#this was a dumb sketch in the corner of an actual WIP but I like how her face came out

[c-rowlesdraws]

Ianthe Tridentarius watching Harrow scream and cry and throw up and tie a sword to herself with bone and commit to giving herself a lobotomy:

[mochibuni]

2020 Fanart Year In Review

@floraone​ tagged me to do this, so let’s see what mine is like! If you’re an artist, please fill this out for yourself!

1.  Number of started vs number of completed fanart this year

As of today I’ve posted between 40 to 50 completed pieces and colored sketches. I’m still really shocked at this number and I’m not sure how that happened. I have way too many WIPs, I use a work flow program to keep track of all my projects and I am afraid to look at it right now. XD

2.  Most popular piece of fanart this year

This varied by platform, but these three were towards the top or at the top across my accounts.

3.  Personal Favorites

OKAY it was actually this one, I was really charmed by Wrong Hordak and I thought this came out so cute! I’d like to do more in this style someday, if I can figure out how to consistently do so.

4.  Characters Drawn Most, in order of frequency

Uhhhhhhhh...I think it was Mako?

5.  Most Used Color Scheme

Pink, green, and purple.

6.  A piece of art that was challenging

This one, because I don’t color like this anymore and it was hard to try and do it again.

And I suppose the time I decided to draw 10 people in one piece. That was dumb don’t do that.

7.  An area you feel you’ve improved

I’m still REALLY REALLY bad at men, but they got slightly better this year and that was my art resolution. Otherwise I have been consciously trying to portray race and body diversity better in my style, while also trying to be respectful about it. Because of BLM I started a series of black magical girls and I truly adore the few I was able to draw and some of the designs I’ve sketched. I want to be better about faces and bodies, and that’s something I’ll add to my focus list for 2021.

8.  A piece of art you’re really proud of

I just love everything about how this one turned out and I have no idea how to do it again.

9.  New things you tried out this year

Always trying to find a coloring technique that works for me. I think I found a few options, but we’ll see how consistent I am with any of them rofl

10. Something you learned this year

I want to say coloring, but I’ve gone through a few techniques and haven’t retained a whole lot. I learned to pick a different background color though.

11.   A comment that touched you

Everyone said such nice things after that thing that happened and how much I’m wanted here. Aside from my own imposter syndrome that 2020 lovingly gave all of us, in general I’ve been having a hard time finding a place to nestle in to after Tumblr went really downhill. I’ve made my way back here a bit, reluctantly, because this is still a terrible place for artists, but it is also the place I feel most accepted at.

Someone also wrote that my green jacket kiss was A+ shitposting and I am very proud of that.

12.  Something that inspired your art this year

Black Lives Matter

13.  Something that you want to try out next year

Begrudgingly I should practice backgrounds......

Maybe get back into traditional art though. I have been making plans for my corner of the office and thanks to some wonderful patronage this year I’m starting to purchase those items!

14. A goal of any sort for next year

Male bodies, diverse characters, more exclusive art for patreon....maybe quit job and take commissions and stream art? Who knows!

[miru667]

Do you have any art tips or a step by step on how you color??

Please its ok if you wont

sure, i can give a tiny bit of insight on how i colour. Under the readmore:

At this point of my personal understanding, i would say colouring is just two things: 1) making sure your colours look good together, and 2) lighting (if u decide to even do lighting/shadows, that is)

The 1st one you can achieve by doing palette studies based on photographs or other ppls art, or by doing trial and error, or apparently by learning colour theory (im too dumb to understand it) and also applying digital tricks like overlay layers and also fiddling with hue/sat/brightness/contrast until it looks good to you. Below is my latest Audrey drawing without the overlay layer (left) and then with the overlay layer (right).

It’s magic, right!? I’m so used to having an overlay layer in every drawing now that these days i just slap one on before i even start colouring lmao. usually 20-50% opacity, usually a saturated orange or pink and then i’ll adjust as i go. mostly i just do trial and error like fitting wooden toy shapes into the right holes - my brain will go “ding!” when the arrow on the hue gauge hits a colour that looks good to my eyes.

