In which every post begins with a song recc in the style of ancient websites now lost to Men

Old school gaming, really old school instrumentation, like drums and birds

SO, ABOUT A YEAR AGO, I picked up a second job in order to support my wife, who had a breakdown approx. one month after our marriage and became suicidally depressed, my radical dudes. She couldn't keep working because it was too tough on her, my beautiful people. I had been a full time waitress before; after that I became a full and a half time waitress and barista. It was really unpleasant, my friends! During that time I did not computer, I did not read book, truly, comrades, I barely even did witchcraft. Just Beltaine and Samhain and screaming at the moon. I had only time for working and gay, and occasionally drawing.

This really sucked. I thought it would be a temporary measure but it was not, good people. I had two jobs most of the year and it was awful. Like, I don't have a cutesy qualifier making it sound better than it was, it was awful. Things absolutely sucked. While I fucking ground myself down to afford my house it filled up with a bug infestation and became unlivable. I hit a wall a few months ago and made the choice that wife and I will be moving in with my parents for a while and searching for jobs around them, in what should be a much, much better job market. In the meanwhile, I've been working one job, getting to clean my house, and ~writing fucked up gay fanfiction~ again. Am hopeful, but very scared, my dear ones. In my heart I don't really feel like I'll ever get a good job but I know how I'll feel if I don't try.

At any point in the year I've been gone I was playing at least one Suikoden game and am 150,000 words deep into a long form gay Suikoden I fanfiction. That's just where I'm at right now. If anyone wants to talk about Suikoden, I'm SO fucking ready. Me and my dubcon trippy dream sequences are deeply and painfully ready. My dudes.

I don't know if or when I'll ever post that thing. It's deeply divorced from its source material in tone and characterization by now and I just keep diving deeper and deeper into a hole that only leads to underage Tir/Luc and broken bones.

 

Because this is a different post it needs a different MUSICAL TRACK. So what are the referance.





My arts, I have been working on. Underrated, traditional art is in the digital age. Better arts I am producing, even now.

 

Welcome back to the forum!! absolutely gorgeous, that art is, especially the hair shading and teeth/tongue on the second one :D

 

Welcome back! I'm sorry things have been so unrelentingly shitty, and I hope they get better. And I agree, your art is stunning.

 

Thanks *u* I hadn't even realize it had been so long. Time got really piecey for a while and after a month of having one job I feel like I'm breathing.

Really thanks for the compliments ^u^ I never really showed my art online... ever, I think I had a DA with five pictures on it when I was in middle school, and not really since then. I couldn't see the point since I only drew smudgy pencil drawing that looked bad online and didn't own a scanner. Now I've been working almost exclusively with ink for a year lol and starting to feel like I'm making things that could be show-worthy with a little more polish.

Here's a bad phone picture of something I've been really pulling out the stops on and which will probably be good once cleaned up, not that I'm sure how to do that. Don't ask me how I've gotten to the point in my life where I spend days on patalliro fanart of all things.

 

ooh, I love the sleeves and the boot lacings on the top one!

 

I'm really sorry to hear how hard the year's been, really hope stuff will start looking up a lot more soon! You got this, the fact that you kept going with that much work is incredible.

As always, your art is a stunning inspiration <3

Also! I have pre-ordered a ~thing~ that should arrive at mom and dad's house sometime in august. It is your birthday present, though there are two copies of the thing and one is for me. which is a weird energy for a birthday present but alas, the ocean that divides us made this method of ordering and shipping by far the most cost effective. i told mom about it as well and she said she'd put it in my room, so if you're still at theirs by then just grab it, otherwise probly either mom or i will let you know it's there when it arrives!

 

I wanted to highlight my favorite part of your post. What a wonderful use for pop culture phrasing but I'm sure it will have excellent energy.

Dang at the time it mostly felt tiring... more than anything I just wanted time to do something else. I don't know how to explain it, the amount of work was fine, I could do the work, it was the fact that I felt like I didn't get to do anything else, if that makes sense.

