BlueBead's Art Blog

Last Edited: 2026-06-14

🔵About Me

● Heya, most people online call me Blue! I’m a queer, neurodivergent artist who’s been drawing for basically all my life and 3D modeling since 2017. I'm nonbinary and go by they/them or it/its, and I'm in my early 30's.

● I use Clip Studio Paint EX and Photoshop CS6 for my 2D art and Blender and 3DCoat for my 3D art. Photoshop and 3DCoat I only use out of necessity though, they both suck. :’)

● The dates I include in the descriptions of my posts are the date the project was completed, not when it was posted.

● This blog was created in December 2016!

● Reblogs are greatly appreciated! I love reading tags that people leave on my art as well! ♥

❌ Do not repost or edit my art without permission.

❌ Do not use my art for AI training or NFTs.

⛔Things That'll Get Ya Blocked

If you're anti-queer, a TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist), racist, sexist, ableist, or similarly bigoted. Or are just a dick to people quite frankly.

USA Republicans in particular because of enabling direct harm to folks like me. (On top of the overlapping venn diagram with most of the above.)

If you condone pe/dophilia, in/cest, bes/tiality, or other similarly harmful pa/raphilia.

🧾Tags

Note: Links don't work on mobile last I checked. Warning for data-savers: My “3D Art”, “Shenanigans”, and “Character References” tags are very gif-heavy.

Let me know if any links break or route to the wrong place.

— Frequently Used Categories

#2D Art — #3D Art #Shenanigans #Behind the Scenes #Fan Art #Original Characters #Character References

— Main Original Characters

#Dayne Slider — 27, he/they, pansexual but mostly gay #Elliott Talo — 22, he/him, aroace #Rayner — Arguable, any pronouns except it/its, demiromantic #Vue Na Maverie — 19, she/her, lesbian #Copper McCoy — 18, they/them, likes girls #Linnet — ancient, she/they, aroace #Kobi — ancient, he/they, unsure #Squid — ???, any pronouns, irrelevant #Viviana Clark — 17, she/her, unsure #Makana Terigi — 27, she/her, pansexual aromantic

— Side Original Characters

I blasted this piece out in 2 days with a work time of 11 hours and 29 minutes, and I have no idea how that happened. I think a recent medication change either working very well or very badly. Well in terms of being able to stay awake and work through the day and not get bogged down with perfectionism, badly in terms of "my executive dysfunction / hyperfixation is so ass that I couldn't switch tasks away from drawing to the detriment of other things I needed to do," lol. But yeah, 2 full characters and a background in 11.5 hours is unheard of for me.

Working across only 4 work sessions does mean I didn't have many checkpoints to "reset" my eyes though, so there are errors I'm noticing the next morning... ;>w> Nothing major, at least.

I had to keep checking the proportions because Reach's legs looked too long, but no, it's correct. They and Tempest are both just really lanky, lol.

I'm pretty proud of this one! I feel like I got the physicality of the hug down, and Tempest's expression is really fun. Love Tempest. Absolute golden retriever of a character.

Brushes used, from the Clip Studio Asset browser:

Line art on the characters (although I’ve edited it so much it’s becoming its own brush): 楽描き質感ペン (ID: 2199256)

Line art on the background: Crispy Chaos Pencil (ID: 2255551)

Been a long time since I've been in a fandom so heckin small that I can keep refreshing the Tumblr and AO3 tags and barely find anything. This friggin game is going to make me write again isn't it. I'm a visual artist, not a writer, I'm not built for this!! I have a 3D modeling project I should be working on!!

I love the tiny fandom experience of recognizing usernames cross-site though. It's like recognizing strangers from your daily commute. Hello fellow tag-crawlers.

Time taken on the portrait was 8 hours 7 minutes. Tummy hurty was 7 hours 10 minutes. Kinda surprised the 2nd one was so fast or that the portrait was so slow. I guess the portrait did pave the way for me figuring out how to draw this dude. I don't have much experience drawing older folks.

Brushes used, from the Clip Studio Asset browser:

Line art (although I’ve edited it so much it’s becoming its own brush): 楽描き質感ペン (ID: 2199256)

Shading (current fave rendering brush): ざらニュルな水彩+ギザっとしたブラシ (ID: 2246932)

I'm like 98% sure Hakita has said there are no canon heights, so take this with a grain of salt. But if you want frames of reference taken from ripped 3D models, have the heights of my fav characters:

V1: 1.39m / 4' 6.8"

V2: 1.6m / 5' 2.9"

Gabriel (no halo): 1.86m / 6' 1.4"

V1 being tiny makes sense from a "designed to infiltrate earthmovers" perspective. Gotta squeeze through little gaps.

