#old piece from inktober 2017

[sarakipin]

Happy Halloween! 🧛

[soyouareandrewdobson]

Nintendo-vember Bonus Round: The art of a Dob

First, I apologze for the late post. I actually had more work to do this week than planned, plus I got really into Hyrule Warriors-Age of Calamity. However, before I unveil the next big post (coming around sunday/monday) I want to do the "bonus round" as indicated in my last post for Nintendo-vember.

What is the bonus round? Not much really. Instead of analyzing anything, these bonus rounds are just me uploading certain Nintendo related things Dobson did outside of the main "level" entries, with little to no comment. In today's case, different fanart Dobson drew over the years of Nintedo characters, particularly Mario, the cast of Zelda and so on. This artwork also goes way back to his very old deviantart days so if you want to more or less see where he started but later on ended up with, here you have it. "Enjoy"

A Zelda comic with a Link design that is off model in a manner, "sexist crap" and lesbians invading personal space...

Mario fanart that really feels outdated in the way it was drawn (that is college level?), Easter Bunnies and a Splatoon comic

His Inktober Art from 2017 compared to a year prior (I actually prefer the more details on Link, but the face really looks wrong)

Okay... on one hand, I kinda enjoy the idea from a macabre point of view. At the same time, Jesus! And once more the wrong number of fingers on each hand

And three Samus Aran's, showing his decline in quality ending in the infamous "commission" piece

some of his multi character pics that actually got him a bit of fame...

And lastly, two pics that were created as ributes to Miyamoto.

While those are not all the pics Dosbon would create with Nintendo characters over the years, they are some of his more well known, but nowadays mostly lost ones.

They also, particularly the oldest, highlight in my opinion actually rather well how simple a lot of Dobson's drawings in the early days are, in the way how washed out and simplistically animesque his characters looked. If you have any opinions on those pics, let me know. I am busy with the next big article.

[jadethest0ne]

Have you ever drawn traditionally? Say, with pencil?

Oh yeah, of course! That's where I started actually. I didn't get into digital drawing/art until college, and even then I mostly drew traditionally. Ironically, I was slow, and even at a point stubbornly refused to do digital art for a while. But since it became more accessible and I found that it fit will with my interest in comics and animation, digital ended up becoming my main medium!

Old art incoming!

I used mostly pens and pencils, and stuck largely with black and white, and very little color. Below are some of the oldest pieces I could find at the moment. They're from 2008/2009, when I was 16-17 years old. One is a page from an old comic that I did, and another is the rare opportunity that I had to work with copic markers

(these can still be found on my old deviantart (@/jadethestone) account haha)

I also did Inktober for a few years. For 2017 I used just ink pens, for 2018 I created India Ink portraits, and for 2019 I used some brush-tip ink-markers which were fun and colorful (all can be found on my instagram (@/renaissancef0x) if you dig far enough)

I actually really like working with India Ink and doing portraits. I even liked combining it with a bit of watercolor for a splash of color! These are my more "recent" pieces from around 2019. The second one was part of a series that was featured in a couple small galleries in Tokyo for a short time

The main reason why I don't do traditional much anymore is because it takes up physical space and materials are more expensive. Also, I became more known online for my comics and such, so that's what I started leaning towards. When I started opening up commissions, I even offered traditional portraits, but no one wanted any, so I took them off this year.

It would be nice to have more opportunities to do/show off my traditional art skills, but I'm very focused on comics and animation now and I work better digitally with them

[dyrwoodan]

and a lil,, sketch of the outsider mayb....

[foxandrabbitart]

Skull Chalice. Kind of a redraw I made from an old 2017 inktober piece. Mixed media of traditional ink and digital colouring.

Patreon | Witch Shoppe | Commissions Open!

[dorywhynot]

For whatever reason this last month I went kind of gouache nuts (purely coincidental that I bought my gouache set almost exactly a year ago?) I'm uh...I'm kind of falling in love with it. I'll be sharing more little pieces I've been working on soon! If you've been around awhile you'll know I'll occasionally throw a pink piece out there. I love pink. I'm wondering if anyone recognizes this as a repaint from an old inktober piece "Memento Mori" from...I want to say 2017?? Lastly, this is the artwork for the Mini-Print reward on patre0n for June! I've switched things up a bit so new folks will have until the end of the month to sign up for this reward, if you wanna 🖤

-

Patreon | Etsy | Instagram

[busymagpie]

Scrolling through your tumblr is great because not only do you have a great supply of Russingon art, but I got to see how your style has evolved and become both mature and more distinct! I really love the consistency in style you’ve got now. And as always, your art is beautiful ❤️ and I’m looking forward to the rest of your inktober pieces!

Every time someone scrolls through my blog I get increasingly more nervous the farther down I see them scrolling, like "oh nooo, don't look at that. It's not good." On the other hand, I love flipping through my old sketchbooks and seeing how far I've come. I don't delete images that I think are not good anymore or rip out pages of my sketchbook if I'm not happy with what I made. It's part of the learning process and even if a drawing is bad, you can go either go back to it and learn from your mistakes or compare it with your newest drawings and take it as a sort of motivation if you feel like you're not making any progress.

