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While I was animating I kept running into problems of keeping the characters consistent. Without a character sheet, I just couldn’t keep minor details the same, like chin size or the nose. So I sat down and drew out the characters, including new characters I haven’t released.

Perhaps it’s best to put the animation on hold until I finish the character sheets for the characters I currently have designed.

Skull-Kid! © Valeria- Luna Art

my gyms water themed. yu do water level puzzles and fight swimmers and those kids with the floaties. everyone has water types. knowing the theme, yo bring a team half/half strong against fire and water, just in case because ofnthe last gym. you get to me.

my team is made entirely of gastly, haunter, and gengar, all named exactly 5 purple hearts. i just really like gengar.

the gym? you ask.

it was on sale, i respond.

You walk through the soft meadows of my gym thinking what should I expect this time? Electric types? FIRE TYPES???? You cross over a beautiful field of daises and tulips, encounter trainers wearing flowers crowns and boasting a plethora of high-level grass and fairy types. Than, deep in the forest while you’re still wondering how the fuck I fit all of this into one building, you encounter a ring of mushrooms, a fairy ring. Inside the ring sits me, the gym leader. You step into the ring ready for battle.

I stand up, walking slowly over to you take you’re hand in mine and gently place something cold and hard into your palm. 

It’s the fairy gyms badge.

I’m not even a Pokemon trainer, I just respond to an ad on craigslist for a gym leader and was the only applicant. 

I ask you a bunch of questions and help you out and even give you a special Pokémon. Then I ask you if you’ve been to the gym and talk about the gym leader. When you say no I push you in the gym.

You battle rock types and you are wondering if you’re even prepared to fight the gym leader. When you finally get to the leaders room, I’m there.

I strike up a friendly conversation and ask you what you think of the gym. I then say “Thanks, I made this myself. It’s still growing. So if you come back I can give you the badge then but it hasn’t come in the mail yet.”

At this point you probably don’t even want to be there anymore. I hand you a small pin that is in the shape of the badge but it’s definitely homemade and cheep. “It’s an I.O.U” I say.

After stocking your team with dark types you take the gym head on. Battling your way through psychic trainers with ease, you finally arrive to a large room. There I stand. The battle commences and you defeat my first two Pokemon, Hypno and Alakazam, with ease. You laugh to yourself, after the hardships of the previous gyms this is like child’s play. I send out my third Pokemon, a beedrill. Dark is weak to Bug. “Something bugging you buddy?” I say with a wink as I decimate your team. You leave without a badge.

Supposedly the Gym Leader uses fighting types. She’s a body builder who wrangles Krookodile in her free time. You don’t know what to expect, so you bring a few psychic and flying types, and then make the rest of your team fairly diverse type-wise just in case.

You’re able to battle your way through the trainers and work your way through the Rock Smash puzzle with little difficulty. You meet me in a small room with wrestling mats on the floor and dumbells next to the walls. I’m working out on the opposite side of the room. I set down the weights as you approach. “I take it you are here to battle me.”

You nod. I flex. “Very well. If you want to receive my badge, you’re going to have to fight me for it. Literally.”

Oh, yeah, I’m one of those. You-can-win-with-any-Pokémon-just-use-what-you-like. Whatever, that one multi-types douche from Kanto was pretty predictable, typical species, no tricky type combinations. ‘Cute’, huh? You switch in a few Steel and Poison Pokémon, expecting a couple Fairies. You remember that one Pachirisu story and bring a Ground type, just in case.

My Gym has zero trainers, but it’s full of bright colors and cheery pastels, cushions and stuffed Pokémon toys lying around on the plush carpet — and not in the creepy abandoned-kid’s-room way, just genuinely cute and playful. Feel-good. I greet you with a pleasant smile and offer you candy.

Ok, your expectations have been punched in the face every time so far, but you’ve actually got my personality pinned down, and there is absolutely no threat in it. You relax, and actually feel confident for once.

“I’m not particularly good, let’s just have fun!” I tell you cheerfully. 

There are a few programs I use on an almost daily basis as an artist and illustrator which I find invaluable, but that seem to be unfortunately more secret than they deserve to be. Which is too bad, because they solve a lot of small workflow problems that I think a number of people would find useful!

