#lykena

I finished this a few days ago but I didn’t post it because I thought I’ll polish it more... but I’m not gonna lol

This animation has more frames and therefore a higher framerate (22 fps I believe). I want to slowly get up to 24 fps, since it’s the standard. It also obviously looks better.

I’m considering making a short animation to a song clip, where there would be a fight scene with Lykena and some bots. I decided to test if I’m even capable of animating her fighting, and not to sound full of myself but I think I can lol

Before I started I looked for an inspiration for the style of combat I wanna show (like if it’s gonna be more realistic or more stylized, and if stylized how much, etc.). I found the first trailer for RWBY, which I saw first when I was like 12 and I’ve come back to from time to time, because the animation there is absolutely beautiful. I won’t start going into details bc I’ll just start rambling but all I’ll say is it’s a shame the show doesn’t use the same style (probably bc the creator, Monty Oum, unfortunately died in the middle of production).

I’m still not sure of the framerate on this tho... I started with 15 but it felt slow, ramped it up to 20, which looked good but I animated too many frames and you wouldn’t be able to see like a third of them at that speed, so I ended up with 17 fps.

So 2 days ago me and my friend were talking about what abilities would his character have if they were a Valorant champion (he plays a lot of Valorant and while I don’t really play it myself I learned a lot from what he showed me). We decided on everything except the ult. And ever since then I was wondering how I would animate it if I had to decide.

So naturally I spend an entire day working on the 3 abilities. I was kinda sleep deprived so the last ability looks like ass (it's the third gif here) lol. But! My friend liked the first 2 and thought they're great!

Anyway, the reason I worked so hard on them even tho this isn't my character and my friend didn't ask for this is bc it kinda lit my motivation to animate again. I didn't do it in sooo long, but now I just wanna do more and more.

Today I animated Ghost/Lykena (4th gif). Went into this without a plan bc I just felt like animating something. It’s pretty choppy and the hair movement doesn't make sense (except the braids, which are animated better than the rest of Ghost lmao). I did choose to animate a close up shot bc of the third gif, where I had to stay on model for my friend’s character and had a hard time. Part of why I stopped animating is I could never stay on model. That, and I kinda go insane when there are too many details. I think I’ll keep doing animations like the first 2 bc they’re the most fun for me. I also found a way to sketch a plan out before I start animating that really helped me. It’s inspired by Multiplicity photography. Here’s the sketch for the third gif (along with the ref sheet that I made for myself but doesn't really look like my friend’s character lol)

Im doing sketches for Lykena's form in Daughter of Death

This is slight spoilers but she's not gonna show up in a while so... I don't think it's really important?

Also her name is said in chapter 5 so it's already known she's in the comic lol.

She looks so sweet here... unlike her other design.....

I know it's been actually over a year since I posted here, because I ended up being very busy on my last year (I did pass and got my degree yippee) and also busy trying to get into a masters program (among other things, like surviving the current political hellscape...)

anyway so I did end up finishing Rana's redesign, as well as the other 3, as well as modelling her and Alies fully including a rig and textures, the latter being my final major project. They're not perfect (somehow both have too long of a chin...) but now I have models I can pose and light however I want so that's cool.

This "painting" (its more of a graphic design experiment, but I did paint for this) is inspired by the new Marathon (as well as the classic, which I started playing. A game from 1994 still holds surprisingly well) and its very distinct visual style. I don't play it so I can't say anything about the actual game, but the art made for it is instantly recognizable, and has this 90s sci fi vibe I absolutely love.

It had me thinking that Old Blood, the world where the vast majority of my characters live in, doesn't have that. Obviously the 90s aesthetic in Marathon wouldn't fit my stuff, but when I thought about what style would, I had an answer pretty quickly - brutalism.

Hence this "poster". This was a test in trying to convey the style of Old Blood with the brutalism poster style in mind. I don't think it necessarily succeeded here - I think I leaned too far away from what Old Blood is - but it is certainly more distinct than my previous stuff already, and I'm happy with that.

This is meant to be a sort of wanted poster for Rana (though they canonically wouldn't have a shot of his unmasked face but for the sake of the poster it's there).

For most of the filters I used a website called effect.app, it does leave a watermark but if you make the thing you need on the left you can avoid it. Anything else is from auto-actions on Clip Studio Paint (mostly for adding scan lines and chromatic aberration over everything in the end)

On the right is a painting I made from scratch for this, which ended up showing less details than I initially wanted just to fit with the rest of the piece. Here's the unedited version of that, as well as the filtered version I'll talk about in a bit:

This was the first time I painted her post-redesign, and I don't think I fully captured her features (underbite, 'lidded' eyes, the scars deforming her face) but he does look much more east-asian as he should so there's that.

The picture on the right here is the filtered version that is beneath the painting layer (it was set to 'screen' I think so it gives it that hologram/tv glow). Initially I planned to have these two combined, glitching into each other, but it wasn't working so I changed the whole composition.

