#imoen

[blighted-elf]

Re-creating my favourite Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 party in BG3 (x)

[promniight]

redraws of Viconia and Imoen’s sprites :-) since i’m kinda dedicated to this bit now lol

[crimsonender]

Mikaila Orchard sucks at Paneling

I debated making this a video or not. But, I decided against it. If you guys are interested in me making videos about this sort of thing, let me know and perhaps it's something I could cover in the future.

So Mikaila Turkleson aka Mikaila Orchard has always made... questionable art. To me it seems like a weird amalgamation of Equestria Girls and Sophie Labelle's art. Anatomy bad character design bad etc etc. I don't however see a lot of people talk about her paneling.

Recently, Mikaila and presumably her partner, Lily Orchard started a new art endeavour. I assume to turn over a new leaf and bury the now-infamous Pokemadhouse. You can find it over at bhaalspawnfunnies. It appears as if the blog will focus around the player character of Baldur's Gate 1, Gorion's Ward, and their half sister, Imoen. This is the first entry.

Source

Where to start? My first impression is that this is very poorly drawn, and low effort even by Mikaila's standards. The speech bubbles are low contrast against the background. The ground/floor blurry blob looks extremely bad. As a fellow artist I get the distinct impression that Mikaila did not want to draw this piece.

Moreover, there's a huge issue with the panelling and pacing. Comics are really cool in that you can kind of use panelling and negative space to "time" jokes, leading the eye where you want it to go and using framing and other art tricks to make a punchline land a little better.

This "comic" has none of that. There is no pacing, there is no comedic timing. It's all bland and presented as a block. I took it upon myself to re-panel this piece, and I've made two versions: One, with Mikaila's art style and visuals, but with the panelling slightly adjusted to be more punchy and effective, the other I completely redrew, using the same joke.

Excuse the sloppiness. I'm not going to expend too much energy polishing and gilding this turd.

That being said, this is already a huge improvement. Even if Mikaila isn't at the technical level of a professional artist, this is very attainable with only a few more minutes of effort. The timing is punchier, the speech bubbles draw your eyes down the page, and even without colour coding, it's clear which of the characters is talking. This isn't exactly a hot take but in my opinion you shouldn't need colour coding on a comic page to denote who is speaking. It should be very obvious! Moreover, speech bubbles should be included in the composition, not added as an after thought.

I'm guessing the original comic took her less than an hour to make. I think I'm being generous here, honestly if this took her more than twenty minutes I would be concerned. Being generous though I gave myself one hour to make a version completely redrawn.

This was again, very quickly put together and of course is in no way perfect, but its to demonstrate what a little bit of thought can do to improve a comic page. I decided to change the pose of Gorion because making family guy references should be a a cardinal sin for artists, as well as make the characters a little more recognizable. "Aryana" is, notably, Lily's OC and bears little resemblance to the canon character of Gorion's Ward, but considering Baldurs Gate does allow character customization and dialogue choices, I decided to make their gender a little more ambiguous so players of any gender could see their version of Gorion's Ward in the comic, but kept the elf with long dark hair appearance from Mikaila's original. I also looked over the pic after I was all done and ready to upload and noticed some small flaws I could easily fix, and went back and did those things. You should always go over your pieces when you're finished them with fresh eyes before you submit them as a final piece.

Again, this certainly isn't perfect and I'd probably put more effort into a piece with characters I care about and a joke I actually find funny, but I hope this demonstrates that pacing and expression really are everything in comics.

[thunderboltfire]

The complete base BG2 party roster in Darkest Dungeon style!

Some of them were used in this scene

I thought that the stylisation is way too fun to limit it to my in-game party (and besides, I sometimes switch party members anyway).

The models (sans my Charname, and including background with Athkatla sewers and Othyugh) are downloadable and usable under CC BY-NC-SA.

download via st.ash and via google disk (maybe I'll find a way to host in somewhere else later). Enjoy!