Sorry for going off on a tangent here, but you made me think of things and I love talking about that.

So thank you for your ask and your nice words 💕 I too think I have finally developed a style that is more consistent than ever. Let me just post some sketches from my sketchbook in 2017:

On the left Fingon and Maedhros from early 2017. On the right Fingon from late 2017. Very inconsistent. The chins and noses!! What even is anatomy

This one was one of my first Russingon drawings ever. Again.. anatomy

Back then I thought this was as good as it gets, but now I know there is still so much room for improvement and I just have to keep on drawing. Now I love anatomy (and Russingon of course) and I'm so excited to continue kinktober 😏

[riisinaakka-draws]

part 5/6

5th part of my Black Sails scraps and doodles from 2016–2021. Not in any particular order.

And of course, please do not steal and repost elsewhere! But if you do get inspired, feel free to make your own interpretations :D

This time I have black and white Walrus study, Monsterman gifs, discarded inktober doodles, vane-jack-anne and jack-anne-max and max-eleanor moments, surprise collars, not-so-relaxing-asmr, daddies, another gazing lesbian, curious tentacles, biker girls, more speed with "black sails" and “oh no!” (I swear these are not as sexy as the list might make it sound...)

Under the cut, because this is a very long post again.

Above is the drawing I made for the Flint on “STAGE” pic (2020), although I think I already fixed some of the perspective mistakes after scanning it. I wanted to study the Walrus’ balcony but didn’t really have proper pictures so had to guess some parts. Also at this point I think I didn’t even want to draw Flint in yet.

I mentioned in the art post that I was listening to Lordi’s “Would You Love A Monsterman”  but it was also because it had the same working music and inspiration as my very old project of making a drawn(!) gif serie with the lyrics (because I didn’t want to make a fan vid... lol) and since that has been on hold for a few years (I mean, I started it right after season 2 aired and ended and then continued it while the s3 was going on...) and I really really wanted to share the idea already after sitting on it for so long xD

And I’m mentioning it now again although I won’t share all the notes because there’s just too much stuff... and the timing is off in the gifs and text a bit hard to read at some points, but you’ll probably get the idea!

Here’s a couple of the gif drafts and experiments from the “monsterman-gif” project I had (somewhere between 2015-2016-2017?):

(Also, I copied the menacing Flint from the drawing above when I was planning the set up for the “STAGE” art! :D)

(all of these were pencil / water-soluable graphite sticks + water and black watercolour drafts before I continued them on photoshop)

(hmm, I think I had a different version of this gif somewhere but it’s buried somewhere in the wip folders...anyway)

There reason I didn’t share them earlier is because I wanted everything to be ready and then... just didn’t do it. Also s3 and then s4 aired and I wanted to include something from there but things spiraled into even more complicated so I just left it to brew, lol). The whole thing is like 80% ready with the 10-11 gifs so maybe someday I’ll share the rest of it.

Next, some old inktober doodles (2017):

The prompt was “poison”. I liked the upper part but not Silver’s face and the bottle’s bottom with the spiky crown and pearls (and infinity loop) felt somewhat clumsy. I’m not even sure what I was thinking with this piece...

Another inktober, prompt “underwater” and in this case of course “underwater training” as Vane is teaching Jack and Anne to swim and dive and guerilla attack ships. I liked the idea but not how Vane turned out and I didn’t want to start over, lol.

An early version of the “G’morning, love” (posted in 2019). At first Anne was wearing a shirt but I wanted them all to be bare and open with each other. Although Jack’s scarf stays on, lol! Working title was also “AnneToulouse” because there’s a painting called “Sleeping” by Henry de Toulouse-Lautrec and I wanted to catch that mood a bit. Around the same time I was also working with the “LaundressFlint” aka “Would you still recognize me?” (posted in 2020).

Next, experimenting with “slices”, like how much story can you fit into a tiny slice?

“Betsy come here!” early sketches. Silver peeking under the desk and Flint’s boots as he caught them. There was also slightly NSFW-version, although I shared it only on discord, I think:

(I wasn’t quite happy with Silver’s face and run out energy to fix things...)

Next, the ASMR AU, 2020. (yeah it was my prompt that I submitted to the challenge... and couldn’t resist illustrating... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

The messy idea and further planning:

Still a few more doodles on this post!

Plans for “I will be your Daddy” or The Next Top Daddy for Vane (2019)

The “like, 30 brothers” that Anne mentions here are the other pirates and captains in the room and the nine step moms (or well, ex-step moms?) are the Blackbeards (ex)wives lol.

awww, this was a nice maxanor piece! I actually like Max’ face here more than in the final result (2017)...

Above, the first idea sketch for the Merbutt piece and the original colour scheme (2019).

Above, an early sketch about Eleanor and Max (finished in 2020) and tbh I liked this composition and style a bit more but for some reason I got caught up honing too much and thinking too much about heights, perspectives, where to put their hands etc... Eleanor had a short hair here and this had more a rockabilly mood.

first(?) sketch for the “black sails” shenanigans (finished in 2018). I really liked Flint’s ninja style and in the last pic’s sketch there’s also someone holding Flint’s coat/cape to be an extra-extra “sail” lol. Tumblr flagged the finished art post at the time, because of the Walrus’ figurehead and her shapes but luckily the appeal went through...

