velnna

[velnna]

Chapter 9 is now up both on Patreon and Gumroad 🎉 we take a trip to town before going back to the usual programming

Greetings everyone this is the PSA that now you can get the first chapter of my latest comic in PDF form 🎉 more details below 🔽🔽🔽

The comic itself is a fantasy coming-of-age type story that started off as me and a friend just rambling about D&D character backstories. It's now neither D&D nor a backstory and we're having a blast

I post the full thing in advance + sneak peeks and random stuff on Patreon a lot. Also 99% of the new stuff you see on twitter etc (bug guy too) relates to it

LINK TO CHAPTERS (updated as I go)

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Or see everything over on Patreon

[velnna]

i’m ngl, i’m a big dnd nerd that was running out of high fantasy content to consume and then i stumbled upon your beloved comic. i just wanted to ask what your favorite worldbuilding decision is for utg and if you could pick dnd classes for any (all) of the characters, what they would be 👀

anyway, i hope you have so much good energy! all the good ideas and epiphanies and magnificent sketches to your heart’s desire ♥️

Oh yay thanks for reading! I hope you enjoy it ☺️

There's two major world things that I'm really happy with and helped a bunch of things click into place I think

One has to do with the magic system, or rather how magic works in that world on a sort of... molecular level? People who've seen me do worldbuilding for a while know I'm cheeky about deriving stuff from physics and loosely drawing parallels here and there, and for the under garden I ended up making it so that a lot of magic runs on wave function interference. Kinda. So the "natural" state of things has its own wave frequencies and magic comes from unnatural frequencies being added into the mix causing shit to go weird

By extension deciding this also made it easier to understand why or how some things can detect magic (they'd pick up on the weird frequencies) AND how it's possible to have magic blocking devices (they emit destructive frequencies that nullify it). Does it fully make sense on a physical level? Not necessarily but I get giddy when I can visualise magic mechanics like this hehe

The other decision was to simplify our lineup of humanoid species from the original DnD esque basis, but in a way that allows us to have basically any humanoid appearance you can think of through a ✨mutation✨ cheatcode. We have two "elf" subspecies (basically the dark elf-like ppl and everyone else, including "dwarf" looking folk, etc) and then a species that technically derives from them (and they're all genetically compatible) that's characterised by having abnormal, often insect-like traits. There's no real limit to their phenotypes since their origin is magical and random in nature, and since they can mix with "normal" elves the degree of bugness varies.

Which means i can have insect people, reptile people, horns or hooves or tails or wings galore without needing to come up with a full background for each of these variants >:)c

ANYHOO sorry I get carried away rambling about these things. Class-wise, I only have claims for some characters who... may be yet to make a full appearance in the comic, and would actually fight:

^ Monk??? Not my first claim but after playing an actual monk the ki system started making a lot of sense

^ Lil' sorcerer u_u probably with a subclass or two but sorcerer would hold up as he grows older

^ I think warlock would work for her well enough. Not a perfect fit but I can see it with some homebrew tweaking

^ Ranger makes sense I feel, she becomes one with the avalanches

^ Barbarian.... barbarian/druid???? Uncharted territory here

^ Warlock but you haven't seen much of it yet.... soon.... (I'm actually so excited for her)

^ This one's easy I just snatched her straight from an old DnD game anyway. That's my rogue artificer babygirl

Anyhoo hope you enjoyed this ramble

[velnna]

Hiii i just INHALED the under garden comic and wowowow its so good! I especially love Stasya and Iga their designs are incredible !! Ty for sharing your wonderful art🫶

Ahh thank you so much!! So happy you like it and you like them 🥰

[velnna]

nvm I found the ref

I miss fem staevestarion a lot😭😭😭😭

Here have a redraw of an old doodle whose reference I lost

[velnna]

I miss fem staevestarion a lot😭😭😭😭

Here have a redraw of an old doodle whose reference I lost

[velnna]

<3

[velnna]

800px?! you're doing all this at 800px?! holy shit like I understand the theory (can't zoom in on a4 paper right) but that would kill me i think. you madlad. that's the opposite of all advice i've heard ever. i'm gonna try it.

All of this... 800px >:)c embrace it

It also does affect how brush texture works which is the main reason I love it. If you try any of the brushes I recommend with larger canvases they'll probably look very different

[velnna]

Could you show us how you draw and colour eyes? I really love how you draw them

Thanks!

Honestly most of my eyes are too small in resolution for me to give them any form of fancy shading but regardless the process is always just

1. Lines, starting with eyelid shapes and direction

2. Flats (and the only extra thing I do here is add some skin colour variation in the eyelid area

3. Shadow cast by the (usually upper) eyelid, on a layer in multiply mode

4. Highlight on the iris (the iris is flatter than the rest of the eyeball, and this makes it look like light is hitting it more directly. If this isn't something you intuitively know I definitely recommend checking out some eyeball 3D models like this one). This is usually a layer on add (glow) mode and using the colour of the eye but a few levels darker

5. Still in the same add (glow) layer, I scribble at least one little white highlight. Could be anywhere in the eye but making it overlap with the iris tends to work best for me visually idk

Aaaand that's it! It really isn't anything special 😅

[velnna]

Velnna. Please. You make such amazing art. I adore all of it, and as a fellow artist I gotta ask.

How do I make more art faster. How do I speed up the process.

There's so much I wanna draw and show but it takes me forever. Help?

Thank youu 🖤

I'll just put here something I shared on IG about not getting stuck on details because they're basically the main things speeding up my process, too:

[velnna]

I never send asks but I haven't slept in nearly 48 hours and i need you to know Staeve is the most gorgeous oc I've ever seen what the fuck do I do now

Stare at him a while longer

(Thank youu 🖤)

[velnna]

Is ThuG readable on an ebook?

For now it's available chapter by chapter as PDFs on Gumroad and as full posts on Patreon (also at the 5€ tier you get access to a code to get the PDFs for free on Gumroad). We'll look into sharing it other ways in the future!

[velnna]

He's ticklish 🥺

[velnna]

Streaming some comic https://twitch.tv/velnna

[velnna]

I've seen that some of your characters have names such as Vasya and Kostya and I'm curious, did you know that those were nicknames for Vasiliy and Konstantin?

(Although Vasya is more often used as a nickname for Vasiliy (a traditionally masculine name), it can also often appear as a nickname for Vasilisa (a traditionally feminine name), but by all means, I see no problem with defying gender norms with names. After all, people just randomly assigned gender to them /shrug/)

It's just that it's pretty common for people not familiar with Slavic languages to mistake nicknames for full names (not necessarily saying that this applies to you in particular, because I don't know that). Which is kind of understandable, ngl... The most common example I've seen is probably Sasha, which is a nickname for Alexander/Alexandra.

Again, this is purely my curiosity, not trying to be rude or anything 😅

Your art is amazing🔥

Haha yeah I know they're nicknames 😅 Imma be real with ya, I'm playing very loose with naming conventions for this comic (some characters later on are just thinly veiled cocktail names for one) and in a way mixing short/nicknames, different spellings and actual full names is meant to show that too. Sorry if it's distracting in any way lmao

Thank you! 🖤

[velnna]

Michel and Elias are back together happy Valentine's Day

[Elias belongs to Odi ]

[velnna]

bbygirl

[velnna]

That one meme