Time taken was 15 hours 47 minutes. I've gotta stop rendering my ""doodles."" I tried using a hard light layer instead of separate multiply and screen layers for shading, and yoo that works pretty slick.

Brushes used, from the Clip Studio Asset browser:

Line art (although I've edited it so much it's becoming its own brush): 楽描き質感ペン (ID: 2199256)

Shading (BIG fan of this one): ざらニュルな水彩+ギザっとしたブラシ (ID: 2246932)

Cat art studies like this are teaching me how to bullshit more effectively, I feel. Normally the perfectionism wins and I'd be putting just as much effort into those backgrounds as the main subjects, but I'm unfamiliar with how to go about drawing a lot of these background elements. So I'm kinda just... mashing colors and lines roughly where they should go? And it's just working?? It's hard to explain how my usual, rigid art flow differs from these, but it certainly shows in the time spent! The first drawing took 6 hours 10 minutes and the second took 7 hours 52 minutes. Listen. That is nothing compared to my usual 15-30 hour workflow, especially for something with a background. The war against perfectionism is never ending, but I struck it a severe blow.

Brushes used, from the Clip Studio Asset browser:

Lines: Mameo鉛筆 (ID: 1870475)

Shading 1st drawing: Alcohol marker set that got deleted and I'm sad about that!

Shading 2nd drawing: ざらニュルな水彩+ギザっとしたブラシ (ID: 2246932)

Wood 2nd drawing: Oil Painting Brushpack (ID: 2094247)

Brushes used, from the Clip Studio Asset Browser:

Soft shading: Oil Painting Brushpack (ID: 2094247)

Hatching in the 1st drawing, text in the 2nd: Messy Brush Set (ID: 2221797)

—

Alright alright these two have probably the most concrete backstory of any of my OCs, so this is going to be a long one. Word count: 1,283.

Quick identity stuff: Linnet is completely gender-apathetic and goes by she/her purely because that's what people tend to call her. She's very aroace and sex-repulsed. Mirroring this, Kobi cares about his gender and is confidently a trans* man and goes by he/him, but is sexuality-apathetic. (*There's all kinds of societal gender nuance here, but "trans" is just the easiest way to convey what he is. He adopted the trans label later in life for convenience.) They're chronologically old as hell, but that nuance will get addressed later.

These two were designed by a highly advanced, now-extinct civilization. They were cutting-edge technology, blending organic and mechanical components. The biggest breakthrough was their bio-mechanical brains, but there's other fancy tech like their upper arms that are flexible and stretchy yet very tough, precision fine motor skills, and fingers that can super-heat for cutting and welding. This served a dual purpose. Primarily, they were designed as adorable little servants to perform a wide variety of skilled tasks, but their civilization was also hyper-militarized, so a lot of their tools doubled as weapons. Both are physically delicate, so they're mostly suited for assassinations. Linnet fights close and personal with high speed and claws while Kobi is a skilled marksman. They're also like a two-member hivemind who are in constant wireless contact. They can literally put their heads together for complex mental tasks. They have distinct personalities, but the line between them can blur significantly. They're greater than the sum of their parts, and they can't bear to live without each other.

Their civilization had a brutally strict caste system, and Linnet and Kobi lived in an unusual crack between the castes. Their creators were high caste and were basically celebrities for their contributions to science, and the twins were mini-celebrities by extension. But at the same time, they were servants and a sub-species. Their opinions of their society were complex as a result. Linnet with her dominant personality especially wanted to be taken seriously as a mature adult instead of a cute little maid. Kobi rebelled against being cutesy and feminine entirely and wanted to present masculine. Both were developing empathy for the lower castes. Their creators were starting to get a little concerned about this expectation-defying behavior, but they wouldn't have the opportunity to do anything about it, because their situation was about to take a turn.

(CW: Injury and death)

Their civilization was living on borrowed time. It was already very old, relations with other factions had soured from eras under its oppressive fist, and the lower castes were beyond their breaking point. It was rotting from outside and within, propped up only by the hubris and military strength of the upper class. But former enemies teamed up against a common foe, and the siege of their home planet was hard and fast. Linnet and Kobi became escorts for evacuating nobles, but their space shuttle was hunted down and crippled, and it made an emergency landing on an inhospitable jungle planet. They tried to hide there to wait things out, but the planet itself had other plans. The nobles were hunted by fauna, stricken with disease, and eventually succumbed to the elements. Leaving their perfect artificial lifeforms all alone. Servants with no one to serve. They got their wish for more independence in the worst way possible.