Last pic for this post!

draft for the drawing where Flint accidentally cuts Silver’s hair while they are training sword fighting, oh noooo~

So as you can see, sometimes my drafts are very loose sketches and sometimes very heavy with thoughts and inspiration (so much so that they end up in the never-ending-pile).

Thank you for checking this out, I hope you had fun! :D

[retronator]

The last 10 years of pixel art

Retronator the blog is exactly 10 years old right now (+ an hour or so more since I can’t seem to stop editing this post)!

I want to take this opportunity to look back at the teenage years of the 21st century and reflect on how the pixel art scene has grown over the years. I only promise a personal perspective, pieced together from my faulty memory and a bit more reliable archive of 1,700 posts on this blog.

2010

Social media sites emerged already in the late 2000s (Facebook launched in 2004, Twitter in 2006, Tumblr in 2007), but it took quite some time before they caught on, especially outside the US. I joined Tumblr in July 2010 and there were relatively few pixel artists active on the site. @jinndevil​ and @unomoralez​ go the farthest of those that I followed. The first post I reblogged was a Back to the Future piece from @megapont​ (via some blogpost share, since Megapont duo didn't join till 2013).

What was huge on the network however was sharing retro-gaming artworks by blogs like @it8bit​ and @gameandgraphics​. This included many pixel art pieces and it helped grow a community of fans that adored both old games and pixels.

2011

I'd put 2011 down as the start of the hi-bit era of pixel art games, championed by the release of the iconic adventure game Sword & Sworcery. Pixel purism of the initial pixel art movement was left behind by mixing pixels with high-res special effects like soft shadows and vignetting. Also, spaghetti legs started their fad period.

Artists such as @probertson​, @drewpixel​, and @merrigo​ started their days on Tumblr, gathering huge audiences over the years. Meanwhile, Retronator grew to a whooping 100 followers by the end of the year.

2012

Tumblr's fan spirits were going stronger and stronger, to which I threw my own logs on the fire by releasing Tribute, my biggest and most popular piece of fan art I created so far.

The highly anticipated FEZ got released (to critical acclaim and other more controversial consequences), further bringing pixel art in front of the mainstream gaming audience.

From newly-followed artists, @johanvinet​ was damn inspiring with his smooth animations. Anything GIF did immensely good on the Tumblr dashboard.

2013

This was THE year for Tumblr. So many new artists joined, it was hard to keep track. Anyone from established names like Mojang's art director @jnkboy​ and @konjakonjak​ of Noitu Love 2 fame (later Iconoclasts) to pixel art beginners such as @waneella​, now one of the most well-known illustrators in the scene.

The push for modern art direction with pixel art games wasn't stopping either. Not that amazing, more traditionally styled titles (with fresh color palettes) weren't present, as Chasm's debut on Kickstarter showed, but it was Hyper Light Drifter that really stole everyone's heart (machine) on the same crowdfunding platform. Gradients and smooth dynamic shading became unapologetically part of the pixel art (gaming) vocabulary from then on.

When Papers, Please got released at the end of the year to universal appraisal, a new example was set for showing that pixel visuals don't necessarily need to be the most polished, technically-impressive pieces of artistic expression, they can also be simple—the majority of detail-filling can be offloaded to the player's imagination.

2014

Pixel purist ideology was a highly debated topic. Dan Fessler, the background artist on Chasm, did a strong push against the tighter set of constraints which said you should only use 'clean' tools such as the pencil and color fill to complete your artworks. Dan instead only cared about clean results, pioneering in the process the technique of HD Index Painting that used the depths of Photoshop layer magic to get otherwise identical results. And there were plenty of others right around the corner that wouldn't even care about keeping the results married to traditional pixel art ideals.

Still, the majority of pixel art at this point was very orthodox. I started the Artist Feature series that showcased my favorite artists and none of them did anything controversial (nor they needed to). The biggest break from the old days was mainly highly increased color counts that allowed for subtle transitions without dithering, and free color picking without creating predefined color palettes. Octavi Navarro started his highly iconic @pixelshuh​ scenes, and the completely unknown @8pxl​ started her journey towards experimentation with pink sky gradients.

Even more importantly, Pixel Dailies were born on Twitter, following Ben Porter's 365 days of doing pixel art daily.

2015

I called 2015 The Year of Pixel Dailies in the end-of-the-year article in my newly started Retronator Magazine. The Twitter community really exploded this year, bringing in many new artists to the medium, with Pixel Dailies serving as a platform to raise visibility to everyone, old and new. I found out about @weilarddrake​ and @orange-magik​ this way, Slynyrd, @iceztiqarts​, @igorsandman​ … Other freshly-discovered people on tumblr were @kirokazepixel​ (one of the most prolific artists on the scene), @faxdoc​ (his learning journey was inspiring enough for its own article), and Talecrafter with @deathtrashgame​ (starting a whole new style of aliased, low-res painting without caring about individual pixels).

The discussion whether pixel art could survive past its nostalgic roots was still in the air, stirred by opinions such as A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art. History is proving them wrong however, with pixel art stronger than ever in 2020. It's not a visual language people born after the 80s couldn't understand.

