#process pics

Feral little harpy guy Mickbell... The egg thief saga. Lol right- don't mind my other art I just find funny the mental image of Mickbell, the guy who loves eating eggs, becoming a very trustworthy indeed egg nanny- he does not in fact want to eat these........ Yet. I say that but the true egg nanny here is Rin. Guy just has no other harpies around no companionship, listen dogs are the best friend of man, Kuro's an affectionate cuddles man and it's FINE if Mickbell never lets him down from the nest it's FINE it's FI-

There's still much concept art to do, I'd like to draw much more of this AU but the design's not consistent just yet. Like I just learned cockatiels are zygodactyl? Me shame be immeasurable. 😔 But in THIS harpy Mickbell AU I'm thinking of basing him more on the swift bird <3 I always tend to think of harpies as a mountainous species but this guy lives in a foresty valley I'd say. Two mickrin harpy AUs though is not enough yet btw I'm already working on ferocious harpy Rin x the fucker she needs to hint down because he littered.

The background went through a loooot lol. Mess around with colors, and if it's not working the solution is always to add more black. The second best is making things brown and monotone.

I like sculpting the most so ofc the first thing I started with was sculpting the feet! I used Sculpey brand oven bake clay for the sculpts, it's the nicest home-bake clay to work with that I've ever tried out. I got lucky enough to get a bunch of old dentist tools a few years back that help a lot with the tiny tiny details.

The armature inside the body is made out of plastic coated electrical wire and just general normal steel wire (I definitely shouldn't have glued the feet in at this point, it made clothing so much harder but live and learn...)

Get mummy'd! There's cotton yarn wrapped under the layer of gauze. I was trying to make the dolls way more posable but I wrapped them up too tight and used too much glue so they became way more stiff than I meant, boo 👎 The hands and head are attached with magnets, you can kinddd of see them peeking out the ends of their limbs and shoulders here.

Clara's legs had an extra step since they were bare and it made more sense in my head to make the boots and legs separately so they would stay in better shape while sculpting. The grey clay is firmer and easier to work sharp details into than the skin-tone-beige clay. I glued the feet and the legs together using some sticks for extra stability (it's always good to use sticks for extra stability)

Here are all the hands I ended up finishing, (not pictured: tons of failed hands lmao), I made various poses for holding various items. The metal balls at the wrist attach to the magnet inside the arm and since the joint is a ball, you can twist it and pose it pretty freely! They're extra strong neodynium magnets too, so the hold is strong enough for the hand and the items in the hand.

Heads! I ended up making four Artemy heads because I kept making them too big and his forehead too flat and he ended up looking fricking elderly and man it was impossible... Almost as if he's the only one who I haven't looked at for hours and hours in a dialogue screen. The one I ended up going with looks kinda too young and soft and isn't posable enough but I was running out of time and sometimes you just gotta say "GOOD ENOUGH." Clara turned out so well, but I kinda wanna redo Daniil and make that fifth Artemy at some point... The Artemy pictured above is number two I think.

Painted heads! Painting is really difficult for me, my hands aren't steady enough for this ughhh, so all in all I'm super proud of how they turned out<3 Their eyes look dead only in the way that all doll eyes do. I used a mix of normal acrylics and the kind of miniature paints that come in those little bottles at Games Workshop that I thought were a scam for years until I finally tried them and realised how much pigment they pack into that stuff o__o

Here's some pics of the Bachelor getting dressed, I was too in the zone to remember to take photos like these for the others sorry :( As you can see, the bits that are not visible aren't exactly pretty lmao. I barely sewed anything for this since the clothes didn't have to come off or adjust to that many differences in poses, I did some stitches for Daniil's pants and Clara's jacket but mostly I just glued fabric like a madman...

I freestyled most of the clothing, just cutting up leather and fabric and making it fit the doll and adjusting if it didn't, but Daniil's coat was impossible enough that I had to make tons of test patterns and prototypes to figure it out. I ended up not finding a way to make the collar in the same piece as the front of the coat which lead to an annoyingly visible seam but it's better than not finishing the coat at all... Also painting the snakeskin pattern was hard lmao I've never had to think about the logic of that before.

Clara ready for assembly (this is a fun photo I wish I took these of the other dolls too augh). I was wondering where I could find a loosely woven piece of fabric for her scarf and realised I could just weave it myself so uh that's what I did. Don't have any photos of that process though </3

Artemy before and after buckles (SO MANY BUCKLES!!!). I made them out of Greenstuff which is this cool (unfortunately toxic) epoxy putty that dries firm but flexible enough you don't have to worry about it chipping ever (guess how many fingers that were made of a chipp-ier material I had to reattach while taking the Pathofest photos and forcing items into the hands??? Ok not that many but still annoyingly many)

Hair! I decided to make actual hair instead of just sculpting it like an absolute maniac. This was my first time wigging a doll and it was DIFFICULT 😭😭 Daniil's head was made out of a faux fur pom pom I had lying around, I glued the hair into strips and glued the strips starting from the bottom – Artemy's hair was donated by a yard sale Barbie. Apparently real doll makers use viscose but I would've had to buy that online and I was working on a budget lol. Might have made the process way easier though! (The shrink wrap in the second pic is to help the hair lay down) (I generated so much microplastic cutting their hair I'm sorry mother Earth)

And here they are finished in all their glory <3

I’ve been trying to avoid acknowledging it by writing fanfic (it’s so much easier to be creatively motivated when I don’t have to paint haha) and it’s been a really fun time (I’ve never written fanfics before and didn’t realise it can be like having a book in your head and you don’t know how it’s going to turn out, so every time you go to work on it, you get more of the story – what I’m saying is, Fanfic people, I totally understand you now.)

But I really want to get some more portraits out before I have to go visit family and be away from my Wacom. (At least travelling 12hrs will give me a good excuse to re-listen to the WoT Audiobooks).

So I thought a good way of trying to get my brain back into visual gear would be to revisit the processes I’ve already completed instead of focusing on the frustration I felt with the last portrait and being completely avoidant. I've got to fall back in love with things.

I always periodically save a version of the image I’m working on before I break so I can look back on how it’s come along. I love seeing progress pics of art personally, and love it when artists make videos of it. I don’t have access to fancy software anymore (need another job that gives me access to full CC), so I’m doing what I can with my ancient copy of Photoshop (yar!), and making it make me videos from still images!

I wish I’d taken more of the “between stages” shots so I could see things that really infuriated me which I eventually “fixed”. It's quite encouraging to look at early versions where I was tearing my hair out and then to see the finished thing and go "oh ok, it turned out ok stop being so dramatic".

Anyway! Here’s a short vid of all the progress pics! And you’ll see what I mean when I say I can’t actually draw. Look at what passes for lineart when I do these things haha. I can paint (kind of treating Photoshop like traditional paint), but I can’t draw worth a damn these days so I don’t even try.