Things can always get worse. Eventually, autonomous hunter units were sent out to find stragglers. The unit sent to investigate the planet near the escape vessel's last known position found Kobi first. He's not useless in close combat by any means, but again, he and Linnet are fragile. Strike first or strike never, and the hunter struck first. It clawed him in his left eye, shattering it, then snagged his right arm as he turned to run away, ripping his shoulder out and shredding his arm cable. With their mental link to alert her, Linnet was on the hunter as soon as physically possible. She got a strong first strike in, but it still raked her across her side before she could cripple it.

Linnet had to triage Kobi's wounds before tending to herself. She got a hair's breadth away from not being able to stop her own bleeding in time. If she had passed out, it would have been over for both of them. Kobi woke up half paralyzed from a bad blow to the head that damaged both biological and mechanical parts of his brain. They didn't have the materials to fix his arm or eye, and even if they did, they don't have the knowledge of how to rebuild the cable. That documentation burned alongside their creators.

At this point, they resigned themselves to needing to wait a long time before trying to signal for help. They can hibernate, and so they did for a few years, only waking up occasionally for food, water, and to check on the solar panels scavenged from their escape vessel. After a while, they started sending an S.O.S. signal, and they waited. And waited. In and out of hibernation for a few hundred years. Their equipment started to wear out, and eventually they could no longer maintain the signal. Hope was lost, but they were too scared to die, so with nothing but time, they continued to wait and wait.

By the law of large numbers, eventually lightning will strike twice. A different ailing ship crashed nearby against all odds, albeit still around a day's walk through dense foliage. Kobi couldn't walk, so Linnet had to investigate on her own, well outside of their wireless connection. Despite everything that happened to them, splitting up to investigate an unknown crash was the most stressful thing they had ever done.

Linnet's first contact with the survivors was hearing a young Dayne (another of my OCs) being menaced by the local wildlife. (He had naively tried to scout around by himself to be helpful.) Linnet had to throw caution to the wind because she wasn't about to let their possible ticket off the planet get eaten. On one hand, this was good, because it wordlessly conveyed that she wanted to help. On the other, seeing a completely unfamiliar alien eviscerate the beast that was trying to chew your fingers off in a single calculated strike without knowing her intentions was possibly scarier than the animal. Not helping things were a language barrier and Linnet's completely decayed social skills after only interacting with her brother for hundreds of years, minus the time spent in hibernation.

It was a strained process, but eventually Linnet won the trust of Dayne's group through lots of mutual miming, pointing, and drawing. She conveyed that she would help with anything they wanted if they helped her bring Kobi over and let them come along when help came. For the sake of summary, I'm cutting out a big chunk of story here, but they all get off the green hell planet!

They begin to chip away at the language barrier, Kobi gets his eye and brain put back together, and— much to their chagrin— they go back to being mini-celebrities, because it's not every day you run into new highly advanced alien life. But extrovert Kobi had more people to talk to, and introvert Linnet had new planets to explore. She found Rayner after their spectacular conscientious objection, and she and Kobi made a project out of repairing them. They became a new found family member, and the twins stayed close with Dayne and his family as well. The family kept growing, they could go back to creative and scientific pursuits, they began the slow process of healing, and they were free. Both from that hellish planet and from their old caste.

I'm not normally much of an art trade person, but Niyo lucked out by contacting me RIGHT as I was in the mood to start a project, and I saw that he had similar tastes as me when it comes to handsomepretty robots, so I was like...... yeh. 🤝

I think if I ever get accused of using gen AI, I'm chucking this image and the reference sheet I was given at them. AI could never get this man on-model. I did misunderstand his reference sheet when it comes to the arms though (they're supposed to be symmetrical, the angle on one of the arms threw me off). But I don't think I could satisfactorily fix it at this point. 😔

Time taken was 25 hours and 27 minutes. Honestly? Not bad considering the complexity. This was a good exercise in speedrunning line art and little details.

