AK Illustrate Talk Blog

Updated ref for Wyst/Wysta.

Her design was also kinda rough for me to draw, and I felt like did not super communicate her abilities or personality well (she is a magic user who is a bit of a show off). Thought it would be fun to make her prismatic (Ice) since that is a thing now. Keeping the old ref since it might be fun to make it happen for story reasons.

This will be super off-the-cuff brain dump word salad, so I might get some details wrongs, but i wanna ramble.

Things were really hype for a bit there before ending really flat. Got big "get it over with" vibes which is understandable but also kinda a shame.

Fyora not only stepping down but completely leaving to soul search felt really odd. I know she was having a hard time this whole plot and now has to face the consequences of both her mistakes with Xandra AND Drakara, but her leaving with out helping to make sure the new council goes smoothly feels like TNT saw how much people were hating on her, and decided to get rid of her. Now people are upset she is no longer queen due to there now being only one solo female leader in the world, and I can't help but wonder if this was a "we were trying to throw the fans a bone and it backfired" type situation. I hope TNT is a little more careful in the future about big decisions like this if this is the case.

On the female leaders note: Princess Lunara should probably take the title of Queen soon, huh?

On the Xandra note: If Luxinia is part of the council do you think she will free and try to help her? If anyone can save Xandra it is Luxinia, right? (Shame that people will not know the significance of this with out playing the game. Was hoping for Luxinia to retell it for the website only players. Oh well...)

On the note of councils: I hear whisperings of getting rid of all the kingdoms in Neopia, and while I get Monarchy bad, I don't love throwing the high fantasy elements of the site out the window. That said, I am surprise Lord Darigan hasn't set up a council yet. Dude seems exhausted and like he could use some help.

On another note of councils: Isn't Altador technically run by a council already? And that King Altador is only called that because he founded the place and people thought it would be a good title for the founder? I was always under the impression he was not a LITERAL king, and that was just a fancy hero title.

Back to the plot: This whole time I thought Nyx was a young adult, but looking back at discussions and the text, it seems like she was actually an older teenager??? Which makes blaming her for what happened extra not great. I remember reading the final chapter and wondering when someone was going to reassure her that none of this was actually her fault since she was basically sucked into a worm hole, but that never happened. The sharing the blame thing doesn't work when one sibling went on a spree cursing people with magic-incurable-turbo-depression, while the other sibling's offense was... Getting a well paying job to support her family???

If anything the Virtue-pets Space station ought to answer for this mess, jfc.

On the topic of Nyx, it feels like there was a lot of wasted potential here. Not once did she take a moment to process the fact that she missed 20 years of Neopia's history. 20 years of her younger brother's life. And like... I feel like there were a lot of moments to have that (campfire argument comes to mind). Some of her crash outs would have really hit harder if she was given a chance to really examine this existential crisis.

By far the best part of all of this was Iridesia. Having a prominent character on my favorite childhood game essentially magically come out as non-binary is such a huge deal. I'm used to getting characters who are robots, aliens, or side characters that don't matter. Not prominent, pre-established NPCs. So, sincerely, thank you for them.

I've been on and off working on another neopets comic, and in it, there is a panel where characters are standing in the Faerieland Library/Bookstore.

I took a look at the reference material (And those butterfly wing railings), and decided this shot would be a good candidate for a 3D modeled, rendered, and re-painted background.

You see, while a lot of people use 3D models to trace over, I'm trying to go a little further and use rendered images as a base to then paint over. This is a common practice in concept art, and I think it could be very useful in comics and illustration as well.

Here is the 3D model

And here are the rendered pieces

These are- SELECTION FLATS - For selecting chunks of various editing for easier editing and paint over. These work similarly to professional comic flats, and can be easily achieved with Blenders "Workbench" render engine. UNSHADED COLORS - Colors with out the lighting so I can remove shadow and light from various areas. I do think I messed these up (They rendered too dark), but they still worked for what I needed. (I adjusted the values in post) SHADED COLORS - The shadows and light rendered with out lines. This is what get's painted over, and works well as a base for your painting. LINE ART - Rendered separately so I can easily edit the lines, since Blender Grease-pencil lines are hard to get perfect, and because we don't want the lines in the way of the painting. COMBINED - Mostly used for reference. Fun to A-B with your final image.

Here is those layers shown cleanly (Sorry the pink highlights on my custom Krita theme are like that. >_> )

Here is the layers after I did a ton of paint over work. (Behold my crappy labeling system and totally intentional typos.)

And here! Is the final outcome!

This isn't the first time I have tried this, but this is definitely, in my opinion, my most successful attempt, and I absolutely want to use blender more in my illustration and comic workflow.

The model took about a day to do. It took about the same amount of time it would have taken if I had drawn it all by hand, and now I have a cool model I can reuse! The actual painting took maybe an hour or two.

A bunch of neopets canidae (Lupes and Gelerts) side-profiles, but I also reference the head shape of real dogs for inspiration on muzzle shape and stuff.

Photo Credits under cut