyguard arc in bsd canon, though there are a few little alterations to make it fit the college setting more lol (no tie, and not 100% traditional Japanese clothes)

I actually wanted to draw a huge fancy library background and them leaning on the railing and talking (to practice my background + fullbody drawing skills)..... but shit happened lol and it's quite late already so here! is my humble offering LOL,,,, going back to my favoured chibi style <3 <3 though I did polish my perspective skills a little on that unfinished background draft <3 all's well ends well <3

fukumori week: day 5 ~ college au ~ ✨

time for a lunch break <3

lil details in next reblog! which should be in a few minutes (◠‿・)—☆

[fuyonggu]

Legend of Jiang Wei: Battle of Mianyong (1)

We begin the game with our hero, Jiang Wei, taking stock of the Shu army gathered near Hanzhong. We’ll get more into his (bad) ideas in a moment.

Cutscenes in the LoCC world are mostly limited to characters walking around and displaying emotions (every now and then they will swing a sword). Despite this, I still find them to be pretty entertaining. However, they can get to be a bit long on repeat viewings, so LoJW included a new fast-forward feature by holding the Space bar.

I mentioned in the introductory post the art assets for the mod. As you can see here, the portraits for the game are borrowed from Romance of the Three Kingdoms 11 (including using the “young” and “old” versions for those who have both, as time passes). The actual character sprites are modeled after their RTK portraits, and I believe that these are original creations for the mod. Almost every single person with a name has a custom sprite made to fit their portrait, which I consider most impressive.

Note the “alignment” bar in the top right. Unlike Legend of Cao Cao, where this bar determined your ending path, Legend of Jiang Wei mostly has a set story path, with one short branch into a Bad End that should be easy to guess. Instead, this bar is used for the romance subplot of the game. Jiang Wei has three women who are interested in gaining his affections, and the bar measures which of them he is more inclined towards (keeping it perfectly neutral is the option for the third woman). For those already groaning, the romance angle plays a relatively minor part in the story, so don’t be too concerned about half the plot being taken up by lovey-dovey stuff (it will already be taken up by questionable decisions by characters in other aspects).

But let’s get back to Jiang Wei, and his companion.

Yin Shang runs up to the edge of the cliff to chastise his buddy Jiang Wei for another one of his hare-brained schemes. If you’re not familiar with Yin Shang, I can’t blame you, but this should be a warning sign that LoJW will be covering almost everyone you can think of for this period, by reference if not by actual appearance. I am not certain of any historical relationship between them, other than both being in Tianshui during this time, but in LoJW the two of them are close friends.

You may be wondering about the lack of space in his name. LoJW has a character limit of eight spaces for people’s names. Although each Chinese character takes up two spaces, this is still no problem in the original: no character has more than four characters in their name, and most are just two. Unfortunately, in English this is often not the case, and certain sacrifices must be made. Yin Shang should be glad he was lucky enough to get the full name in. Sharp-eyed observers may have noticed that “Jiang Wei” with the space is actually nine spaces. Why is Jiang Wei the exception to the eight spaces rule? I don’t know, I just know that he is.

Here, Yin Shang is mad at Jiang Wei for dragging him all the way to Hanzhong, which is quite some ways from their home at Tianshui, not to mention deep within Shu territory. But Jiang Wei defends himself by saying he was following up on reports of a Shu army being assembled for an invasion, and wanting to scope it out for himself. When Yin Shang points out that the army they’re looking at is only about ten thousand men, he believes this is sufficient grounds not to worry. Unfortunately, Jiang Wei has other ideas.

He points out that the flag with “Zhao” on it must mean that Zhao Yun is there, and correctly deducts that this small army is really just a decoy. Those familiar with Zhuge Liang’s first northern campaign will know that this is the same decoy army being sent to feint towards Chang’an. Jiang Wei then further realizes that, since this is a decoy, there must be a real army which is heading for their hometown back in Tianshui.

The cutscenes are broken up by a quick summary of the preceding events of the Three Kingdoms, quickly going over things from the Yellow Scarves through Dong Zhuo, Cao Cao’s rise, the Battle of Chibi, Wu’s conquest of Jingzhou, and on down to the Battle of Yiling and the death of Liu Bei.

We’re also given a quick backstory on Jiang Wei himself, and his place in Tianshui.

Jumping back to the present, Jiang Wei reveals to Yin Shang his real reason for coming out here so close to the Shu army.

Since he knows that Zhuge Liang’s main army won’t move until after Zhao Yun’s decoy army sets out, he’s planning to launch a pre-emptive attack on Zhao Yun first, to slow him down if nothing else. I feel like this is a good introduction to the sort of strategic thinking that Jiang Wei displays in the rest of the game. Yin Shang is understandibly concerned about the merits of this plan, but is convinced by Jiang Wei to go along with it.

While Yin Shang worries himself over nothing, Jiang Wei considers how he wants to go about dealing with the upcoming battle, and this presents us with one of the interesting gameplay mechanics of the mod.