Brushes used, from the Clip Studio Asset browser: Shading: Oil Painting Brushpack (ID: 2094247) Additional shading texture: Messy Brush Set (ID: 2221797) Additional smooth rendering: 먹는빵simple water (ID: 1915353)

Franken-reference!! The holly stock photo I badly pasted onto it is from Pixabay. Also badly photoshopped but easier to miss is that this is actually 2 different cat pics combined, lmao. You can see the lighting change on the left and just under the branch. I got 2 reference pics; one zoomed in on her face and a fullbody. I liked the face angle on the portrait better but wanted to give her hip and tail more room for anatomy context, so I smashed them together. The photos lined up surprisingly well with only a little scaling and rotation.

If you're curious about the "???" at 0:37 in the timelapse, I was having a moment trying to figure out how her neck rolls worked, because despite having analyzed the heck out of the reference pic, it wasn't looking right on-canvas. But since the timelapse doesn't capture the time spent staring at my ref and instead looks like I figure it out instantly, it seems out of place, lol.

The grid during sketching was overlaid over my reference photo as well to give me proportion landmarks. The photo in the beginning was added in video editing, it never touched the canvas. Nothing was traced.

Total time taken was about 12h 13m.

Brushes used, from the Clip Studio Asset Browser: Line art: 楽描き質感ペン (ID: 2199256) Rendering: Oil Painting Brushpack (ID: 2094247) Texture: Messy Brush Set (ID: 2221797)

Lastly, a closeup of the holly because I'm still not over it. This file is chunky print size, and a lot of the oil brushes' lovely texture got lost in the size reduction.

—

You can see that I don't actually know how to draw cats here. No construction, just outlines and eyeballin' the reference. You can also see the ADHD. I never work in the same area for long, heh. Also I was hoping to be able to crop out the top cabinet handle so I didn't have to draw it, but alas. 😂

Full disclosure / behind the scenes: The grid was overlaid over my reference photo as well to give me proportion landmarks. And I created the perspective ruler over the photo and then pasted it on my canvas, because I find trying to setup perspective rulers without a guide to be a huge pain. So I got to cheat on knowing where the bottom of the cabinet and where the crack between the doors are. (The two landmarks I used for vanishing points.) Everything else about that cabinet was me BSing. I signed up to draw cats, not cabinets, lmaooo.

Beyond the cabinet cheat, nothing was traced. The photo in the beginning was added in video editing, it never touched the canvas. Pretty happy that I got so close to the reference that I feel the need to emphasize it's not traced, ehehe.

I love my cat Ammy, she's such a creature. <3

I tried painting light instead of shadows this time, and hmm... It worked amazingly on his face and spherical stuff like his shoulders, but everywhere else it made the lighting look super dirty. I spent so much time just cleaning up. Woes of a textured brush, I guess. I think his hair looks a little flatter than it should too. Will probably paint shadow or light on a case by case basis from now on.

Been implementing more bounced light/color lately, and that shit is so powerful. It's hard to spot as is, but turning the layer off shows just how much weight it carries. Also, bloom my beloved.

Brush time! From the Clip Studio Asset browser:

Raku Drawing Texture Pen (ID 2199256): Line art. Texture removed so the opacity is extra solid.

SU-Cream Pencil (ID 1761353): Shading. Brush density hovered around 60% for most of the process to make painting gradients easier.

I referenced a few different versions of this meme, but this is the one that had the most of the images in it. I still have no idea what depressed nihilistic person is sitting on— or crouching on?— so I simply didn't think about it. <3

August 26th

Bonus Maverie doodle to better show off her head shape, that she has a lil' tail, and to practice drawing tumby in profile. Not the happiest with it, hence why it's in read-more purgatory, haha. Her hair was fun though.

Dunno how long the reference drawing took since I ricocheted between 3D sculpting and designing and that's hard to time, but the Maverie doodle(?) took 6h 45m and the nihilism meme took 12h 24m. Those are pretty fast by my standards! Especially with smooth shading. I've also gotten better at "I see things I want to tweak, but that'll take time and I'd have to re-export files, so I simply won't. <3" Perfectionism is healing...

Iiiit's brush time! Let's see if I remember all of them, I used a lot... On the Clip Studio Assets browser:

Modified version of the default Textured Pen: Line art on the reference drawing.

Default Design Pencil: Shading in the reference drawing and on Maverie in the nihilism meme.

Raku Drawing Texture Pen (ID 2199256): Line art on the doodle(?) and nihilism meme. Watery version used for shading on the doodle(?). (I really like these brushes. Got them while they were briefly free and I'm sad folks can't easily try them out.)

ザッサラ絵筆油彩風 (ID 1751444): The flowers on Maverie's Hawaiian shirt.

Chunky Triangle (ID 1851789): Water on Maverie's Hawaiian shirt.

