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Personal Art!
Personal Art!
In pretty much no order at all, here's all the art I made just for me, for fun, that wasn't in my subfolders designated for specific stuff like comics or commissions or 3D or school or Galaxy Error Zero. Except the ones that weren't in those subfolders for some reason. Huh. Anyway, this spans from January to December, but some of the rest of the subpages on this blog will jump back to January as well. Getting things in chronological order wouldn't make much sense.
If you bother people long enough they will let you work on things. In this case I worked my way into my friend's fangame-turned-official-release and did all the key art for MiniGUNN. Good learning experience for making promotional art! DRAW WELL BEYOND THE BORDERS BECAUSE YOU WILL HAVE WEIRD ASPECT RATIOS TO CROP TO!
(4 is a Great Gatsby reference. Yes, actually. Otomo's eye reflection is also a Great Gastby reference)
I wonder if this will come up again later in the roundup
fun drawing terrible reference
Villain Valentines + a religious pamphlet someone stuck in there
Captain Mastermind Costume Design / Concept Art
(Impractical for the show's budget. But still fun)
These are drawn from memory... they don't look so good...
TS! Underswap doodles during D&D
A bunch of people were drawing Tim Ship for Star Fest, so I had to make a little model sheet and style guide!
I should have probably included that he has no neck because some people gave him one...
My avatar is also objectively a height marker now.
Crimbles also gets a model sheet after I decided I didn't like the old design. I still might revise this one later on.
The very first iteration of Commander Plume. Notice how it is perfect and did not need changing (designs below are her Pawn Squad, who were less perfect).
Nonolith
Nonolith
I got commissioned to do the promotional art for Nonolith! Wishlist/check it out here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3203340/Nonolith/
This was actually a very fun project, JustCamh was really nice and gave good direction and feedback. It was really helpful being able to ask for constant feedback to bring someone else's vision to life, since if something didn't look quite right there was always an answer as to WHY. Plus, freelancing is kind of my dream job at the moment, so having an opportunity to do that was really cool!
I don't like drawing the Nonolith object itself though, it's very geometric and symmetrical which I'm not the best at.
Ignore that, some greedy person trying to afford college must have snuck it in when I wasn't looking
Game Dev
Game Dev
Didn't release much this year! But I did make a few prototypes I never posted anywhere! Gamedev is still fun and I'm getting better at it, but I realized I don't have the time or skills to make a decent game without a lot more practice so I just doubled down on art projects this year instead.
Earl Shades and the Dried Lake
Started this at the end of 2023, but got a good chunk of stuff done for it in the first part of the year. I haven't finished it yet but I do plan to, it's actually fairly fun to play. Although it's more likely that another project will take up my insterest instead.
BoomBox Bash 2
This wasn't an especially noteworthy project, I just wanted to spend a few days making a 3D game and messing with local multiplayer. Not really fun to play at all, but in the end I got it working with on-the-fly add and drop with dynamic splitscreen AND character swapping. Which was pretty cool for me. My big takeaway was that my code base was kind of too clunky again and I needed to simplify things from scratch, which led to...
Micro Jams
Short, 1-3 hour projects just to practice making things quickly without using much existing code. Not much to show or say, they're very simple and bland. Great for testing different ways to code things more efficiently though, which was something I really needed to do after BoomBox Bash 2
Collaborations
Did two larger jams with friends. I worked only on 2D art on Maintenance Break, and did NO art on Gas-EE's! Both were good projects on learning how to work as a team and designate workloads. I'm hoping to update Gas-EE's with slightly more content and bugfixes, but no promises.
These collaborations were also the only public games I released, so you can play them below! Maintenance Break's trailer is also a rare instance of me doing 2D animation! Yay!
Sludgy: Blood Drive
This isn't ever really gonna be a full game but I wanted to practice making stuff from scratch again and recreating mechanics from other games (this is just Mario and Luigi if you didn't know). Very successful learning experience. Special thanks to sirmilkman for helping a ton with game feel, the spiraling stars to help with timing were all their idea.
Blocker Knocker
Made in a day and a half just for the sake of getting to make games again. Another crack at multiplayer, this time using a completely flexible text based input system that lets me assign literally device or keyboard setup to whatever control schemes I want. Being built from the ground up yet again with preexisting assets that communicate player states and collectables easily, it also makes a great template for future projects!
It's actually kind of fun so I might polish it up, add better visuals and release it sometime next year. Honestly, it's playable as-is, I just want things to be a bit more hectic and competitive and look better.
I also uploaded all my music for stuff onto Soundcloud! Not very good music but it's there now!