New-school voxel art pieces started trending with the advent of Magicavoxel, pioneering the development of pixel art's sibling in 3D. The first pixel art convention Pixel Art Park was held in Tokyo. And (important for me personally), I came up with Pixel Art Academy, an adventure game that would take my ambitions in pixel art education into the future.

2016

After 9 years in development, Owlboy released! Also Hyper Light Drifter! And Stardew Valley! And Kingdom! Pixel art games were not dying, they were on the rise.

Edge (the popular British video game magazine) published a special 200+ page issue called Art of the Pixel. It featured contemporary artists outside the gaming context, championing the aesthetic's transition from its video game roots into its own art form.

Pedro Medeiros of @studiominiboss​ started his famous series of GIF tutorials, subsequently encouraging many others to share their knowledge in the popular square format. Tumblr still saw new artists joining the platform, such as @motocross-arts​ and @apolism​ (two thirds of the Japanese trio The Ultimate Pixel Crew), while others like @6vcr​ started their first pixel explorations that year. @brunopixels​, an old-schooler on the platform like me, sparked the Octobit movement, a pixel art alternative to Inktober.

2017

Further new names on Tumblr included @guttykreum​ (outdoorsy perspective pieces) and @scrixels​ (one of the most consistent daily posters with over 1,000 artworks by now).

The annual Shibuya Pixel Art Contest joined Pixel Art Park at promoting the art form in Tokyo, Japan (and worldwide really). Lospec became the new go-to resource site for pixel art, picking up the mantle from PixelJoint and Pixelation that—while still active—stagnated technologically and feature-wise.

More than anything, pixel art games were everywhere. Maybe it only seemed to me this way since I was able to go to the Game Developer's Conference as press and had the chance to interview many many people in the scene, leading to over half a year of daily content on this blog. Indie games felt stronger than ever with so many of us full-on realizing our dreams of creating our own games professionally. The one that left the biggest splash on the scenes was no doubt The Last Night, announced front and center in-between AAA titles during Microsoft's E3 conference. The brothers Soret pushed the art direction even beyond the hi-bit era moniker, fusing 3D, shaders, and modern cinematography with pixels in an iconic combination that, like Sword & Sworcery's spaghetti legs, was so atmospheric that it couldn't be resisted by future imitators.

2018

Another game that pushed technological boundaries was Pathway, finally stepping into full light in 2018 and releasing one year later. I still think it has the most advanced pixel art graphics engine to date, using voxels and other tricks under the hood to deliver a completely dynamically lit environment while retaining the pixel-perfect 3/4 view aesthetic. Pixel art games were firmly part of mainstream gaming by now, with Celeste winning many awards alongisde pixelish Return of the Obra Dinn, further cementing the presence of pixels as an ever-evolving medium capable of expressing very different art styles.

I decided to focus solely on developing Pixel Art Academy in 2018, putting this blog on relative hiatus with very sporadic updates towards the end of the year. But I never let it die. I thoroughly enjoy writing about the scene and my interest in the art form only grows with time.

2019–2020

Ironically, the closer the years are to the present, the less I remember what things stood out most. Maybe it's because my brain hasn't had the chance to automatically prune my memories yet from the overload of information that is the interwebs these days. Pixel art seems so out there, so much of my everyday life, encompassing me on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, DeviantArt … Even on TikTok you see kids zooming out of their freshly pixelized Minecraft photographs they call pixel art. The medium is alive, and more than ever.

As for the Retronator blog, from its zero followers exactly 10 years ago, it grew to 100 after a year and a half, 1000 the year after, 10k when it was 5 years old, and 30k just last month. Tumblr is still the platform where most of you follow my pixel art reports and I don't intend to stop anytime soon.

Here's to the next decade! Thank you all for reading. <3

[cloudmyweather]

A Small Guide to Munimún's Discography: Part two, Aimless wandering

From 2016 to 2018 I really hit a point where I didn't know what to do next, both with my life and artistically. I went to major in arts, and there I wasted the beginning of my adulthood. Meanwhile, I went on making music. I made a lot of stuff that I didn't know what to do with it, so I figured I'd make more compilations like Leftovers. Not on account of that being successful (nothing I make is), but simply because it was fun to do.

The first one, titled Lonely Tracks, is probably one of my better collections, at least as far as close friends have told me. The second one was titled How could I ever forget you?, and it's not as good, it feels like I'm scraping the barrel sometimes.

LONELY TRACKS — November 2016

Highlights: "Megger Le Venus", "Life on the Moon", "You're Endangered", "The Mississippi Legend", "Shine on Me"

HOW COULD I EVER FORGET YOU? — June 2017

Highlights: "Squandered Immortality", "Look at Yourself", "We Like You", "Piece of Me", "The Ghost House is Growing"

A third compilation of this sort was done during Inktober 2017. There was a gimmick on my old tumblr where, along with a daily drawing, I would post a new audio track. So that was 31 audio tracks - some of them composed specifically for the occasion, others dug out from my folders to fill space. The result was published on Bandcamp the following month. It's quite long... but I really like the sound I was coming up with at the time. Plus a lot of nice drawings were made, all available as download gifts by the way.

