Ad-tober Day 15: Game Night

haven't seen that in you in a long, long time.

"So how much?" "Eh? Oh, the price of it is... nothing." "Pardon? You realize the opportunity you have, Addison?" "It was always going to be a gift. To apologize for my Juniors bothering you last night." "Ah, yes, yes. I knew that already..."

a soft continuation of day 5, and my initial concept for day 5.

this was an interesting composition that i hit the ground running with. many parts i could've tightened or polished up, but i wished to have it complete over perfect. the initial draft had a couple more darkners in here: a maus on the railing with the addisons on the top right; a plugboy with a bandanna entering the "groce" (name of the store); a werewire in the far background visually between cyber-dashers, checking for rain; and cliq was actually walking side by side with the orange addison.

the first three i forgot to incorporate, and by the time i was done i decided i didn't want to force squeezing them in. for cliq, at some point i decided it'd be funny if he was actually meeting ceres and company at their intended location. so he's suspiciously absent here, but hasn't been forgotten.

that overhead bridge in the addison alley is actually my favorite detail in cyber city. first playing through that part, seeing the little cars walk by on a tiny path and getting to walk under them... it filled me with... uh... what's the word again? but i really latched onto the idea of filling out that part a bit more. i like the idea of cyber city having layers upon layers upon layers... above the cyber dashers you can see me trying to incorporate yet another ambiguous bridge in the distance. i'm aware that there's no foliage in the cyber city we go through, but i'd like to imagine that any sort of park or "green" space is simply slightly out of frame.

wip shot: he's alone on this bitch of an earth

i was uncertain of what the composition would look like, but i did know what i wanted everyone to look like. valencia was supposed to be a part of the piece as well, but i realized cramming xer in there would've messed up the shape and line language i had going on.

something i never sketched out but considered: this painting being a photograph, and drawing someone looking at it through reflection. (of whom, i never decided.) another idea was a collage of photos in cyber grill: these losers are regulars and have populated the same table for years.

the idea of senior pink glaring came from me thinking it'd be really funny if someone got on you-know-who's case for putting his feet on the table. i imagine his parent showed up for something far more serious than being impolite at a restaurant, though.

this ended up being 5-point perspective, sort of. it's my first time attempting the perspective on purpose, and from the beginning i chose not to worry too much about precision as it'd lead to stiffness. which is why i rendered the background the way i did: breaking everything up into bigger strokes helped me focus on the more important parts of the painting.

Ad-tober Day 18: Nose Nuzzle Champs (and, potentially, Day 21's Spamily...?)

the rituals are intricate

part 1 of 3...? this got much longer than i expected it to.

my partner and i have been talking a lot about finding a new home; of finding a better place to start our lives and work hard in a place that welcomes it. i wish we could step foot into Castle Town ourselves as innocuous denizens; as two vagrant travelers walking into a new home, hand in hand, becoming part of the scenery. i'd like to take them to the streets of such a place and dance, like old strangers and new friends, and hear the sound of clumsy footwork and hard laughter bounce back at us from the walls that cradle us.

those feelings, of love and of yearning, i think may be why i worked on this piece to the extent that i did. i got a little too ambitious, and i did take shortcuts at the end to simply see it complete, but i'm happy to have it made and have it be some level of "done".

originally i wanted the rest of the seniors in this piece, but they were always going to be in the foreground (as they were surrounding the booth). they've instead been replaced by cliq and an extremely out-of-shot sweet. apologies for the lack of sweet. to make up for it, here's something i drew earlier today:

i aim to scale back the effort i'm putting into these for at least the next week, but we'll see if i hold myself to that.

originally this piece wasn't this... big. 4800x3200px, 300dpi, that's probably a chunky file. i draw big and this was bigger than usual. i attribute it to the fact that the first thing i sketched was pink sr and sev-5 dancing as a rough draft... and i got so attached to the pose, i decided to build the scene around the two. i knew i was going to set the scene in the courtyard where the addisons started their pop up, and when i knew that i was going to draw the seniors dancing, i knew i wanted ralsei to also be in the picture.

though ralsei isn't baked into the background (i can take ralsei out), he ties in so well into the scenery that it feels odd to take him out.

canonically, for this piece:

ralsei is totally daydreaming about dancing with kris and susie

that rudinn's the same one that started the Fan Club.

sweet and k_k are playing music. and cap'n is either flirting with clover in the other room, or is with the other addisons judging the taste of cd bagels together (he wasn't sure if any of them were mademoiselles, and they weren't sure if he was going to buy anything, so somehow their energies canceled out and they just started hanging out.)

if my partner were a darkner, i think they'd be a cute robot character. and if i were a darkner, i'd probably be something yellow and scattered.