Tales of Persona

Traditional Attacks

This is something unexpected that came out of me getting addicted to watercolor pencils right before the event started! I was having a lot of fun with the medium (and Japan had some really, REALLY nice art supplies to say the least of it), so I did what any responsible adult with disposable income would do: splurge on art supplies!

The fantastic supplies really did fuel my enjoyment. Even if the attacks themselves didn't score that much, I was having way too much fun painting my pictures! Especially with the sable brushes I bought on accident. I even got addicted to brush pens and it's so fun seeing what kind of lines I could make with them!

While I mostly did traditional as a way to take the edge of drawing (I was at the cusp of burnout early June), I also experienced some wonderful gains thanks to my prolonged stint with traditional art! I started to be more careful about my marks thanks to the lack of an undo button for traditional, and thanks to it, my sketching phase on digital has sped up a bit (redrawing the bits I accidentally erase is. Character Building to say the least of it). I felt this the most when I was drawing M!Byleth for the first time, as drawing his portrait didn't take me too long but rendering blood did.

I feel a bit embarrassed as I did solicit if anyone would be interested in receiving a traditional attack, but I ended up not doing anything outside of revenges except for one. If only my health didn't start failing me mid-scuffle (and I had to triage things and prioritize my collabs), I would have done more! Hopefully next year!!

Collab Attacks

Two of my collabs were planned, while the rest were more spontaneous.

The first one completed was with @itsmoonpeaches. It was 100% unplanned and probably my most cursed collab as thanks to it, a monstrosity was born (Jeribee). It was supposed to be low effort as heck but. I got too into rendering Jeribee and then Peaches' fic got out of hand aka we matched each other's freak. So here we are :notok: (thanks Peaches)

The second is an illustration set collab with @priintaniere. We schemed to nuke Katha and like with the previous collab, things just snowballed from our Dimisylvix PWP to, idk, Koushaku wa Maid-sama fjsdkfj ANYWAY it was not supposed to have a plot/fic nor backgrounds but we got carried away and got to blast Katha away too ehe

The third collab is a comic with @yanyan46e20. A lesson was learned, aka read the full terms and conditions before agreeing to a comic collab /j YAN'S THUMBNAILS were evil but the art gains were so worth it. I'm very proud of how everything turned out!

I learned a lot from Lin and Yan. Mostly because I decided to be vulnerable with them about my limitations as an artist. I was honestly a little nervous collaborating with them because both of them have way more exp than I do, but they were super understanding throughout the process and were so fun to collab with.

The fourth collab is contributing a Felix sprite to the game nuke that Heiden was preparing for Em. I guess this is technically planned because I knew I wanted to also contribute something to it as Heiden and Em are both friends. It was fun bearing witness to the whole process. Check out Heiden's game here!

The fifth collab was an art collab with @yulgurr. This was somewhat unplanned as I was running out of time to finish my atpay claim before scuffle ended. My health was also tanking at the time and coloring is my least favorite part of the art process, so Yully truly saved me by taking over the colors and background. She did such a fantastic job with my lines!!

The last one was a ShuAke collab for Blair. It was a prompt on the list that I wanted to do the most but I unfortunately ran out of time to draw things. I saw Kuni and Lys planning and knew I immediately had to jump in and try to see if there's anyway I could contribute as a last resort. And thankfully there was! Aka my last attack for scuffle, which was CF!Felix and Dimitri dancing to Will Power.

MMD Attacks

My biggest hitters in the last scuffle (and also this one) are the 3D animations I make using the program MikuMikuDance (or MMD for short). I've been using a lot more of Raycast in my videos and it really does lend a neat effect to them for when I need a video to look nice.

You may find my MMD videos on YouTube.

Regular Digital Attacks

Outside of collaborations, I didn't really fire off that many digital attacks. It was only the Byleth revenge and the silly finger doodle I made on my phone as a self-attack.

Art Gains

Last year, I experienced massive gains after participating in ArtScuffle as the event pushed me out of my comfort zone and got me drawing a lot! This year, it was similar but went in a different, more subtle direction.

The biggest gain I've had was confidence! As mentioned earlier, traditional art helped me think a lot more carefully about my marks and because of that, I'd make less mistakes with my digital art too. So I think my line confidence has increased! I've also learned how to render faster, funnily enough.

The second gain was… learning to lean more on other people, especially those I'm collabing with. Usually, there's only one (1) friend I run to for art advice. The one time I tried expanding beyond her, it did not end well and I got the feeling the other fella was really annoyed at having to entertain a newbie like me. So for more than a year… I hesitated on reaching out, fearing that I will just be annoying people when I ask for help.

Later this year, things started to change. I've been asking May (@meltypancake) about her process, and even asked her to color my lines so I could see a master at work!

(She did such an excellent job hngh)

Scuffle-wise, I've leaned on Lin for some advice on how to improve my Dimisylvix sketch and Yan has more or less guided me on how a multi-page comic collab process could look like. And Yan even took over for certain parts of our collab when my health started to fail me. Yully was also very enthusiastic about coloring my lines and that was such a weight off my shoulders.

Most recently, I asked Katha (@taxkha) for some advice on how to approach comics and she has some valuable insight for me! I look forward to having time to put everything into practice ☺️

Anyway!! I'm glad I've started to take a chance with others after that disaster and it's going a lot better than expected. Thank you to everyone that helped me during scuffle and beyond!

Conclusion

I was really ambitious and at first I wanted to do one attack a day, but my health started falling apart midway through the event and I had to readjust my expectations. It sucked, but all things considered, I've done more this year than I have the last despite the health issues.

Most of my attacks this year are actually art attacks and not MMD! For last year, most of my points were from MMD attacks and I actually didn't do as much art outside of collaborations. Even if it's a lot less than I wanted to do, I'm still proud of everything I've done.