The 2nd one, lighting, is more complex. I always say “lighting is everything” because to me it IS...it can control the entire mood of the picture. Where is the light? Is it hard or soft? is there a secondary light? What emotion are u trying to convey? and then how can you execute it? how would light look on THIS object compared to THAT object? A big part of lighting is being able to visualize your drawing in 3D. Once you can do that, you can lay down the light and shadows quite naturally depending on where your light source is. this ties into the way you DRAW things tho (like, u have to already be thinking about 3D while in the drawing stage) so i dont wanna get into it since this post is about colouring.

Lately I’ve been p lazy and doing all my major shadows on a single layer, set to “Shade” on sai (it might be something diff on other programs idk), 42% opacity (for this particular piece), and clipped to my folder of colour layers. So that means almost all my actual colour layers are just flat colours! Here’s my main shadow layer all by itself without any base colours (left), and then shadows + base colours (right):

sometimes i’m already thinking about lighting while im still sketching the picture. sometimes i’m already thinking about lighting before i even start to draw. For this particular pic I ended up with 5 different layers for lighting: 1) all shadows (42% opacity Shade layer); 2) some extra shadow under her hat (72% opacity Shade layer), which then allowed me to create the cool hat texture by simply erasing bits of this layer 3) a soft angelic backglow coming from behind her. this layer goes somewhere above the lineart layer to give the illusion of light spilling in front of her and fading out her edges; 4) secondary blue reflective light coming from the....sky im presuming, but mostly because i just felt like the drawing needed some blue lol; 5) a 55% opacity overlay layer containing a trace amount of vignette in 3 of the corners + an extra glob of light just to the right of her cuz i was experimenting with different instagram filters near the end and found one i rly liked and tried replicating it on sai 😂 Here’s the picture with only my main shadow layer (left) vs the picture with all 5 lighting layers (right):

The pic on the right makes her look more like she is Somewhere. I think I could’ve pushed the depth even more but i wasn’t confident enough. And sai doesn’t have blur tool :(

I also always have at least one layer that i name “extra”. The Extra layer goes on top of the colours/shadows/lineart layers, but under the overlay/glow layers. This is for extra details (including extra LIGHTING details) that I wanna add like extra sparkles, extra straw hat strands, hair strands, hair shine, zipper shine, etc all for that “extra” touch of realness. I don’t do all this stuff at the end, though. I have my Extra layer created pretty early on and i go back to it and add to it when I need to. Here’s what it would look like without the Extra layer (left), and with it (right).  Try to find all the extra bits i listed:

One last note is i don’t colour one thing at a time. Before I start, I slap on all the base colours and all the shadows super roughly, just to check if my lighting and colour choices look good TOGETHER and make the entire composition look good. no point in spending hours rendering all the lighting and shadows on the character’s hair if in the end u decide there was actually a better lighting design u could’ve gone with. So here’s the rough colouring plan I made for myself before i started rendering for real:

im not sure if this was useful at all but i hope it was interesting at least! if you want to see my actual chronological process for colouring you can watch the gif of wips i compiled here: [link]. You’ll notice that i edit my lines as i colour. I think it’s good to be adaptable, and to be ready to go back and change ur lines to benefit your lighting, colouring, and overall look of the piece.

Also here’s the finished version of the pic: [link]

[hydrospanners]

a writing year in review: 2k18 edition

So I’m taking a minute to look back at all the writing I did this year and it has been a pretty spotty year for fanfic for me. Lots of long, blank spaces between weird surges of productivity. But! I did a lot of work on my original projects and also the boring adult responsibilities in my life (I changed jobs three times!!! I changed my name!!! I started going to therapy!!!!) and I pushed out some fic I really liked this year in spite of all that so, all things considered, I’m calling this one a win.

