#alinktoana

[alinktoana]

hi here i am being vulnerable on this website lmao hit me up if you have an shin megami tensei server/thoughts and feelings or something ;) im playing through smt3 right now but i did play a bit of smt5 (and ill go back to it once im done with 3), and i did play a bit of 4, and raidou1. i'm just really at aw with this world and wanna know more and draw more but i dont have enough time or energy or enough mental health to do so AaaAAAa beam me up aogami beam me up and as an offering, here's a sketch dump of various stages. im glad i get to do some fanart on my illustration course, bc otherwise... my mind would be in shambles :v

Edit: me praying to whatever entity so I have enough time to draw aogami, thor and mastema thirst traps

[kulemii]

Tag Game Q&A

tagged by: @mendipite (it's blown my mind since like last month that you even realize i exist, eep! so i appreciate the tag!)

favorite time of the year: september-december. i love the chilly seasons despite being born in the heart of summer. plus all my favorite holidays are there and it's when all my favorite treats taste the best! speaking of which--

comfort food: this is probably weird but if i had to choose a comfort food that isn't a sweet i'd probably choose crab (specifically crab legs). feeling depressed? time to hit up my favorite seafood deli and order a couple pounds of crab legs, steamed with nothing on them. then i'll go home and whip together a butter based lemon garlic sauce. aaaaahhhhhhhhhhh! if not that, some pasta with a cream based sauce!

favorite drink: black coffee because i'm a middle aged dad at heart

current favorite song: according to spotify since like mid-2021, midnight cruisin by kingo hamada. it's one of my OCs' favorite song and i listen as a reminder that i abandoned that project (and also??? it's an actual bop)

do you collect something: WIPs lol. no, i'm fine. really. x_x

favorite song: this is so hard and i don't wanna upset all of my other favorite songs by choosing just one because what if they decide to revolt and stop giving me the warm fuzzies in retaliation? 🥺

tagging in no particular order (hope yall don't mind): @skygayzer, @epicfallenismine, @dead-little-robin, @harveydentures, @monirei, @alinktoana, @blue-eyed-giant, @partylikemajima, @chaoszonenate & @nyfabee

[majimassqueaktoy]

Fun fact! Baba did in fact practically say he fell in love with Saejima but like on accident

https://at.tumblr.com/alinktoana/699737429668659200/wm8djfo7d93n

omg... he was in love.... ooh but that's very interesting though! Thank you for sharing the link with me I really did love Baba so I'm very happy to here about him always!! 💗💗

[alinktoana]

so very tired of being afraid of posting, so here’s a gouache dump.

im gearing up to post more stuff but it is what it is for now, goddamnit *old woman shakes fist at self*

[alinktoana]

some painting + shading warmups bc im way too scared of finishing what i actually wanna finish lol *help*

[alinktoana]

im back on the mastema shenanigans yAY :party popper:

[alinktoana]

30 day no fanart challenge

this is the meat of the challenge: no fanart for 30 days (oh wow lol) 1. drawing categories/prompts instead of IP: it can be *anything*, it can be food, hobbies/professions, folklore/mythology. eg: actual taiko drums instead of taiko no tatsujin characters, cute dinosaurs instead of yoshi, cool hedgehogs instead sonic (lol) 2. IF i happen to wanna draw fanart, it's gotta be at least 100 years old (anything before 1924) eg: drawing fanart of John Tenniel's Alice (1865) and not disney Alice (1951), Albert Lynch's Joan of Arc (1903) and not Clone High Joan (2002). ps: im not sure about famous people yet, but i think ill go with the same idea that theyd have to have been dead before 1924.