Freya brush // watered down ink (ID 1855154): Shading on Copper in the nihilism meme.

Default Gouache brushes: Copper's nihilism background.

—

Okay, it's OC lore rambling time. My condolences these ones got long, LMAO.

—Copper McCoy

Copper is 18 years old, agender, and goes by they/them. They prefer gender-neutral terms if possible, but if not they lean femme. (i.e. Call them pretty instead of handsome.) They think they're attracted to girls, but word of god says, "Tee hee, not exactly. They're somewhere on the aro/ace spectrum but haven't realized." They're in a "romantic" relationship with Viviana, who is ALSO aro/ace but hasn't realized, making it harder for EITHER of them to notice something's up. Both are queer-plantonic partners with Maverie, who has accurately guessed that "they're probably QPPs with each other too," but wants to see if/when they realize themselves.

In space with multi-solar-system societies of billions and billions of people, eventually the law of large numbers throws you some anomalies. Copper is one of those anomalies. Their eyes are completely blind, but they have a sense of "sight" that relies on a secret 6th sensation instead of light. To them, things "look" like untextured 3D models. They can view surface texture in amazing detail, can see in the dark, and can see behind them, but there are drawbacks. They can only see surfaces, no color or transparency. So screens and printed pages are blank slates, windows are walls, and rain... oooh, the rain. They have a full-blown phobia of rain because being surrounded in fast-moving "visual" noise in high detail causes unfathomable sensory overload. They can't just close their eyes either, it's inescapable. They were relieved to find a space station to live on.

Speaking of, how did they get there? They spent most of their life in a research facility after their parents surrendered them at a young age. After all, some anomalies are dangerous, and their parents were cowards that didn't even give them a chance. There's obviously lots of resentment from Copper there. As for the facility, it was... fine. There were no cruel experiments or (too much) violation of consent, but Copper hated it anyways. They felt they were treated as a potentially-dangerous novelty instead of a person, and they were trapped with little control over their situation. And they're a very, very rebellious teenager. Their "sight" gives them a huge stealth advantage, and eventually they worm their way out and run away. Now they have a problem though. They're an extremely sheltered teenager with zero life skills trying to live a homeless life. This goes about as well as you'd expect, and their continued existence was touch-and-go through most of it. Until they bump into another runaway; Maverie. They become fast friends, and Maverie has decent survival skills and could improve their situation somewhat. They were still homeless though.

Eventually, the two sneak their way onto the nomadic space station that's the main hub for basically all of my OCs. They get found by Albaer, Dayne's and Elliott's not-exactly-father-figure-but-close-enough, who cares deeply about helping people out of tough situations. He sees right through Copper's and Maverie's lies about what they're doing on the station, but he plays along and helps them for a while to not spook them away. Once enough trust was built, he fully confronts them but lets them know he can help them build a life here if they wanted. And thus they enter the larger story of my OCs.

Copper is extremely cagey about their past and anomalous nature. Even their last name is one they chose for themself. They've only told their absolute closest allies about their anomaly, and their deadname is SUPER dead.

—Vue Na Maverie

That mouthful of a name is because, in Maverie's culture, you just get like 3-5 names. No family names, just hopefully enough names in a specific order to be a unique identifier for you. You can call her by any of her names. (FYI, "Vue" rhymes with "True", and "Na" sounds like the ending of "banana." (I can't think of a better equivalent lmao.)) Maverie is 20 years old and cisgender (she/her), and she's a somewhat aromantic lesbian.

Maverie was a weird kid. She's morbid and unsettling, so other kids tried to bully her. However, instead of being hurt by it, Maverie's response was to get even creepier. It's less fun to bully someone when every interaction with them makes you uncomfortable. Thwarting bullies like that makes her feel powerful, but as a side-effect it pushed away potential friends. But with enough time, occasionally folks would pass her "weirdness test" and like her because of it instead of in spite of it. They were few and far between however, and due to moving a lot, she could never keep school friends for long. When she met Copper, they passed her weirdness test with flying colors. Copper is dark and morbid as well, after all. Now that she has full freedom over her life after running away, she clings to that friendship with everything she has.

Maverie is somehow even more cagey and cryptic about her reason for running away than Copper. The most you'll get out of her is that the reason is a good one, and that she liked / likes the adventures of runaway life better anyways, despite all its challenges. Some folks half-joke that she's anomalous as well, given her creepy tendency to know too much and luck her way through difficult situations, but is she actually? Who knows. ;)