Without further ado, here is the breakdown of all the fic I’ve written this year plus a sad breakdown all of the geriatric WIPs looking at me with their big sad eyes, crossing their fingers for 2019. Hiding most of it under a cut because the rankings and WIP snippets got long.

2k18's Publication Stats for Fun & Profit:

This year I published 16 fanfics, all but one for SWTOR. 10 were brand new, started and finished in 2018, and 6 were old WIPS that have been marinating for Force only knows how long. That number is down from the 29 fics I published in 2017, but close to the 14 I published in 2016. 2015 was only 3 fics and 2014 was only 2. I have a total of 64 works published on AO3.

This year I published 34559 words for an average of about 2160 words per fic. This is extremely above my overall average of about 930 words per fic with a combined total of 59569 words published since I started posting fic publicly back in 2014.

So the number of fics may be lower this year but the number of words total and the average words in the fics I did publish went up! Please enjoy a review of the shit people liked most according to AO3 and then the stuff I personally liked most because I'm allowed to like my own writing, sue me.

2k18's Most Read Fics:

1. spoonful of sugar: Everyone gets sick sometimes; even big damn heroes. These are vignettes about the Jedi Knight's crew getting sick, getting treated, and getting better. (SWTOR)

I started writing this one when I got really sick during the summer of 2017 and I finally finished it this year! There's another part that I cut because it got way out of control that I'd like to one day add back in as a second chapter but I am okay with calling this one complete and maybe never doing that. This one is a nice combo of funny and a little bit sweet that I think is refreshing, like a cold, fruity drink on a hot summer's day. Here is my very favorite line from this whole fic because it is so delightfully dumb:

“Scourge,” Rhese tries and fails to sound as though he has some degree of command over his own voice right now. “Get off my dick.”

2. filling the table: They have a saying back on Corellia that the only way you can ever really know a man is by taking his credits. They also have a saying that you should never play cards with a Corellian because Corellians always cheat, but she's betting Doc never heard that one. (SWTOR)

I think I started this one all the way back in like 2014 or 2015. I can't remember now but it was a long time ago and this piece of shit has morphed a million times since then. I must have rewritten the ending about a million times.

I really wanted to capture the desperation of the Balmorran Resistance while I was doing the character work with this, the sense of limited resources and hard living, and I am pretty happy with the result. I'm also pretty happy with the characterization work here, the little snippets they are both revealing to each other and the bigger snippets they aren't. I'm still not entirely happy with the white spaces in this one. I feel like I was a little too sparse and there are lots of places that don't flow if you don't already know what isn't being said, but I am more or less happy with this one! Here is my favorite bit because of the doublespeak foreshadowing their future relationship that was definitely on purpose:

Four hands later, she’s fifty credits richer and Doc is rooting around in his pocket for something to scribble another IOU on. She knows he’ll never make good on it, but Rea’s happy to accept his empty promises if it keeps him playing the game. She’s overdue for a bit of fun.

3. take back what the kingdom stole:  Alliance Commander Nirea Velaran has always had a talent for burning bridges. When Theron comes to her after Nathema to pay for his sins, she finds herself wondering whether some bridges can't be repaired. (SWTOR)

Hey look! Something I started and finished in the same calendar year!! This one grew out of a very stupid joke that I ended up not even making until the end of the fic. At first I wanted to draw that bit, but I got frustrated with my lacking artistic talent so I wrote it instead and it turned into one of my fave things I've written. It has nice scenery and character growth and intimate friendships that have a real impact on their emotional lives! Hurt feelings aren't just for romance fam!! Anyway here's my favorite bit because it's one of the most Rea moments I've ever written:

He shoved her off his shoulder none-too-gently, scowling as he looked skyward, as if searching for another fleet of hostile ships to arrive and grant him the sweet release of death. When none came, he settled for another hearty gulp of whiskey. He had to be halfway to knackered by now. “You’re insufferable,” he grumbled.