here's some stuff ive drawn with that in mind, even though i hadnt stablished the challenge yet lol

why a no fanart challenge? well well well, if this isnt another post artist alley eulogy lol

here's some background feelings: after having helped promote 2 japanese food festivals and tabled on both its artist alley's, and knowing myself, and having grown up in the age of comic/book to film adaptations and the rebootprequelsequelmagaddon, it's really hard for me not to fanart, even though i trashtalk hollywood all the time for not taking risks and doing original stuff, lo and behold, i do the same. who am i to judge _anything_ when i watched all three star wars sequels in theaters and crushed on kylux for years, i was kneedeep into hannigram, i gave money to the barbenheimer industrial complex. how can i blame RGG for not letting kiryu go when i _cried legit tears of joy_ when pirate majima was announced? (granted, it's not as bad as the kiryu situation lol but this is about ma$cots, not me lol)

i love a lot of characters, a lot of stories, im always jumping from show to show, game to game, and coming back to them. but i wanna go beyond my love for other people's art and be in love with my own, now that im at a better skill and mental state. it might not resonate as much, specially at the japanese festivals im a part of, but i wanna try. and im gonna start slow, i *am* going to draw japanese food, japanese animals, and create my tiny little scenes and see what comes up. i love stickers with every fiber of my being lol so ill always have in mind that ill draw stuff that i would wanna stick on my own sketchbooks and journals. but i need to do this, at least for 30 days. who knows what will happen later, you know? a friend of mine once said that colored pencils are like sugar, and graphite pencils are like veggies. and i feel like fanart and not-fanart is the same. we love fanart, but it's not healthy to only draw fanart... also i love people who delve into IP OCs and stuff, it always seems a lot of fun. i could try that, but i think ill cut my fanart ties cold turkey and then i can figure something out, i dont know lol i could go back to d&d character sheets lol another side note: i went to film school bc i loved watching movies. i wanted to tell stories, but i had no idea how, and i didnt think i had the talent for drawing. i started studying japanese and bullet journaling, bc i had the urge to draw, and those were the mediums that were close enough to drawing i felt i could try. and then hannibal happened, i had a roommate who was learning to watercolor, and i was like, screw it, let me draw hannigram bc i love them lol ive had the opportunity to make some movies, but logistically and creatively, they never felt as good as having the spark of inspiration, sketching, linearting, painting, printing and selling these tiny ass stickers. there is some control freakness in that, sure lol but there's also a need to build confidence in my own abilities, which sadly i didnt have a space for in movie sets... anyway, ill always mourn not having spent my teens drawing, but im making my kid self proud now <3 also i might post my new stickers at some point, i still havent made a pinned post lol but someday, you know so yeah, if anyone's reading this, ty lol TLDR: if you draw, write, sculpt, whatever, anything, and you tend to do fanart, ask yourself if you're fanarting a bit too much, if there's a way of turning your love for these characters/worlds into something different and more you.

[alinktoana]

local elderly girl sells stickers at a japanese food festival

not gonna lie, the entire experience is very emotional to me and it's been a month but moon channel's vid essay about cool japan, and the release of smt5 vengeance (lol) inspired me

tldr: i made some stickers, got real existential about it, will keep making more c: if youd like to check them out, here's a link

ive always wanted to draw, i used to say i was gonna become a painter or a fashion designer when i grew up. none of that happened, but i did go to film school. my final project was a script for an animated short highly inspired by nbc hannibal, majora's mask (i know, it was 2016, it makes sense to me lol) and a huge loss in my life from which i havent fully recovered, 10 years later.

the point is, ive always been art adjacent but i never really drew, until i got inspired by_hannibal itself_, noel fielding, kylux (LOL) and a roommate who was who was really inspired by art youtubers like frannerd and drew around the house, so i picked up a pencil and started drawing hannigram fanart bc i was so insanely in love with that show lol i remember who i was before i drew. i spent my days reading and watching tv, bc i love stories and stuff, but i was a consumer. and once i got a job after college i felt so incredibly isolated and directionless. do i have a direction now, as i work as a """"designer""" for a company that sells a mental health app? no. but like demifiend was force fed a magatama and got demon powers (LMAO BEAR WITH ME I JUST BOUGHT SMT3 HD REMASTER), i caught the art demon (like steven zapata says). and i caught it bad. i spend my day to day rushing through my work and chores and everything so i can have enough time to draw in the evening, to do whatever, and sometimes the need is so immense i cant do anything bc im not good enough, my skills are fading, im worthless, what's the meaning of all this? so i took a chance and showed my work at an arts alley on a japanese food festival i was helping organize. mind you, i was juggling that with my 9/5, promoting the event, finishing drawings from years ago. and when i got there, nobody got it. people looked at the stickers and didnt recognize the characters, and went on to buy the stickers my friends had that were more current. it was all japanese fanart. we were there with the single purpose of baiting weebs like us lol