Spring Semester
Spring Semester
Various drawings from my art classes in Spring, mostly on paper. I took a class on representing stuff abstractly too, so that was interesting. This blog post is not in order at all, a ton of fall/winter stuff was above this point.
skits I wrote for Theatre Club that semester
Vineshatter
Vineshatter
If you dig through my drawings and sketches from the past few years you might recognize these characters! A lot of characters from old or scrapped game projects (Earl Shades, Sludgly, lightbulb hint guy from multiple projects,) or created for a specific event have stuck in my head, so I've been tossing around ideas for a world for them to all live in. This was the first year I fully committed to doing their dialogue and started sticking ideas to the wall to see what worked. Lots of variation between each test and a lot more experimentation left before it goes anywhere, but it's working its way towards a full comic series! I'm really glad I get to take these characters out of my head and share them with the world in some degree, they're really fun to draw and write.
Above was my first real test comic, figuring out what things would look like and how characters would actually speak. It's rough! But it set the precedent for Sludgly and Gimbal being the heroes. Earl Shades had to be made more normal after this no one liked his overengineered personality (especially in the game prototype I made).
Below are comics made for Candycorntober to test art styles and better introduce characters.
Zine made for an Illustration event at my school.
Fall Semester
Fall Semester
I took a lot more art classes, so there's a lot more stuff I normally don't do here, so it starts somewhat rough but led to a lot of improvement very quickly. One class also had us redraw 10-20 scenes from different movies each week, so those are a bit rougher because I was trying to get the workload done in less than 700 hours.
As our reward for drawing a bajillion real people we got to do make our own key art from a game we liked so I chose Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga because it's really funny and has some fun character designs. Here's all the thumbnails as well as the final version
(this is my favorite drawing of Mario I've ever done but I didn't like the rest of the image much)
I really like my Vineshatter characters if you can't tell
This was a final assignment we had a month and a half to do and I finished in 3 weeks and the teacher absolutely grilled me about that fact for the rest of the semester and made me "follow proper process" and give me more negative notes than anyone else in the class (which my classmates actually approached me about). That has slightly hindered my ability to enjoy what otherwise is probably the best thing I've ever drawn! Very proud of how it came out, I just didn't like that class at all. Anyway! I entered the first color draft in an art show of 80 pieces and won top 5! Which was a really surreal experience that I'm very thankful for! And also made me think that maybe I did not need to keep working on it in that class for another 4 weeks!
To actually talk about the story in the image: I was inspired to break the rules of the assignment (see interview with Em a litle ways below) and make it into Vineshatter concept art, using the BigSmall BeeHive area I drew in 2023's Candycorntober because I really loved all the ideas behind that. You can't see it, but it's hanging on an absolutely ENORMOUS tree reaching all the way into space. Or maybe everything except the tree is just really really small. Who knows. If I ever make a Vineshatter game (which I probaboly won't), this city's gimmick would be a lot of hex-themed sliding/flying puzzles, platforming on the traffic (they all have flat surfaces on their heads), and really weird size things. Here, they're visiting the capital to work with the Monarch Bee to help destroy the bad guy's energy siphon. At some point, Sludgly also probably gets exposed to the area's weird size properties and turns into a Kaiju. Sludgly, being a little kid, would then go on a rampage and be the boss for the area. Unfortunatly I only had that idea while rendering it, otherwise said Kaiju would be there and things would be significantly more chaotic.
This was one of my favorite projects from the semester- a senior interview. I learned a lot from it! And it was fun to do an interview and get to format a lot of text like this.
Galaxy Error Zero
Galaxy Error Zero
Galaxy Error Zero! Boy, now THERE'S a big project. This is an idea for a movie I've been bouncing around in my head for 2 years or so, and I'm really happy with where I got with it! The original pitch was an improvised puppet show of sorts with my friends loosely parodying Candace Against the Universe based on an inside joke, which then morphed into wanting to make an animated series (I do NOT have the time to do that), to just a book with some illustrations. And the tone went from lighthearted galaxy trotting shenanigans to probably the highest stakes story I've ever written, so it was great to get to get to stretch my writing muscles without the constraint of having to draw/animate every single action. I could create a longer story faster with more depth to characters than I'd ever really tried before. And it was really fun! Like... forgot-about-ANYTHING-else-for-hours-on-end kind of fun. I actually had to make sure I only opened up the doc to write on days where I didn't have any other projects or social obligations and had already eaten.
The initial spur for this project came from Chris Hall's Creative Writing Class, where he gave us complete freedom to just write pretty much whatever and get an entire class worth of feedback on stuff! It was a great environment with a ton of really cool people, and it's also how I met one of my closest friends, who still keeps doing workshops and feedback on stuff with me to this day!
This was a pretty big thing that I really wish I'd gotten to finish because it's possibly the most consistent fun working on a project I've ever had, but it heavily references events in Bacon Pasta Comics that I'm not going to get to without at least 2 years more of work. So for now, it's in stasis... even though I already wrote the entire plot outline and the first drafts of Chapters 4&5....
Final note on this: it isn't done! And as much as I enjoyed writing it, I'm not the best writer! I definitely overhyped it a little bit. But, it was a passion project, and if you (the reader) leave comments, I can learn a lot to make future things even better! Don't be afraid to rip it apart either, as long as you do so with the intention of improvement.