The middle image is of the actual model! It has been heavily filtered and I painted over some parts to fit better with the proportions the painting had, but in the end you really can't tell I think.

The unedited image I worked off of looked like this:

I ended up changing where he looks so I had to repaint the scars obviously. Also stuff like the horns of the mask I like to have longer to get a stronger silhouette.

The left image is the wireframe of the model, an effect that would've been very annoying to get if I didn't have the model lol:

These two were given a gradient map and a bunch of filters I layered over each other to get the result I wanted.

The three small pics on the bottom row are of old drawings I made. Two are of Lykena the Goddess, because her design is unsettling enough without glitchy filters over it, and the middle is of part of a cloudy sky I painted a few years back (the full painting was also of Rana)

The text is pretty basic, Old Blood is obviously the name of the whole universe, and on the left is some random stuff to hint at the poster being a wanted poster. The NGB is the government in the megacity everyone lived in (the full meaning of the initials is literally "Noex Governmental Body", Noex being the name of the place)

On the right though, that's where I got the inspiration from classic Marathon. Without spoiling anything (if you ever want to play a game from over 30 years ago), the story is told almost exclusively through computer terminals, where you interact with an AI called Leela. Every previous terminal had texts from either Leela or the ship's logs, but one of them was different. It had a poem, about a woman stepping into an ashless fire, screaming as she tries to escape... Something. It stood at such contrast to the rest of the game so far, it was obviously important and I can't figure it out yet and it really made me latch onto it.

So I added something similar, that is clear to me since I know Rana's backstory like the palm of my hand, but to an outsider hopefully it seems mysterious.

*Throws this on the ground and runs*

Heyyy how long have I not posted here? Like actually 2 fuckin years or something?? Who knows!

Anyway, I am very busy with uni work (I'm on my final year! Can you believe that bc I can't), and because they require us to keep a record of everything we do, I don't really feel like posting here (where I used to ramble). Also, the whole AI debacle put me off posting my big finalized paintings, which is what this blog was for. And so, it was abandoned.

I also have a secret side blog for an unnamed brain rot game that has consumed much of my free time lol

So, why am I posting now? Well, I wanted to post about this somewhere, and this isn't (technically) uni work, or related to the brain rot game...

On the left, is Lykena, drawn around 2021, last time I made large changes to her design.

On the right, is her newest design, still a WIP, but like, fuck man. This looks like a whole different person drew it lmao.

I am always blown away by the sheer difference every time I go back to that time, even 2021 compared to 2022 is kinda like this, and I'm like ???

Okay I should talk about the actual fuckin design instead of being incoherent lol. So I was going for her being not exactly pretty. She's still pretty, don't get me wrong (maybe I'm biased but I love her ok), but she's flawed. Eye bags, underbite, messy hair, and not to mention her scars. The little superficial lines on the 2021 are cowardly, in my honest opinion, and if you give a character scars, go all in.

In the 2025 version, I also showed her before the story really takes off (aka before she gets powers, and gets injured by her god) and God she's so <333

(yeah, I'm here to love my ocs, who else would)

Also, finally she looks androgynous. I'm heavily considering bringing back an idea I had a longgg time ago, to make Rana Bigender (she/he) because I need to make everything gayer, and she does get mistaken as a man in earlier parts of the story, so like why not?

I didn't even say why I'm doing this fuck. So I want more pieces for my concept art portfolio (more... current ones at least), and re-designing the main 4 from Old Blood seemed like just the thing to do. I've been wanting to redesign them forever now, didn't really get the opportunity until now.

So I will have a full outfit redesign for him in the near future (hopefully). I already have a bunch of cool ideas for it, made a whole moodboard lol

I'm not promising I'm back, but I will be finishing my degree soon (what a concept), and idk maybe I miss rambling here. It's not as... social? As the sideblog (it's... scarily popular for God knows why haha, somehow I got a lot of followers and notes, I honestly still can't wrap my head around that) but I kinda like that there's no pressure on me here. I can post whatever I want, because I know maybe 10 people will see it.

(also helps that future potential employers won't be here, because... it's Tumblr lol)

So I noticed that my profile pic is like, super old, but I didn't have anything with the same vibes to change it to. I also didn't paint a close up of a face in months, so everything I had done didn't fit.

So I just kinda redrew the old pfp lol

In this one, I took a bit of a different approach to how I use saturated colors - instead of using them everywhere, I save them to a few key points, usually for the lightest highlights. You can see it on Lykena’s nose, where there are saturated purples and blues.

I found a reference for the lighting on Pinterest, which is what promoted me to actually start this. The hand I did without reference.

The thing that surprised me the most is how much I improved with painting blood. It’s not something I worked on previously... I had do to some panels with blood for the comic, but the style there is way simpler than with this.

I did really enjoy just painting a big face tbh. Like I said, it's been a while, and it's one of my favorite things to paint. So I should do it more.