INKTOBER 2017

Highlights: "Up There with the Boys", "Forest Maze Variations", "Vapour Dream", "Oklahoma", "Cloudy Weather"

The year of 2017 was actually quite productive musically. Aside from the aforementioned compilations and some toe-dipping into videogame music (which I'll get into on part three), there was an album done in collaboration with Selena, a friend of mine, as a duo named Fishface. The duo thing was my idea, and Sel was the only one of my friends who had experience making music, so we put our efforts (or lack thereof) into this ugly thing.

FISHFACE — October 2017

Highlights: "gloomy mood", "DIE!", "Kung Fu", "The Jam", "Artsy Girls", "Evil Eliza (both parts)"

I have many reservations about this album. While Sel's friends were quite amused about the project, on my end people weren't so receptive. On one occasion someone told me it was the worst thing I'd ever done. Others complained of the lack of chemistry between us two. I'm not usually one to take criticism into heart, unless it really digs deep - and making a "comedy" project admittedly put me in a vulnerable spot. Like someone making fun of your smile. So I've made some efforts to distance myself from this one, but I'm not closed to the idea of making further collaborations, or even bringing Fishface back with a better record. An attempt led into a project I'll discuss on part four.

Other small projects of note: Teu silêncio ensurdece — March 2017 EP recorded in a week at a very low mood, with some guitar/fake piano noodling. I call it my "bandcamp-core" project.

Abbey Road Demastered — 2012 / January 2018 Don't ask me why I butchered my second-favorite Beatles album by layering isolated vocal tracks onto shitty FL Studio remakes of every song. They're not even interesting reimaginations — the instrumentals were done way back in 2012, I'm pretty sure. So while the Residents have the Warner Bros. Album, I have this stupid thing.

I will watch you bloom and prosper without me — July 2017 Nature 2017 — March 2018 Two "singles." Wanted to have "Bloom and Prosper" somewhere but couldn't. "Nature" is a remake of a track from Magic.

Continued on part three.

[alarawriting]

Inktober 2020 #24 - Dig

This comes from the latest incarnation of the very first novel I ever wrote.

When I was 10 I was blown away by a book called “The Girl Who Owned A City”, about a girl my age trying to survive after a plague killed all the adults. This predated the TV/comic series “Jeremiah” by a good bit. The book had a lot of weird shit in it that I now know is libertarian/objectivist bullshit, but at the time I was amazed by it. So, of course, I wrote my own version of the concept, “Below”, which was terrible because I was in 7th grade and in those days, without the Internet, we all sucked when we were young. Then when I was 13, I wanted to enter a contest for teen novel writers, and my mom “helped” me by completely rewriting Below into a totally different, equally terrible work that was terrible in a very different way.

Sometime in my 20′s, I started a rewrite, more or less using the plot skeleton of the original but completely rewriting from the ground up, but I only got, like, two chapters into it. In 2017, I picked up the rewrite again, and would probably have gotten farther with it if not for the 2018 cancer diagnosis. One of the things I did was to add an explicitly autistic character as a counterpart to the main character, who, being that she was originally based on me, is an undiagnosed autistic girl who more or less successfully fakes being NT most of the time. Andy Thorn is a boy, does not successfully fake being NT pretty much ever, and was diagnosed as autistic at some point in his life. He’s also anosmic because my older son is and I wanted to explore how not being able to smell might affect a kid in a world without adults, after a plague.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The house was like most of the other houses Andy had visited. One window was smashed, but the front and back doors were still locked, and aside from the broken window, there was no evidence anyone had gone inside. “Stay, boys,” Andy told his dogs. They’d led him here, and he didn’t question their noses, but it was good to get independent corroboration.

He used the stepladder he’d been carrying around in the cart attached to his bicycle to climb up to the broken window. Carefully he reached inside, unlatched the lock on the window, and screwed two clamps to the lower rail of the window sash. With the clamps attached, he was easily able to open the window enough to slide inside without hurting himself on broken glass. The front door was deadbolted, but the deadbolt could be opened with the twist of a knob – it didn’t require a key. Andy opened the door and let his dogs in, and then pulled in his cart.

Clifford and Updog immediately began sniffing around, exploring the house. “Clifford. Find the dead thing. Find dead, Clifford.” Tail wagging, Clifford went in search of dead people. “Updog. Heel.” Updog took the appropriate position. “Good boy. Let’s go.” He followed Clifford, and Updog followed him.

They were in the master bedroom, of course. Two of them this time, two men. Their rotting bodies lay next to each other, as if they had huddled together before the end had come.

Andy was here to make a bargain with them. He didn’t need to talk out loud, because they were dead and couldn’t hear him, and because he knew they wanted what he had to offer. Or would have wanted it, if he had been able to make the deal when they were alive on behalf of when they were dead. The dead wanted to be buried. They didn’t want to rot in the pajamas and nightgowns or sometimes naked in the bedsheets that he found them, bringing maggots and disease to the homes they had loved when they were alive. They wanted to go down in the ground and have a stone to mark where they’d been laid to rest. And they would pay him in the bounties of their home, canned goods and medicines and other things Andy could make use of and that they couldn’t anymore.