“I know.” She smiled a smile that felt damn near genuine and collapsed back against the grass, swinging her legs out over the crevasse.

“I don’t even feel bad about all this anymore.” Theron complained. “You deserve it.”

Rea only laughed. A real laugh, all the way up from her belly, and it felt so fucking good.

Theron looked at her from the corners of his bloodshot eyes, suspicious and too clever by half. “Fuck,” he swore, shaking his head. “You just mindfucked me, didn’t you?”

2k18 Author’s Choice:

1. when the wicked play. After witnessing his first real lightsaber duel, Doc reflects on the contradictions of what the Jedi are supposed to be and the realities of fighting a war. (SWTOR)

This might be one of my very favorite things I've written ever. In case it wasn't clear by now, I am pretty preoccupied with making myself feel the weight of the violence and uncertainty and war that plagues you in this game. It all feels so clean and sanitary in the game because it's a game, but it's something I always want to explore and make visceral in the stories I tell about the game. I am also obsessed with Jedi and the mythos and conflicting ideas that must surround them inside the story's universe. This was a fun way to marry the two and do a bit of character work at the same time. I'm also pretty proud of this one structurally, with how contained and bookended it is. [high fives self] Anyway here's my favorite part because it's some of the only action I've written that feels like it captures the brutal urgency of how I imagine actual lightsaber combat and also says a little bit about my girl Rea via the way she fights:

Rea is little more than a blur of blue light as she collides with the Sith across the field, her sabers swinging too fast for Doc’s eyes to track. She’s hammering her enemy from every side, pushing him back and back and back. Her assault is savage and relentless and there is nothing like grace or elegance in any of it. It isn’t beautiful; it’s violence. Ugly, brutal violence.

The whole thing is over in less than a minute.

Blue meets red meets blue meets blue meets blue meets red and then the Sith’s head is hitting the floor with a muffled thump. It happens so abruptly Doc doesn’t even realize it’s ended until the rest of the body collapses a heartbeat later.

2. shadows settle on the place that you left. In the wake of her father’s death, Nyria Ryder tries to reconcile the man she knew with the shadow he left hanging over her. (Mass Effect: Andromeda)

Look! Something that isn't SWTOR! (The only thing I wrote this year that wasn't for SWTOR.) I have a whole bunch of feelings about Alec Ryder and had a really good time porting Rea over to this game and seeing the ways his presence in her life altered who she is and the ways that it didn't. Also I have a lot of feelings about SAM. This is probably peak self-indulgence but I still feel like this is some efficient sketching of Nyria's character and Alec's and their particular relationship and I'm pretty proud of it. Also I'm always a slut for complicated familial relationships. Here is my favorite bit because it's such a nice illustration of who Ria is and an important turning point for her character:

She decided to be kinder to SAM than the universe had been to her. He was her brother, just as much as Rhys, and she was all he had. She would have to make sure herself was enough.

“He believed in us both,” she told him what he needed to hear, even though it wasn’t true. Then she made a promise she could not keep, because she knew he needed that too: “You and me are going to figure this thing out. Just you watch. We’re gonna make Alec proud.”

3. take back what the kingdom stole:  Alliance Commander Nirea Velaran has always had a talent for burning bridges. When Theron comes to her after Nathema to pay for his sins, she finds herself wondering whether some bridges can't be repaired. (SWTOR)

All the same stuff I said above applies here still. Glad we can all agree this one was nice.

State of the WIPs

Just for fun I did a dive into my WIP folder to see what I'm setting myself up for in 2019! Only it wasn't very fun at all because there is so much really old stuff in here!!!!!! Good luck to future me because past me really left you with the bag girl! Good luck carrying the weight of hopes and dreams and stories unfulfilled!!