At some point during the cutscenes before every battle, we are presented with an option similar to this one for how to handle things. Despite any implications that may be given beforehand, this sort of choice always plays out the same way. It is a subtle way of giving you the difficulty option for the upcoming battle, either Normal or Hard, and the options are always presented in that order. The game is a little less obvious about the clear superiority of the first option as things go on, but again, I feel like now is a good time to get the essence of Jiang Wei’s insights. I’ll get into the differences between Normal and Hard for the individual battles as we cover them.

As Jiang Wei goes charging off to either set up his plan or just rush headlong into things, Yin Shang muses to himself about how reckless Boyue really is. This is the first inclination we get of something covered in more detail later: not only are Jiang Wei and Yin Shang friends, but in the backstory of the mod, Jiang Wei was actually married to Yin Shang’s little sister Yin Xiang up until three years ago when she passed away. This will be a plot point that will be brought up several times, so no need to worry about forgetting it.

We cut briefly to Zhao Yun and Deng Zhi at their camp, where evidence of Jiang Wei’s plan is already underway. Zhao Yun decides to go look into this incident himself, despite Deng Zhi’s warning that the leader of the army shouldn’t personally be fighting.

And with that, we’re off to our first battle: Mianyong.

Zhao Yun leads some soldiers to investigate the disturbance in the camps, and...

Soon finds himself surrounded by fire, cut off from his troops.

Jiang Wei then shows up, expecting to deal with a few generic soldiers, when he notices the size of his catch.

Naturally, he decides that he’s a match for Zhao Yun and decides to go after Zhao himself. This is the kind of person that Jiang Wei is.

Had we gone with the Hard mode option, Zhao Yun would have remained with his soldiers, none of them would be impaired as you can see above, and Jiang Wei and Yin Shang would be on the two center tents instead.

I assume that, by the merits of gameplay abstraction, it is not just literally only Jiang Wei and Yin Shang here, but sometimes it amuses me to think that it is, so I leave determining the truth as an exercise for the reader.

And now the battle starts! As in most strategy games of this sort, the winning condition is usually to defeat all enemies (as it is here) or to defeat some particular boss enemy. This stage is a good introduction to the game mechanics, as despite being outnumbered three to one, the enemies are much weaker than you are and you can simply camp on the tents to heal up and hit them as they approach. Obviously, being on Hard mode makes this quite a bit tougher.

Characters are divided into classes, along the sorts of lines you might be able to guess. Infantry have high defense, cavalry have greater mobility, archers have range, and strategists have various spells to help you or harm the enemies.

Speaking of numbers, you can probably guess that as he is the main character, Jiang Wei is also a permanent member of your battle party. The same cannot be said for poor Yin Shang; he is not an actual party member, but is an NPC that you can control. Legend of Cao Cao often had NPC units that were on your side, but which were under the control of the AI. I have to applaud Legend of Jiang Wei in that almost every stage has at least one, and usually several, NPCs you can control, to give some of the one-hit-wonder people of the RTK era a time to shine. There will be many more of these as we go on.

Yin Shang is important in another aspect: The “Seal Condition” for this stage is to keep him alive (you will only lose the battle if Jiang Wei himself is defeated). In the original LoCC, Seals were items sold in shops between battles, and your units used them at levels 15 and 30 to advance into more powerful versions of themselves. Legend of Lv Bu was the first mod to put a spin on this idea: it required you to fulfill certain conditions in battle, such as keeping someone alive, or triggering all duels and conversations, in order to earn seals at the end of battle. LoJW follows the same principle.

What are duels and conversations? The latter is simply when certain characters who have some connection with one another move adjacent to each other in battle and have a little chat. Often there is no direct impact beyond seeing more of the story, but sometimes you earn stat-boosting items from them or force an enemy to retreat.

As for duels, they follow the same idea, but... a bit flashier. If we move Jiang Wei next to Zhao Yun...

This triggers a glorified cutscene which involves the characters involved beating each other up, accompanied by increasingly silly attack names shouted out shonen-style. There is no player input involved; the duel always plays out the same way, usually with the enemy character being defeated. This was a feature of Legend of Cao Cao as well, but subsequent mods like LoJW have really upped the ante in this regard. Duels have the added feature of almost always causing the enemy to retreat from battle, though not always. If we were playing this battle on Hard mode, Zhao Yun would have lost some health, but still stuck around until we actually defeated him the normal way.

Since this is only the first battle, there’s not too much of interest to say about mopping up the generics. Once we’ve cleared the battlefield out, Jiang Wei and Yin Shang decide to beat a hasty retreat, just before Deng Zhi arrives with some reinforcements.

Zhao Yun assures him that he’s alright, and that the invasion will still go on as planned. Deng Zhi asks if he should mention the incident to Zhuge Liang.

We will see how this plays out for Jiang Wei, for Shu, and for the world, next time.