Stealing was wrong. Andy didn’t like the looters any more than he liked the gangs. The looters stole from people who weren’t alive any more – generally speaking people who had died in a hospital, far away, because they stayed away from the houses that smelled like death – and the gangs stole from the looters. Stealing was wrong, even if you were doing it to survive, because it was wrong. Wrong things didn’t stop being wrong just because you felt like you had to do them. Andy had found another alternative. He performed a service for the dead, and the dead repaid him.

He found bedsheets in the linen closet. Wearing his gloves, which he never forgot because he hated touching anything because everything had germs on it, Andy wrapped the first body in a bedsheet, and then the second one. They didn’t fall apart too much. The skeletons were strong. Some of the meat had rotted enough to fall away from the bone, but it was stuck in the pajamas so it didn’t fall away from the body, and then it was all wrapped up in the bedsheet. Another bedsheet, he carried out to his cart and lined it, and then pulled the cart to the bedroom.

It was hard for a 10 year old boy to move the dead body of an adult man. It involved a lot of pushing and pulling, and eventually, the body fell off the bed onto the cart. Two dead bodies would be too much to carry, so Andy moved the first one first, going back to the front door. “Don’t worry,” he told the dead man. “Your friend comes next. You won’t be alone.”

Outside, he dug in the dirt. Clifford and Updog helped. They liked to dig. For sanitary reasons a grave should be six feet deep, but Andy wasn’t even six feet tall, and there was no way he could dig that much. He dug down about a foot and a half, wide enough for two bodies to lie next to each other, long enough that they could lay mostly straight without having to curl up a lot. It took hours. Not as long as it had taken the first time he did this, when it was his mom and his dad that he was burying; he was stronger now, even if his hands were sore and calloused from all the digging, but it was still hard and it still took half the day.

When he was done digging, he tumbled the body off his cart and into the shallow grave, and then went back for the second body. That one was dumped into the grave too, lying half on top of the first body. Then Andy started putting the dirt that he’d taken out back on them, forming a mound.

He ate two meals there at the house, while he was digging. The cheese that had gone bad in the fridge was covered with mold, but the mold didn’t go all the way into the hard cheese, so he was able to get it all off with a cheese planer. The bread in the pantry was moldy too, but there was an ancient hard baguette that was too crunchy and tough to have grown any mold. Water still ran from the taps, though the hot water was all gone by now. Hard baguette plus water made softer, more edible baguette, and cheese where he’d cut all the mold off tasted weird but satisfied his hunger.  For his second meal he ate cold vegetable soup with milk made from powder, and had a dessert of a can of cherry pie filling.

There wasn’t any dog food in the pantry. They hadn’t had a dog. Most houses Andy visited didn’t have a dog, and the one he did find, the dog had eaten most of the old man’s body, making it very hard to collect all the pieces of the guy to bury them. He’d released the dog; as much as he liked dogs, it was a small yappy dog who barked at him and his dogs a lot and also growled at his dogs, so letting it free to join a wild pack was probably better than making Clifford and Updog jealous or stressed out. Andy did find canned Vienna sausages and canned tuna fish. He liked to eat those things himself, but Clifford and Updog needed meat in their diet; Andy could survive without it as long as he ate things like powdered milk and peanut butter, things with the protein he couldn’t get from most vegetables. So he fed the canned meat to his dogs. It wasn’t very much; they’d need another meal when they all got home.

It was close to evening as he finished shoveling dirt onto the mound. He heard a whistle, and turned. Three boys were standing outside the fence. He was face-blind, so he couldn’t tell from looking at them if he knew them from anywhere. One was a littler kid, maybe seven or eight, but the other two were around his age, 10 or 11 or so. One of the kids his age was white; the other two boys looked like they were from India or Pakistan or something. All three of the boys were wearing hoodies that had some kind of green blob painted on them, that looked as if maybe it was trying to be the same shape each time but whoever had had the can of spray paint wasn’t a good enough artist to be consistent. “Shit, dude,” the white boy said. “Did you just dig a grave for some deads?”

“Yes,” Andy said.

“This your house then? I thought this was the house where the gay guys lived.”

“Is that why they died together?” Andy said.

“Didn’t you know them?” the older brown-skinned boy said. When he talked, Andy recognized him. It was Nish Varma, who’d been in most of his classes with him. “How did you not know they were gay?”

“I didn’t know them,” Andy said. “I looked through all the envelopes in the house to find their names and I wrote them on this rock.” He showed the boys the rock he had written the men’s names on, in crayon because Sharpie markers didn’t stick to rocks as well as crayon did. Andy kept crayons in his pocket for that reason.

“What were you burying them for then?”

“That’s what I do,” Andy said. “I bury the dead. Stealing is wrong so when I need food, I go to houses that have dead people in them, and I bury them.  That’s a service, so I take the food they left as a repayment. That’s better than stealing. There’s nothing wrong with bargaining for what you need and working hard to provide a service and getting paid for it.”

The little boy said, “How can you stand how bad it stinks? We don’t go to houses with dead people! There’s flies everywhere and it smells awful!”

“I can’t smell anything,” Andy said.