The hardest choice in moving was having to separate from the pagan group but there are two universalist churches in that area to check out, and there sare always under the table pagan events in any city, you just have to wiggle your way in. It's networking.

I'm probably going to still be in mom and dads house for a bit... I have no idea how long it'll take to find a job I actually want... I'm scared it'll take too long and I'll really tax their hospitality. My goal is the public library system, which offers part time positions at 'you can buy groceries AND pay a bill' per hour, if that fails, mom showed me a website fora bookstore/coffee house/bar, SO THERE'S THAT.

 

They will stare unbelieving at...


Art post separated into two posts for COMPARTMENTALIZATION :D

This is... like... 70% of a huge ink painting I made of Amalthea from The Last Unicorn, film version. I only realized when I went to scan her that she's actually too big for my scanner so Darling is going to take her into work and scan the whole thing eventually. It... happens... I guess.

This one went through like. Ups and downs. Took me about a week or two and six sessions to finish it. I had a different color palate in my head entirely when I started and in the end I wish I had kept the palette tighter and the colors lighter and paler, but I got really carried away. That said I also like how bright it looks when scanned? I can't wait to see how the fancy work scanners make the colors look. Who knows??? Is mystery.

My favorite part was when I took it to church to do the inks and no one said any dumb shit like 'that lady's naked.' I always hated that. I know the lady is naked. Can you not see the good sense and care I employed in creating tasteful nudity for your viewing ease.

But yeah, I'm going to get her rescanned some time in the next few days so that I have the full version in the digital world!! Because I can and I like her despite not being 100% pleased with how the color scheme/overall flow of the image worked out.

Don't even know if I want to talk about how The Last Unicorn is. One of my favorite books, ever. Or how I still literally cry every single time I watch the animated adaption, more than once. My favorite scene is the one when King Haggard corners Amalthea in the tower and Christopher Lee delivers my favorite speech I have ever heard him give, in anything, swear on my LIFE, how about u.

 

And now, who's ready for design doodles?? Who's ready for SPECIAL INTEREST design doodles??? AAAaaaa

Surpassing Love, an intro theme 200% better than the rest of the soundtrack, unfortunately

What follows is... five?? Separate outfit redesigns for several characters from the Suikoden series. That's just what I was doing for a while because I wanted to play with color and Suikoden has been an obsessive focus for about a yearrrrrrr or more now. LOOK, I never mentally shifted out of 16 bit and the whole premise of the series is that you gather not four, not six, not like, 20, but ONE HUNDRED AND FUCKING EIGHT SEPARATE CHARACTERS to build an army and accomplish various societal shifts in a pretty well-done fantasy world. I'm autistic, give me a fucking break. Typically like half of those 108 characters are people you can put in your party with like... hella... customization and... there are six characters in two rows and how you build your strategy depends on where everyone is on the grid and... aauuuha ha ha haaa I'm so fucking caught in this stupid retro gaming web

Anyway let me go by character or whatever. Spoilered because of length.

Spoiler: Luc

Luc is in the first 3 Suikoden games, which is rare, most characters don't carry over in so many games. He's a pure magician who literally can't melee attack and his main element is wind, which is usually bright green or yellow in Suikoden. Don't... don't read his wiki page if you're curious about playing the games. Please don't. His whole life is a spoiler. Here's an image of how he looks in Suikoden 2 for comparison, since that's the outfit/image I was riffing off of.

The black and white image also has influences from Sarah's dress in Suikoden 3, which I was thinking of because they're wearing clothes from approximately the same culture?... Please don't read her page either unless you want extra hot spoilers.