[mikaila-orchard]

Real conversation in BG2

[lilies-in-the-attic]

Personally if I was trying to convince people I didn’t molest my sister I would not be parading around the fact that one of my favourite ships is of two siblings, constantly pointing this out and not making any effort to disavow mods that write them as siblings while still being a romance but hey maybe I’M the weird one in this situation

[purpledemonlilyposting]

Aww is that what Lily said? Her incest mod written by incest fetishists is the best "RPG" romance?

[Lily's Post]

Too bad that was on her old now terminated blog lost forever to time. Oh wait.

Ah yes, one of the best romances ever written according to Lily.

Credit to this now anonymous post for this info on the mod.

[liquidorcard]

Lily's confusing "line weight" for "thin lines." Line weight means like, literally just how thick or thin the lines are. They teach you to vary or consider your line weight based on a bunch of different factors when you learn to illustrate professionally. Line weights are just another element of design you can use for utilitarian and stylistic purposes. You can pull attention to something by giving it heavier line weight, you can give something a more dynamic or organic quality by varying line weight, you can give something a delicate or textured quality with very light lineweight, etc. And of course, obviously, some illustrations has no lines.

Here's some good visual examples I just pulled off Google.

[ratscrap]

immy wimmyy

[blackjackkent]

Sunset

Pairing: Jaheira/Khalid Characters: Jaheira, Khalid, Jon Irenicus, Imoen Rating: T Warnings: Major Character Death Descriptors: Angst, Fluff, Tragedy, Bittersweet, Torture, Missing Scene, Backstory, Character Study, Canon-Typical Violence, Flashbacks Word Count: 8.4k Setting: Beginning of Baldur's Gate 2, with flashbacks to pre-BG1, start of BG1, and Siege of Dragonspear Summary:  "I am in no danger of forgetting how my husband died. But I choose to remember how he lived.” The death of Khalid of the Harpers, and the love that brought him strength. read on ao3 | send me fic requests!

For a long, long time, Khalid has only the vague impression of hectic movement. The drug-tipped darts have not given him the mercy of perfect unconsciousness; instead, he exists in a never-ending world of shadow, dimly aware of being bundled head over heels into a cart which dashes off into the night to the sound of thundering hoofbeats. 

Somewhere in that long twilight, he feels himself torn from the cart, placed on another, then another. Then a ship briefly, a different rolling motion punctuated with a brutal chill, and then more carts, each somehow a more violent journey than the last. Every now and then, he feels a gentle prick of pain - at his neck, on his thigh, in the crook of his elbow - and then the shadows deepen for a while and he can see the taunting edge of oblivion. But awareness always creeps back, unrelenting, inescapable, and when he drifts near the surface again, he knows some time has passed, but not how much, nor where he is.

After a while, the movement stops. The drug starts to wear off, the shadows receding bit by bit. Vision returns, and then the sense of lying prostrate on stone, his cheek glued to the floor by a layer of damp and stinking dust.

He attempts to squirm, to roll onto his back. The room spins dramatically around him, sending his stomach in a nauseous scramble up his throat.

"Wh... where..." The muscles of his face feel wooden and stiff from lack of use. "Where..."

He is dimly aware that he should be frightened, even more so than usual. The fear, numbed by the lingering effects of whatever drug kept him sedated all this time, waits to pounce like a muzzled beast at the back of his mind. For the moment, he instead feels only a sort of dazed horror, and the creeping sense that something terrible and irrevocable has happened. 

He makes another fumbling attempt to move, and succeeds in rolling over onto his back. He's in a cage, and not a very large one; trying to shift from his curled position knocks his boot heels against the iron bars. The air is deathly cold, like a tomb.

"You're awake. Good," an icy voice growls from somewhere above him. Khalid squints up into the dimness and can just make out the voice's source - a tall, broad-shouldered man, his eyes obscured by the heavy hood of his cloak. "It is time for the work to begin."

Read More on AO3

[thunderboltfire]

Oh shit, is it Drizzt Do'Urden?!

[mikaila-orchard]

At what point can we call this a skill issue?

[soelvfiskart]

Some ink practice with some bg1-2 characters

[shallow-life]

Lily, is it incest to ship siblings together?

[scarila]

bhaalspawns