The white boy said, “Seriously? You can’t smell that? What’s wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with me is called anosmia,” Andy said. “It means I have no sense of smell. It’s like being blind or deaf except for smell.”  He gestured at his dogs. “My dogs here find the dead people houses for me. Dogs don’t mind dead people smells.  So I bury the dead bodies. You’re supposed to make graves six feet deep but that takes grownup men a long time to do and ladders so they can get out, so I don’t dig as deep.”  Andy had suspected that the main reason the houses he visited were usually untouched and unlooted – at most, a broken window or a jimmied door, but no food taken – was that people with a sense of smell couldn’t stand it, and as long as there were still houses where the owners had died in the hospital and so there were no dead bodies on the premises, other kids weren’t desperate enough to go to the houses of the dead.  He knew dead people supposedly smelled bad; he just had no idea what a bad smell was actually like, since he couldn’t smell anything.  But this was the first time he’d had it confirmed.

The white boy whistled again. “But still! You can lift dead grownups and you can dig a hole that big? You must be ripped, man.” He leaned on the fence. “Look, me and my dudes here aren’t here to get on your stake and take the food here. I can see you’ve got big dogs, and you look pretty tough.”

That surprised Andy. Most people didn’t think he looked tough. He used to get bullied a lot. “Maybe I got pretty tough from a lot of digging,” he agreed. Or maybe they were fake complimenting him in a sarcastic way and it was really bullying. Andy could never tell if that was what kids were trying to do until they started laughing. But he preferred to give people the benefit of the doubt and take their word for it until they proved otherwise.

“I’ll just bet,” the white boy said. “That’s why we’re here to recruit you. The Green Bears could use a strong dude like you.”

“You wouldn’t have to dig any more graves,” Nish said. “When you’re a Bear, you get fed.  We’ve got access to gas-powered ranges that are still on, so we get cooked food.”

“We had spaghetti yesterday,” the little boy said. “With sauce!”

“Yeah, and me and my brother are vegetarian but the kids who aren’t vegetarian got meat sauce.”

“And you can live in your own house, since the Civic Center got too full for any more guys,” the white boy said. “The Bears are fucking huge, man.”

Andy winced. “That’s a curse word. You shouldn’t say that word.”

“Oh, like my mommy and daddy are around to wash my fucking mouth out with fucking soap? Fucking shit damn on a bastard son of a bitch. Who’s gonna fucking stop me?”

“No one,” Andy said, “but wrong things don’t stop being wrong just because no one can stop you doing them.”

“Fucking hell, dudes, we got ourselves a real Boy Scout here,” the white boy said, and Nish and his brother and the white boy all laughed.

“No,” Andy said. “I was never in the Boy Scouts.” The other boys laughed harder. Andy scowled. He knew they were laughing at what he said, and he was pretty sure it was probably in a nasty, making-fun-of-him way, but as usual he had no idea why they thought what he’d said was funny.

“Andy’s special,” Nish said, leaning on the fence. “If he doesn’t wanna swear I’m cool with that.” Nish hadn’t been one of the kids who’d bullied him in class. He had never talked to him or tried to be friends with him either, but at least he hadn’t bullied Andy. “How about it, Andy? Come join us!”

“No, thank you,” Andy said politely.

The white boy scowled. “Dude. You have no idea what you’re passing up.”

“That’s okay,” Andy said. “I don’t believe in stealing. Gangs go around stealing things from other kids, so I don’t want to join one.  And I don’t believe in hurting anyone unless they hurt me first.”

“Bullshit,” Nish said. “In third grade you hit the teacher with a chair.”

Andy winced. He had done it because she took his book away while he was reading about dogs, even though he was already done with his assignment, because it was math class and he wasn’t supposed to be reading in math class. It had been totally unfair and triggered a complete emotional meltdown. He’d been suspended for three days and had had numerous Talks with his parents during that time. “I have a bad temper,” he admitted. “That doesn’t mean I think what I did was right.”

“I think you’d better reconsider,” the white boy said. “Carrie doesn’t like it when we report to her that some guy didn’t want to join the Bears. She’s psycho, man.”

“Who is Carrie?”

“Carrie Mulhaney. She’s Rich’s younger sister and second in command. When guys say they won’t join the Bears, she burns their houses down.”

“I’m not worried about that,” Andy said.

“I’m not fucking with you, man. I’m serious. She will burn your fucking house down.”

“With what?” Andy said. “Gasoline? Wood that’s on fire? Alcohol?”

“Are you serious?” the boy said. “With whatever! What does it matter?”

“My dogs are trained to smell dangerous things for me,” Andy said. “Fire is a smell they’re trained on. Gasoline is a smell they’re trained on. Natural gas is a smell they’re trained on. I don’t know of anything that can be used to burn down a house that isn’t a smell they’re trained on.” He smiled, with all his teeth, because a couple of kids in his class said that when he smiled with all of his teeth he looked like a psycho and he should stop doing that, except that right now, these boys were threatening him so looking like a psycho so they would leave him alone was a good thing. “I have guns upstairs in my house. If my dogs alert me that someone is bringing a dangerous smell to my house, I’ll take my dad’s rifle and I’ll shoot whoever is on my property. And dogs can smell a dangerous thing from a long way away. I could tell you all about how good dogs are at smelling, if you want.” Most kids never wanted to hear him talk about dogs. Occasionally adults would listen to him, but there were no adults anymore.