Spoiler: Jeane (nsfw warning for huge sideboob)

So, she looks like that in the games. Dawg ok Jeane is one of my favorite characters though, she's a mixed battlemage who can adapt to just about every element. In Suikoden 4 she's one of your best possible party members since she can take to any kind of magic and has an insane amount of spell slots. I drew her as I thought she would appear in Suikoden 4 in particular, which takes place in a chain of tropical islands, hence the tan. Color wise this ended up super weird but I like it anyway; I liked the outfit design and I jsut kept having fun with the colors, so though I pushed it too far and got weird in some parts I just smile when I see this drawing anyway.

And in case you're like, oh, those are stupid outfits, is this a series that hates women? Not really, Jeane is the exception, she clearly dresses like that on purpose. One way Suikoden stands out to me is the sheer amount of cool female characters dressed well. Unfortunately, I'm bi and love drawing sexy, sexy people of multiple genders.

Spoiler: Hugo, Chris, and Geddoe

So, Suikoden 3 does this really cool conceit where it gives you three potential protagonists, and you can play through really long storylines for all three in one game, or not, up to you, as long as you do at least 1, and then you pick which one is The Chosen One. Whichever one you pick will complete the game and the other three are support.



Hugo is the canon choice in all the supplementary material, and you can tell, but you really don't have to choose him if you don't want to. He's the son of a chief of a hunter-gather tribe and I LOVE his color scheme. His element is either fire or wind, depending on how you play, and he can kind of an assassin build--hits really fast, can do a lot of strikes per round, relatively tough, fun character to play. I didn't choose him. And TBH? My silly little doodle is an homage to his original design and not a redesign and it isn't even as good as the original. DAMN, what a design. Look up all the Karaya villager designs, they are all fucking on point.

Chris is the leader of the Knights of Zexen, a military force that's kind of special ops-y? But Knights. Her super cool storyline deals with abuse of power, every level of societal dysfunction, how you accept or don't accept orders that are wrong in an honor society, being a woman in a male-oriented military, issues of 'civilization and 'barbarianism,' and what you do when you realize that you're the bad guy. Fucking. Masterful. Again, my redesign was just me having fun, I was trying to sort of make an ambiguous good guy-bad guy outfit.

She's a tank. She is my favorite tank. She is water element, can heal herself, and has the most insane defense score in the game. In my final boss battle, she was. The only character left standing. For five rounds. And she won. She defeated the final boss. By herself. However, she was not my choice for protag either.

Geddoe is both my protagonist and my husband, and he's flawless. He's flawless, do you fucking hear me. Geddoe is a fucking beast and I will hear no arguments to the contrary. I. Love. Him.

Listen. He's a mercenary. He works for the Bad Guys. He is a merciless career killer, he's a middle-aged wreck who's ruined most of his personal relationships, he honestly is kind of weird looking, AND HE CAN BE YOUR PROTAGONIST. In a JRPG. Look, I'm not taking arguments. Geddoe is the ideal.

Anyway, battle-wise, he's a black mage. I know, right? I was so fucking confused at first. Yeah, he's a good melee fighter. But he's a battlemage, and he's one of your best mages in the fucking game. He takes to fire well but his element is lightning, and there, is, literally, no, one, who, can, do, more, magical, damage, than, him, with, his, particular, lightening, rune. He's your best black mage. I'm just, I'm crying. Geddoe is a walking, murdering trope subversion, and, I love, I just love him. I JUST LOVE HIM. that's my fucking champion. You can play this man for the whole damn game if you want to. You CAN be Hugo. OR YOU CAN BE GEDDOE.

I drew him in some kind of weird military scale mail because he's undercover in canon but what if he had a sickass military mercenary outfit? What if.

I... yeah, I like the Suikoden series. I want to caution that I'm selling Suikoden 3 hard but it had some weird production issues and the ending is kind of flat and it's usually considered the worst game in the series. I could talk at length about that but I'm going to not right now.

Overall, I recognize this image is sketchy and loose and not great, but every time I flip to it in my sketchbook, it makes my eyes happy to look at. Love the color schemes, love these people. :)

Spoiler: And just a little ink doodle of Lazlo

Lazlo is the protagonist of Suikoden 4. He's a sweet little bi cupcake. Look at him and tell me he's not. I drew him in a kind of kitshy punk outfit while watching Stranger Things with my parents and I just like his Nani legs here ha ha ha.