I have a total of 48 fics in progress right now. The fandom breakdown is as follows, ranked from the most to the least: Star Wars: The Old Republic (35), Dragon Age (8), Mass Effect: Andromeda (4), Fallout 4 (1). And because I'm a masochist, I looked at the dates on all this shit too. Here's the breakdown of what year all of these things were started:

2014: 4 fics

2015: 9 fics

2016: 15 fics

2017: 11 fics

2018: 9 fics

That sound you hear is me sobbing in the distance. 2014!!! What the fuck!!!!! I am gonna finish those four fics this year if it kills me. We aren't living like this anymore. Please enjoy some samples from the WIP folder with absolutely no context:

“You carry sleeping pills in your pocket?”

“For my wife. Maybe you’ve met her? About this high--” Doc raised his hand half a foot over his own head “--brown hair, blue eyes, great ass.”

Ignoring the commentary on his sister’s figure and the extreme overestimation of her height, Rhese nodded. “I may have seen her around.”

“Well if you see her again, you tell her to come home. Her family’s worried.”

Do you hear that Rea? Your family is worried. Rhese wondered if she could feel their concern, their anguish. Was she searching for them as they searched for her? She’d always been good at hiding, but she’d never vanished completely before. A hole in the Force where her warm, fervent energy should have been.

He felt cold. Really alone for the first time in his life. Careful what you wish for, Liss had always said. You might just get it.

Ossus is important.

Rea feels it when she falls out of hyperspace, that shift, that tug of something just behind her navel. The familiar weight of destiny, settling like a stone in the pit of her stomach. It leaves her breathless, white-knuckled and gripping the shuttle’s controls, her skin prickling under the cold caress of dread.

She wasn’t expecting this story to have a happy ending—a colony of Jedi on the eve of war? she’s danced that dance enough times to know the steps by now—but she wasn’t expecting anything so bad as the draw of destiny.

Fate has never been anything but cruel to her. Feeling it here, now? This is going to be worse than she imagined.

This is how you deal with failure.

You just do.

You get up in the morning and brush your teeth. You train until your legs wobble beneath you. You choke down your nutripaste and ask Simms about his niece. You congratulate Tarinik on her promotion. You laugh too loud at Vortena’s shit jokes. And when Beniko’s eyes follow a little too close, you blow her a kiss like it doesn’t matter at all.

You keep moving forward because standing still will kill you. Because life is a race and if you slow down for even a second, death will catch up.

Nirea Velaran is not ready to die.

She is not maleficarum, but she is changed. Something is awake inside her now, and the whispers are louder each time she touches the Fade. Sweet, coaxing whispers full of promises. Some of them sound like her mother.

Take care of your brother, Niria. You’re all he’s got.

In the morning, Qarric wakes with a pounding head and an empty sleeve. He never asks, but he watches her more sharply, reprimands her more often, demands more of her in training.

When she is fourteen, blade tucked into the top of her worn boot, he gives her a warning. “You aren’t as strong as you think,” he says. “No one is.”

“Is it much farther?” Ria jabbed the bladed end of her stave--a fancy enchanted thing Vivienne had insisted on--into the sodden ground and squinted through the trees, praying for a glimpse of the promised coast. The air smelled of salt and death and the sea, but she hadn’t seen a single crashing wave yet.

“A few more miles yet,” Blackwall answered irritably. Ria had elected to blame the weather for his foul mood. “Same as it was five minutes ago, Your Worship.”

“And five minutes before that,” Varric added.

“Conditions are much safer inside the ship, Nyria.”

“Didn’t come all the way out here to be safe, SAM.” Another rock plinked hollowly against the wall of the prefab. “We came to see new planets and shit. That’s what I’m doing.”

“There is not much to see at night.”

“Not much to see during the day either. Sure as hell nothing worth dying for.” She huffed a bitter not-quite-laugh.

She spoke before he could even open his mouth to ask the question. “You’re overthinking it, little brother.”

“We’re twins,” he said, mostly out of habit. “And I’m taller.”

“Your hair is taller.”

“This is serious, Nyria.”

“So is your hair.” She reached out almost absent-mindedly to ruffle it, eyes still fixed on her omni-tool, but he dodged out of the way.