#i had to goddamn “ship of theseus” the whole psd file

[egghowl]

The End Times featuring @lilybug-02 's Toasty

Some context and process showcase stuff under the cut.

There is a lot of text.

Ok so Outer Wilds, one of my favorite games ever. I wanted to draw something for it for a while now. With brittle hollow being my favorite planet of the solar system it felt right having it take up most of the image. I added giant's deep because it's simply iconic and you can kinda see it from anywhere during the whole game. And Timber Hearth because it just felt right having it in the picture. Also the supernova is there because it looks cool.

Toasty

why is Toasty experiencing the Horrors?

yeah um so about that. I started working on this image back in september (i don't know why it took me so long to finish it i worked on it most of the time [you do not want to see the state of the half bread chaos fanart i've been making for like 2.5 years]).

During that time when i was sketching it, lilybug was posting a lot about their OC toasty. Now i didn't really feel like drawing the hatchling at the time and was also heavily sleep deprived so i drew them, mainly for fun. They were on my mind and i wanted to have a character in the middle of the image. Now i planned to replace them with something more appropriate eventually.

Now why did i not do that? To be frank i tried. Quite a few times actually. I tried to replace them with the hatchling, the spaceship, i also tried to put my own character there instead, tried it with the spot being empty (that looked awful), put a symbol of the eye there, silhouette of the far away stranger, ... just over all tried a bunch of things but... none of them looked right.

I kept returning to the sketch of toasty and they always looked the most... present(?) in the picture. None of the other things looked that bad but Toasty just felt correct. Even tho they were "kinda" out of place. I finally decided to color and shade them and they just looked... great. So i kept them there. Even though they should have never been there.

TLDR: they were a placeholder that i tried to replace a bunch of times, and after failing i decided to keep them in the image.

Alright some closing thoughts.

Outer Wilds is a game that means a lot to me as it does to many other people. I could say the whole spiel about how much you shouldn't look up anything about it whilst insisting that you have to play it. But i don't want to do that. I played Outer Wilds when i was going through a bunch of stuff. And during my fractured play through of it, it didn't make all of it disappear or change my world view so much i that i finally stopped... having "dreams". What it managed to do is... calm me down. It was the first time in so long i felt at least partially content with... everything. I am still dealing with all the stuff I was going through, more than ever. But, i am a little bit calmer during it. At least for now.

You don't have to play outer wilds. But i think you would like it.

I want to thank Alex, Kelsey, Andrew and everyone else that worked on Outer Wilds. You all made a very special game that has done what no one else could.

Anyway here are some pictures from the process.

Alright, Byee [Ōō]/