...Alright, I should be fair and describe his battle system like everyone else. He's a dual wielder and so well-balanced as a protag that he's a little dull? S4 had my least favorite battle system out of the ones I've played, full disclosure. Every other Suikoden game gives you 6 party members but S4 only allows four, which is weird for a game with like 50 playable characters. It also has a stupid high encounter rate so it feels so much more boring and repetitive than the other games in the series, so that's the weakness for that one. He does specialize in Pain magic which rebounds on his own HP in different ways and sometimes party members too so that is cool.

 

I really love the way you draw bodies - they look really natural and realistic!

 

Thank you!! That's something I have worked on so I really appreciate that. I always start with a sketch of the bones, and sometimes a muscle layer on that, and they're really light sketches but that's just how I've learned to draw. If I get to a final layer, where I'm drawing skin and clothes, and everything that goes into a human body can't fit under it I can tell. And actually when I was drawing Amalthea, I was thinking 'I really want her to look absolutely average, not too artificial or poised, it's not true to her character' while I was drawing her, so I'm proud that sort of thing comes through.

 

Where did all the happy endings go? Where can all the good times be?

We finally got a decent scan of Amalthea!! Yaaay! It took about three or four separate scanners and lots of tried because I live in a city where improving anything in any way or fixing decades old broken fucking equipment is being fancy and giving yourself airs!! 8) But enough of that.


I had to reduce the size of the file quite a bit to do a simple upload to Kintsugi but it doesn't seem to have changed the colors at all so that's alright. Behold!! After many failed scans, one that's at least the full image!! The colors are still a little duller than they are on the page but that's the nature of traditional art. I still find myself wishing that I had kept it to duller, more subtle colors anyway, but I just let myself have too much fun here. That's been what I do, lately... don't pull back. Do something big, bold, and weird, and see if it works. But I hope it's an ocean that one can imagine a lot of magical creatures being trapped in.

One of the rules I live my life by came from The Last Unicorn. It was incidental--I had long forgotten this part, but when rereading the book at age 15, it struck me. I saw both the meaning of some of my own previous actions and a person I wanted to be in it. In criticism of Mommy Fortuna, a witch, using dragons' livers to cast her spells;

"Speaking of livers," the unicorn said. "Real magic can never be made from offering up someone else's liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back. The true witches know that."
​

That call to fully honest intentionality really compels me. It has always made me ask, do I really mean what I'm saying? Am I fully matching what I'm saying to what I'm doing? When I say no pressure, is there really no pressure? Am I trying to use subtleties or guilt to get what I want instead of just asking for I want? And am I really offering up my own liver, or am I expecting someone else to pull theirs out? Am I ok with making a sacrifice, or am I secretly hoping to get off the hook?

It's been one of the words that kicks around in my head most ever since it impressed me at that age. Am I really putting myself on the line? And will I be ok with actually giving away what I'm offering if it's accepted? How honest am I being?

Anyway, it's a weird part of the book to fixate on. It didn't make it into the movie, which is well enough. It's pretty weird advice. And it would have made a scene with a lot of standing and talking have even more standing and talking, which is poor movie-making.

Unrelated, I just blazed through the ~150 pages of Tiger, Tiger in existence, enjoying so far, can recommend. Really fine art, really beautiful people, really interesting things starting to happen. And fine bisexual representation. Very fine... ahem. yes. Anyone else taken a gander at it bc I've been hecking enjoying it

 

Not really a song recc as much as it is approximately 50 hours of French history

I'm about 30 hours in I've been packing up my house to move everything's fine

My least favorite things I discovered were covered in bugs and bug shit in order:

8. Important papers I was keeping in a shelf
7. The nice glassware
6. The fish tank
5. A litterbox
4. The bookshelf
3. The other bookshelf
2. The other fucking bookshelf
1. The motherfucking vacuum fucking cleaner. Who is it up there who hates me

Positive discoveries of things not covered in bugs, despite expectations:

3. The tea
2. The underside of the bed/ the underside of the couch
1. Absolutely anything I left outside the house in the shed, weirdly enough

 

Aw man, not the vacuum cleaner :( that seems spiteful at that point. Hopefully in your next apartment there will be 1-2 bugs max and they leave you alone.