I’ll keep this list limited to my big three, but it is organized in order of usefulness. (And incidentally of compatibility, as the latter two are Windows-only. Sorry! Please do still check out PureRef though, Mac users.)

1. PureRef

PureRef is a program specifically designed to make it easier to view, sort, and work with your references. I actually put off downloading it initially because it seemed redundant– couldn’t I just paste the refs into my PSD files? Indeed, the only real barrier to working with PureRef is that learning the keyboard shortcuts and the clicks to move around the program takes a little while. But getting over that hump is well worth it, because it has some distinct advantages over trying to organize your refs in your actual art program.

Firstly, you’re no longer bogging down your actual PSD file with extra layers, nor having to fight with said layers at all– PureRef has no layer panel, so you never have to scramble to grab the right one. All images you paste into the program retain their original resolution data, so you can resize, rotate, crop, etc as needed without distortion. If you find yourself needing to adjust the values, color, etc of a ref image, you can just copy paste it into Photoshop, make your adjustments, and copy paste it back into PureRef.

The other great advantage is that you can toggle the program as ‘Stay On Top’ and keep it above Photoshop (or whatever else)– which was always a problem when trying to make a reference collage in a separate PSD file. I find that I just don’t look at my references as much as I should when they are on a second monitor, and this solves that problem.

I’ve used it religiously for about a year now, creating a new PureRef file for every illustration I do, as well as a few for specific characters, cultures, or settings in personal projects. As you can see in the example above, I like to sort my images into little clusters or ‘islands’ of specific content, so that I can easily scroll out to see the entire reference map, then zoom in to the relevant cluster easily.

There is one big tip I would suggest for using this program, if you have the harddrive space: As soon as you get it, turn on the ‘Embed local images in save file’ option. This will make your PureRef files bigger, but you’ll never have to deal with a ‘broken link’ if you move around the source files you originally dragged in.

2. Work Timer

This is such a simple little app that it doesn’t have a very formal name, though I think of it as ‘Work’ or ‘Work Work’ (for some reason.) It’s a timer that counts when your cursor is active in any (of up to 3) program you set it to count for, and stops counting when you change programs or idle. No starting, pausing, stopping, or forgetting to do any of those three things.

I use this one to accurately track my hours, both to inform myself and for commissions or other client work. At the end of a work session, I take the hours counted and add them to the hours I’ve already spent on that image in a spreadsheet.

I have it set to count my three art programs (Photoshop, Painter, and Manga Studio), so based on the settings I use, it doesn’t count time that I spend doing relevant work in my browser (such as looking up an email to double check character descriptions or ref hunting), so to counter that, I set the ‘Timeout’ option in it’s menu to 360. This means it will count to 360 seconds of cursor inactivity before it considers me idle and stops counting. Since it instantly stops counting if you switch to ‘non-work’ a program, I figure this extra time just about cancels out relevant time that it ignores in ‘non-work’ programs by counting an extra minute or so when I walk away from the computer to grab some water or what-have-you.

3. Carapace

I use Carapace the least of these three, since my work doesn’t often have a need for creating perspective lines. But when there is architecture involved in something, this proves invaluable in simplifying that process.

Carapace lets you copy paste an image into it, and then drop in vanishing points and move them around to create perspective lines. (Though you’ll want to scale down your full res drawing or painting a bit to avoid lagging the program.) Like with PureRef, fighting the shortcuts is the worst part of it, though for myself it’s more of an issue in this program because I don’t use it often enough to remember them. Still, it gets the job done, and it’s easy to adjust the points to feel things out until you get them ‘right’. Then you just copy and paste the grid back into your art program and you’ve got that information to use as need be on its own layer.

Of course, using Carapace isn’t a replacement for actually knowing how perspective works– you still have to have a sense of how far apart the vanishing points should be placed to keep things feeling believable. But it sure does save you a lot of trouble once you do have that knowledge.

So, there are my big three recommendations for programs to help your art workflow. I hope people find them useful– if you do, please share so that they climb a little higher out of their unwarranted obscurity! And if you’ve got a favorite tool like this that I didn’t cover, feel free to share it in the comments. I know I’m curious to see what else is out there, too. Also, if Mac users have any suggestions for programs that fill similar functions, feel free to share there as well!