“Don’t let him get started,” Nish said. “If he starts talking about dogs he never shuts up.”

“Your funeral, man,” the white boy said. “If you’re saying no, you’re saying no, but I betcha Carrie isn’t worried about your guns.”

“That’s good,” Andy said. “If she’s not worried about them, then she won’t take precautions and it’ll be easy to shoot her if she comes into my yard.”

“Whatever,” the white boy said. “Come on, dudes, let’s go. We don’t need this loser anyway.”

“Weirdo,” the little boy said. “Creepy weirdo. We don’t even want him in the Bears.”

They left. Andy brought his dogs back into the house, sat down on the dead men’s plush, soft sofa, and called his dogs up on to the sofa with them. Then he hugged them while he cried. Emotional confrontations upset him, a lot. He’d gotten better at controlling his temper since third grade, and he could hide the fact that he wanted to cry until he was alone or with a safe grownup, but he couldn’t keep himself from crying indefinitely. Updog lay his head and paws down on Andy’s lap, which was heavy but comforting anyway, and Clifford snuggled close so Andy could hug him and cry against his fur.

After he was done crying, it was time to take his payment and go home. His dogs needed food, and he had candy bars at his house that he was saving for stressful times like this. He loaded his cart with the powdered milk and all the cans he could fit, as well as a bunch of fitness food replacements like energy bars and protein powder. Maybe tomorrow he’d come back for the rest of the cans; he didn’t know how fast dead smell cleared out of a house, though, so it was possible that other kids would hit the place before he had a chance to.

It was dark, and Andy had a hard time finding his way in the dark, but he trusted his dogs to know the way. “Home, Clifford. Home, Updog,” he said, and they trotted in front of him, pulling just hard enough on their leashes to lead him forward.  Really, he was only holding their leashes to make them feel secure, because they were trained with leashes; he knew they would walk with him if he let go of the leashes, and it was hard to pull his heavy cart with one hand and hold onto two big dogs’ leashes with the other, but he did it anyway because his dogs expected it and he know how upset he got when things happened that he didn’t expect, so he imagined his dogs felt the same way.

[littlecello]

BEEP BOOP fresh listings!! I have added some of my very old LoM postcards, my Inktober piece of Max DeBryn from 2017, my most recent sunflower Gene, and another Inktober 2017 piece! Please have a look around if you feel so inclined! 💖

Also, I now have a flat and a definite move-in date, so yeah, any support would be hugely appreciated, even signal-boosting. Thank you everybody, it means a lot how much you’ve already done. :’)

[batkingsalem]

I was going through my old work and I stumbled upon this piece again from Inktober 2017. It’s been pretty popular, so I figured I would put the original piece up for sale on my store, if anybody wants it! It’s probably my favorite Inktober piece I’ve done.

You can get it here: chickpeaillustration.bigcartel.com

[stefanoterry]

Inktober 2019 Day 3! I know I’m cheating, but this is actually a colored version of a piece I did for Inktober 2017 that I’ve always been meaning to color, and figured, why not? Also, it’s Throwback Thursday, so, loophole! Huzzah! I’ve been working on improving my digital painting, so this has been good practice, and I admit it’s a little easier revisiting some old work that has been begging for the color treatment! Anyway, this is Ann Takamaki from Persona 5! I absolutely love the Persona series, and the P5 gang is so much fun to draw! I might color the others at some point. Included the original Inktober 2017 black and white version too!

[noctae-corvus]

slides in with a smoothie Hi I'm tentatively doing some things for Inktober!

A redraw of a piece from 14th December 2017. I wanted to draw Athena again and just see how much I've improved aaaaa

Drawn entirely with a Vball ink pen

Art/character are mine - Please do not copy/use/trace/repost etc.

Old piece below cut:

[salavante]

I know I’m making some artistic headway when I can acknowledge the attractive aspects of something I did a year ago, because generally speaking, I absolutely loathe looking at my old art. I have almost 0 emotional attachment to it and get rid of it very liberally, physical or digital. Even stuff I did in college, that was near my peak level of performance at the time, I have trouble looking at. But most of the stuff I did from my first Inktober in 2017 onwards, I actually still like.

 Though at times I feel nostalgic for being in a structured, academic environment, almost all of the work I made during school is basically useless to me in the present. Which is not to say my experience was useless in the past - they were learning tools. I learned a lot from making them, but what I made there was never really mine, which was fine for educational purposes, but. Well. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. I sometimes wish I would have pushed back harder earlier to make things more “me”, but we are all tired as hell and sometimes you just gotta let that go and accept that not every piece is your magnum opus and is there for the purpose of making you learn value, color theory, a new medium etc. All the same, I wish I could have gotten out of there with more than three pieces that I don’t hate.

My work since then has been almost all play, but it’s what I’ve needed to enjoy making work as a human and not a machine, so there’s what. I also feel like my last two years have been about solidifying my art style, and I like the way it’s coming along. I must be doing something right because I can look at work from 2017 and not want to flush it.