Pivblog

its that time of the year again! my art summary for 2025... once again i have completed my general goal of being able to find at least one (1) drawing across each month. really cut it close with august, that one was from the 31st lol

---

once again, my yearly art summary! i met my general goal, which is to draw (by complete happenstance) one vaguely substantial thing every month. hurray! woo

most of these were posted on my sketchblog except for that april eddie (im waiting for... the thing its for... to be released) and that july shane (i forgot LOL). thats about on par with last year

look at this cool outer wilds model kit that's gonna come out!! im been excited about this forever i'm glad everyone can see it now yay!!!

making the trailer was a lot of fun. here's a picture of the paper cutouts i made

theoretically yes but practically no, lol... ive been entertaining the idea of "opening commissions" for years but the planets rarely align for me to do so*.

i also have that disease where i can only do 0% or 120% amounts of effort, with no inbetween. the former is not worth it for customers and the latter is not worth it for me. alas

hey! do you happen to be at anime expo 2024? I too happen to be at anime expo 2024! I'm helping my friend sell objects in the artist alley at table C02!

consider purchasing some of her many dark souls and video gamey wares. you can also buy some cool stickers! wow I wonder who drew some of these!

haha thanks! the lack of half life stuff lying around makes sense tho. they're old games. half life 2 episode 2 came out all the way back in 2007, the series has had its heyday loooong ago and a lot of stuff from back then has been lost to time. so, yeah, there's gonna be a lot less of it around nowadays compared to hlvrai. half life alyx came out in 2020 and was absolutely incredible, but it's a vr game and I'm not going to pretend thats not a limiting factor in who can engage with it*

it's honestly staggering how popular hlvrai got over the pandemic, but for better or for worse it was a huge influence in introducing new people to half life and it's the reason why a vast majority of my recent friends got into the series. without having them to talk to about it, I probably wouldnt have drawn as much HL things across the last 4 years myself lol

Happy Outer Wilds five year anniversary!!! (wow)

Here's an old photo of some silly Nomai post-it note comics that were on the Mobius office corkboard. Had to have been before the Nomai got their designs finalized, so early-to-mid 2017 probably...?

They were in the fig backer digital artbook but idk if anyone knows that thing existed. Anyway here's a closeup view:

As a bonus heres an unseen whiteboard comic about the black hole forge made shortly after Outer Wilds came out:

it's just idle animation, the movement on the drawing/gaming ones just use the blink slots to randomly change between the "normal" pose and the "doing something" pose. i used veadotube mini so the only thing I directly control is the shift between talking/not talking and switching between the different states (standing/drawing/gaming). they're quite simple, it's just the movement of animation giving it the illusion of complexity. I know there's a way out there to map mouse/controller movement to your vtuber thing, but I didn't look into it because... well. I didn't want to lol

things can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. I'd recommend keeping the designs simple so it's faster to draw and make variations of. it took me one night to work on this one and I learned a lot about better ways to organize/set up my art/file for exporting as I was making edits. if I had a really intricate-looking drawing to start with, I'd have spent more of my time just drawing a single pose instead of being able to place an image in the program to see how it works and how things look in it. I started with just 2 static images and then went "what if it moved a bit" and then added things as I went. breadth vs depth, I guess.

hmm... as for tips...

the talk mouth is on a layer that covers up part of the face when I unhide it. this was nice because when I made a change to the animated drawing/controller poses, I could export out the talking variation immediately by just turning 1 layer on, instead of having to swap/redo changes between multiple layers (annoying). I also had the parts that moved (the arms) in a separated group, so when I changed the thickness of a line on his vest I didn't have to redo that change over and over again across 3 more frames. I still had to redo it for the 3 poses, but that's just 3 times total instead of 1 + 3 + 3 = 7 times total. if I were to do this again, I'd have things set up in a way where the different variations use as many of the same layers as possible, so changing something in one place automatically works for every pose.

and you can keep your life simple. for the animated frames I didn't redraw the arms from scratch for each frame of movement-- I just used the liquify tool to nudge them slightly and fixed up any small sections that looked weird. it ends up looking very intentional but with less work. it's easy to make it look bad though if you don't keep it subtle, I just had to feel it out by doing it.

...and you don't need to do any animation if you don't want to!! I just think it's cool and also a fun challenge. all the stuff I did on this one is built upon my experience making that older one I linked in my post, 2 years ago. the goofy crying pose i made for that is where I learned you weren't restricted to static images for the stand/talk/blink/blink-talk poses.