(but do also say nice things too please those because it helps me know what I do well and make me feel a bit better)
If this pitch somehow sold you on it at all, check out the rough drafts of the first three chapters here! And leave some notes for me! It means the world to me.
Do keep in mind this is NOT a finished product. The opening especially is rough, and you can add comments to help make it better!
I kid you not this joke edit from 2021 inspired this whole story and shaped a pretty good part of my creative endevours.
Here's some of my favorite drawings from the story
This was a joke trailer from 2023 riffing off the lame poster that gave me a ton of room to mess around with setting and plot. I didn't make it this year! But it's relevant so I'm squeezing it in here too.
For stuff I DID make this year, below are two test animations that don't quite follow the plot but show how this project would look. I love stylized 3D! Speaking of...
3D and Animations
3D and Animations
I really sat down and made an effort to use the stuff I've got to make the coolest animations I could! In the process, I broke quite a few rules of perspective and eucclidean geometry. Then I made some new models and a bunch of really cool renders! 3D stuff is fun but honestly I forget that I can do that most of the time.
One Off Comics
One Off Comics
Some of the Birthdays/Special Events/Noncanon Comics, mostly made for friends. There's actually quite a few more here too.
And finally...
Bacon Pasta Comics
Bacon Pasta Comics
Despite big breaks from increased workload on the next arcs and juggling projects, these are still going!. This was the 3rd year of these, and wow is it starting to show. Better writing, more creative composition, cleaner designs, nicer colors, actual backgrounds, and (hopefully) funnier jokes; these are my #1 source of creative improvement. Art classes help too, but the sheer volume of drawings and writing I put into the comics makes them a worthwhile investment. I'm not going to post them all here, but I made quite a few for the level of quality and detail that they're reaching. Most importantly, I finished AMBUSH (the 13th arc), which is my first full-color comic and crack at writing a significant villain. I started drawing this arc mid-2023, so it was pretty important to me to finally get to show it off to the world! And I've been planning it for even longer! If you go back through Acting Bridge, there's a good number of hints towards this, and even Star Fest (written after but finished before) establishes a few abilities that appear in it. In fact, Star Fest technically takes place the morning/afternoon before Ambush kicks off, but I don't consider it canon exclusively because Josh and Jetveam aren't with the group in Ambush but was with them in Star Fest. That's literally the primary reason. I couldn't think of a way to justify it.
After Ambush, I also got a good FOURTEEN comic pages done, but I'm not including them all here because I haven't finished the arc and don't want to spoil it before then. The first two pages are included here though!
Quick Links:
1-2-skip-a-few (go read the rest of the pages here)
(they're singing the campfire song song)
So, SO much concept art.
Star Fest (Bacon Pasta Comics spinoff)
Did this actually happen? This was an April Fools joke gone horribly over scoped and it feels like a fever dream from how fast I pumped stuff out and the amount of organization I had to do. Glad I did it and it was cool working with everyone. On the other hand though, it was intense to make sure 2 pages came out every week, especially when multiple people didn't meet their deadline (I made 2 filler comics in a day each because of this!!!). One literally didn't finish their comic until a month after Star Fest wrapped up??? So??? Glad I hosted it but I am still a bit bitter about it. On the bright side, I absolutely loved working with this color palette and getting to draw more of my friends.
Anyway, check out other people's contributions here.
This is one of two visual references to A Hat in Time's Dead Bird Studio in this arc. Both were entirely unplanned, not intended at all for this project, and retooled from boredom doodles!
Go read Dr. Cataclysm, please
Scrapnik Isle
Murder on the Owl Express (Hat in Time)
Braut Cass is a reference to a skit I wrote this semester. Their actor also appears in this comic.
This was so close to having Alex grab Skooka immediately jump through the portal to Ambush Arc, but it was too weird to leave Josh, JetVeam and Lu behind since they join halfway through that arc.
Bonus Cover for the 3rd anniversary of Bacon Pasta Comics, which featured a compilation of what the real life Bacon Pasta Network deemed as "the funny ones"
Break Time Arc (preview + concept art)
Wrap-Up! + Top 6 Creations
Wrap-Up! + Top 6 Creations
What a year! This is by far the most art I've made in a single year. 3 different comics, big collaborations, lots of writing, performing skits I wrote to a live audience (not pictured), making game prototypes, starting art school... I did a lot! Thanks to everyone who was a part of the journey!
I love drawing my Vineshatter characters and this is easily the best environment I've ever made, with emphasis on describing materials and a clear focal point.
The last 20 seconds of action especially came together super well, I'm really proud of the panel hopping effect and blur on the legs to show speed building up.
This one is super simple but also very clean and was fun to work on.
Proud of how much story telling I crammed into a single frame.
Favorite pose and post processing I've pulled off in 3D. It's also funny.
Easily my best comic page I've made so far. Interesting action, effective colors, and of course that one panel with the green glowing boxing gloves blocking the water that looks 100x better than anything I've drawn before or since and I do not understand how I got it so right.
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