ive always dealt with clients, im used to this. but im used to business to business, bc sigh i am a corporate girly. and im a beginner in the demon arts of arting. i felt so ashamed people were preferring other people, that i had the audacity to think i was worth anything. but i stood there, standing still with my brain boucing off my skull wanting to leave but also enjoying the experience and hoping someone, anyone would get it. and some people did. to my surprise, jack frost was my best selling sticker, lol. jack frost, from the smt franchise, a franchise im so new to but i love so dearly. im 100% a poser, ive never finished a megaten game. but… it just speaks to me. and thats where my cool japan feelings come from bc, like i said, i was selling at a japanese food festival. people my age, from the country i come from, were exposed to dragon ball and cardcaptor sakura from birth. and learning about history and the atrocities of the japanese empire is just. who can you trust. but ive aways resonated with one thing from japan, and it's the way they portray sadness in their works. it's become a ritual since last year that i will listen to smtv's ost when im on my period bc it literally brings me back to life. no one but i know how many times ive drawn goro majima and taiga saejima bc their mere existance and their sorrow resonates with me so immensily and i dont wanna see them being sad, nor do i wanna see me being sad. it's. it's really difficult to be to admit that im from brazil, bc our country sells happiness as an export but for many, many years the most popular genre is butthurt country music, and it makes sense, you know? people dont wanna admit they're sad. and i can only imagine what it's like for regular japanese people, bc we (i) get to see their big exports of bittersweetness… i dont know, maybe other people get to see that from brazil too, i dont know. the arts in brazil, or specially where i live, it's just isnt in the cards for us. but ill keep trying, you know. and i know fanart is a hack. but im trying. despite everything and everyone wanting us (me) to work for mining/metal/oil companies, make the most money, have the least health, drink all the alcohol (but call an uber), consume, reproduce and die, i. i just wanna draw tiny people, you know. it's. not that big a deal. all this to say that yes im gonna keep drawing and making stickers and, who knows, you know. these are stickers that i wont ever find near me, or that im too broke to get them from artists/official stores, so if youre like me, here's some pdfs in case you wanna print them and stick them wherever c: ty if you got this far, this is a big ramble… but it's been years in the making and despite everything im happy about it c:

[alinktoana]

i always draw animals when im mentally and/or emotionally recovering from something, and ive drawn *a lot* of animals the past couple weeks lmao cannot believe my illustration course is almost over and i get to draw whatever again <3

[alinktoana]

oh yes honey due to the fact I probably won’t touch these in a while, here’s a sketch dump of my favorite angel that I always forget has wings

(also pay no attention to the extra nose, I only understood how the mask works a bit later lol)

[alinktoana]

so i gotta come clean about a couple things 1. i've filtered any and all ofmd s2 spoilers

2. i've also been watching 01 episode a week

and i gotta say, it's one of the best decisions ive made this year lol i had no idea if lucius was coming back or not, i wasnt looking at bts, i stayed off nathan foad's social media for months and. it's been great! lol i used to be the kind of person that didnt care about spoilers but as ive gotten older, i dont know... a third of my day is so boring (9 to 5), holding on to these fun surprises is really worth it.

but enough with the debbie downs, im actually really proud of the last facial expression. and even if it's just a simple sketch with some shaows thrown in, it's a step forward to me. i spent like 10min deciding if i was gonna sign it or not so i just did, whatever lol slowly but surely working on that self confidence i hear so much about