 

Gods willing I truly hope so ;u; thank you for caring.

 

The upper edge of Edge and the height of romance combine into something I could barely get through but loved to death once I did. I've done maybe 50 plays of this song in the past 3 months. I know every word.

Time for an Arte Poste. I've been having a bad time, as I've kind of enumerated on.... various venting sub-forums on this very internet website. As such I've got a big pile of stress doodles from about the past month or two that have never seen the light of day.... and a couple of nice pictures I've finally cleaned up. I'm going to post some today and some later, since some need a bigger scanner than my home scanner and I've got a little parcel of doodles about a couple of my OCs that I could introduce.

I'm mostly uploading things I put colors on to and in the end made my eyes happy : ) Spoilering just because I choose to upload huge images, every time. My bloggette, my rules.

Spoiler: New color palette for old character

Darling has a long-running fantasy story that he works on from time to time (Darling has been pretty malecore recently, so I'm pronouning differently). The story goes through a lot of changes and he recently did a huge revamp to the map and cultures to make it more realistic. More realistic biomes, cultures, national politics... it also included a challenge he was a little stuck on, which was raceswapping a character he had had for a long time. A character that had been with the story from the start and had been a personal favorite for a long time.

Perceval is a literal macaw. He's a parrot pirate. He keeps a fox on his shoulder. Naturally. So he's always been drawn with bright blue and yellow feathers and bright red hair. He's also from a chain of tropical islands. Darling told me he realized Perceval should probably be sort of mid-dark skinned, because of his climate, but that he had always drawn him light-skinned because of his bright red hair. The hair is integral. We can't give it up. But bright red hair and darker skin looked odd to him.

I obviously said 'challenge accepted' and picked up some markers for a new palette. I was going for some sort of incredibly weird age-fade, like how people born blonde often become brunettes with time. The idea is that Perce would continue insisting he's a natural redhead forever even though only his tips are red now. This was drawn entirely while rewatching The Road to El Dorado as my inspiration, and I think that's pretty visible.

I was sort of zoning out when I drew his outfit so I made something really basic, which I regret. It was mostly making the new color palette work that mattered, though, so we're good.

Spoiler: Terra

This was a picture of Terra Bradford that got away from me. I drew it quite a while ago actually and re-found it. I was in a car on a like 12 hr drive and had a very random selection of working pens. It works because I loooooove limited palettes.

I remember drawing this vividly. I had just started my 2 job life and was so tired all the time. When I sat in the car realizing I was stuck in there for like a day, I was so relieved and so excited that there was nothing I could do but draw.

Terra Bradford really captured my imagination when I played FF6 a few years back and I draw her periodically. I've written a lot of short FF6 drabbles over time and I still think of it as an example of my favorite sort of game. Here she's pictured holding an artist's representation of Lightbringer, a weapon you have to win in a coliseum show down that you don't control your own character in by wagering another rare weapon you really don't want to lose. I save scummed like hell to get it and actually I gave it to Celes, not Terra, so idk.

How I forgot to put her ribbon in her hair I don't know. It's the most iconic part of her character design but I was drawing her off-model in the first place. Even so.

Spoiler: Chris Lightfellow

Surprise, an outfit design on a Suikoden character. I would LOVE to stop drawing these too. She's the same character I dew in villain armor here, but I wanted to give her something in a dress style--literally a dress and dress/parade armor. You first meet her in a triumph parade, after all.