[alinktoana]

look i did not set out to yassify the quaker oats guy, the yassified quaker oats guy possessed me lmao

[alinktoana]

now that im done with my illustration course ✨ i wanna post stuff here more often, so here it is, some young majima studies for mental health purposes (lol) and bc i wanna bring back my high school baseball!Majima idea, and bring other teens to the mix (aka saejima, akiyama, kiryu + nishiki at some point...)

also some bonus fall!Saejima wips bc the southern hemisphere is getting hotter by the day and i need to think about below 15C to balance it out 🙃

[alinktoana]

so guess what ive been playing

˜˜˜

ive had this xp pen display tablet for... 2 months and it's honestly my new best friend <3

[alinktoana]

feeling the Big Sad™️ for a while so here’s overalls!Saejima on a variety of quality and upsetness levels lol

edit: also I’ve been thinking a lot about saejima since the ending of Y5 bc ~beautiful eyes and guess who’s the only one who didn’t get a proper ending? fucking saejima :/ (and majima but he was barely there anyway :/)

~ so, about the overalls

ana in 2020: cottagecore? why? who would want to be stranded in the middle of nowhere?

ana in 2022: do I hear cottagecore!Saejima? that’s a yes for me, ding ding ding!

expect cottagecore baba/saejima in the very near future (or so I hope lmao)

[alinktoana]

~ spoilers for yakuza 0 ~ 4

You know how Daigo has been kinda involved in the yakuza world ever since he was a fetus, and Saejima joined in as a teen? Well, imagine it Majima had joined the Shimano family as a child? This is is a very important part of my Yakuza 0,5 ~project~, and I was obsessed with kid Majima for a while lol I know it doesn’t visually matter as much, but to me it’s a big part of the background motivations and personality traits Majima has on yakuza 0. A lot of people who began with 0 wonder why Majima went insane, others say he’s a villain. Not to be that one who is usually really villains (aka my past self being obsessed with Hannibal and Kylo Ren), Majima *is not* a villain. I understand why some people would say that after having played ps2 yakuza 1, but I feel like RGG didn’t know what to do with him yet so Kiryu and Majima’s interactions are basically Batman + Joker.

But I digress lol Majima basically growing up in the yakuza makes so much sense to me. I’m still not 100% on the how, but my headcanon is 12yo Majima as the kid who crunches numbers for a hotel the Shimano family build to do some money-laundering, and eventually he started dealing drugs (like adhd meds) to other kids in his high school. All that while having a pretty normal childhood, or at least as far as he was concerned. The hotel part is a big deal in the development of his sense of style (think Kamurocho Hills, more on his building motivations on a later day lol).

I still don’t know what to do with his parents. I’m mostly inclined with him being from a poor family with many children and wanting to join so he wouldn’t be another mouth to be fed, and eventually sending them money. That Shimano would actually be an ok father figure, kinda like Kazama, but obviously more deranged. I also like the idea of Shibusawa being around the office and first getting to know Majima when he was a kid as well. Other than ~being sponsored by the Yakuza, I’d gather Majima has a pretty normal childhood, always on the baseball team, even playing the big national high school leagues. Because his activities are more on the ~assistant to the regional manager, he wouldn’t be involved in bloody fights, Shimano would make sure of that, but he would still use him as a mule in high school, he had plenty of time to be a child. Just. A little on the stricter upbringing side because being the surrogate child of a crime boss does things to a person (again, think Ryuji, Daigo, Kiryu, Nishiki and Yumi). Also it’s crucial to his relationship with Saejima bc, in Majima’s eyes, he finally got a buddy, a friend who understands what it is like being a teen in the intensely traditional adult male world of the yakuza, so they became friends real quick, Majima showing him the ropes and Saejima just being his sane self lol they’re such a nice combo <3 I’ve been meaning to draw more kid Saejima as well.

But that’s just an idea lol I really like the idea of bringing the smuggler and his love for baseball to his childhood days too.