Chris's character should be the source of a lot of fascinating gender politics in-game, and she kind of is, but she deserves more in-depth consideration than she gets. She's a knight, a military commander. She's not treated that way. She talks about how she hates being marketed as a pure maiden, a Jeanne D'Arc sent to save her nation, when she sees herself as a working professional, a grown fucking woman. She's single and unmarried. She's surrounded by men with romantic interest in her but picks none of them, rarely showing interest back, and becoming angry at a couple who press her too hard. But she does seem interested in one in particular, but the relationship would be a political wreck because he's a spy from another country. She never says anything about it. Instead, she pushes it aside and moves on.

In the end, depending on player choices, she either becomes a working knight, a general, like she was before, still unattached, or the carrier of a dire fate, frightened but not alone. When her father, who left her when she was a child, shows up again and offers her to accept the true water rune and the role of a healer-protector, she can either violently refuse or reluctantly accept it, based on player choices. If she accepts it, she takes a support role in the final fight, which you want her in, because she is your tank. If she refuses, it's because you made her the game's protagonist and she will not be side-lined. She picks the true fire rune instead and burns shit down.

When the plot takes her to an all-female hunter/gatherer village, a sort of amazon tribe, she takes her armor off and is welcomed among them with open arms, immediately given access to their places of worship and secrets, because they trust her as a sister. She holds a new sister as she dies, killed by her enemies. She fights because she thinks it isn't right, she thinks it isn't right because of her empathy, care, sense of justice, and trust.

Chris Lightfellow deserves a lot better than the game she's in. I don't even fully know how to talk about her, other than... I really get it. I feel like I'm constantly pushing into male roles, male spaces, and I will eventually be expected to given up femininity in order to go farther. And if I don't, violence and degradation will probably follow. They don't do as bad to Chris as what I realistically think would happen to her in the real world, but it hurt all the same. It hit me harder than I even realized at the time.

She's trying to be a knight and a woman and everyone just hates it.

As far as this actual picture, I loved the sketch, didn't like how the colors ended out, but after some time of waiting, now I do. I think it's an interesting design and I have to re-look at it myself to see the details I did. Success.

I didn't really intend to rant about that so much, so,

Spoiler: here's my fursona

...yeah.

Her name is... Undertow... it's short for Stealthy Hunter Waits In The Undertow... she's an indonesian mimic octopus and I feel that octopuses would have/do have very complicated languages and naming systems, and also would probably be very full of themselves.

So, yeah. Drew this in the car too and it ended up pretty shaky but I like the design. She doesn't strictly LOOK like me but she has my pentagram so???

Colors are shifting, doesn't have to be pink, she's a mimic octopus. Lol.

Next time, Eva fanart that's too big for my scanner, and some OC junk, if I ever get it uploaded.

 

I am now to my great consternation @leitsterne on twitter. You may follow me. I may follow you. I may be following you already. Somehow it found out I wanted a lot of kintsugijin fast.

 

I also want to boost the fact that Ethika Arete on AO3 has written over 100k words of historical fiction feat. Maximilien Robespierre/Antoine Saint-Juste, forward slash intended, I shrieked with joy when I discovered the existence of this and have been in a state of rapture since

I am filled in my soul with historical fic like a cream puff is filled in its soul with cream and this is the most delicious cream I have ever be filled with, my driving desire for incredibly niche weird internet content and my need for the good, good gay shit are filled at once. EVEN FURTHER, this thing is all of those things I just said and brain-bendingly well-written, as in, both technically flawless and disarmingly beautiful to read. I am in a higher state of being.

Friendly reminder that slash shipping real people is ok if they reached megalomaniacal dictator status in their lifetime!

 

Took me 30 minutes of scrolling around to remember I walked into Kintsugi to post up this picture I made of my OC. I was flipping through and old sketchbook and remembered about how I used to do Stuff Haloes. Haloes made of Stuff. I was like, I’m doing Stuff Haloes again.

Sioarvaine himself looks odd here but the Stuff Halo pleases me.