ToxicTophat's attempts at drawing

I’ve given up on the whole ‘treat this like a blog people actually read’ thing.

This was done for a YouTube video I plan to do for Artfight.

The video will just be pretty much what this blog is but in video form. Why am I doing this? Partially so I can hope that more people see my stuff, but mostly so that I can enjoy it better.

I’ve been doing a bit of reflecting recently. I’ve stopped tagging my blogs due to bots semi-recently, but it also means that there’s pretty much no traction here. But, ultimately, I’ve realised that everything creative I’ve done as of late, between the Rimworld videos I made last year, the YouTube, and this very blog, were written not for just anyone to read. It’s extremely invalidating to know that people will not - cannot - care about the things you do. How could they, even if they wanted to, they wouldn’t understand the trials you’ve gone through, the journeys of self-exploration, frustration and compromises you’ve gone through to land where you are now. And this is at no fault of anyone, really - this is just how interests manifest. No, this blog, everything was done with the hope that other people will care, but made with one key audience in mind - someone who is guaranteed to know, relate and care:

Me.

By making a few blogs in video form, it’ll be better for me to digest - for me to convey emotions to none other than myself. These blogs not only reflect my progress in drawing, but also act as time-capsules to my life during that time - my thought processes, my feelings, my values and contrivances. It’s why a lot of these are so personal: this blog is a letter from the past to the future. And hopefully a video will be more enjoyable to consume.

On to the art part.

I’ve known for a while that I have trouble drawing my main persona. Between the coat, the head shape, the hats and just how everything needs to be stitched together, it’s always been a challenge to draw them. Naturally, the best way to conquer a challenge is ruthless iteration. So here I am - five billion iterations of the exact same dude in superficially different poses.

Something that you (me) might notice is that none of the poses have the guy smiling. This is intentional - right now, I don’t really smile a lot when talking about things or thinking things through, which is the format that these poses will be used in - me talking and expressing my thoughts. I’ve made the corners of the ‘v’ mouth curl up ever-so-slightly in some faces, though - that isn’t a smile, that’s more a ‘neutral’ mouth pose.

Also another thing I’ve done is made every ‘slime’ bit 90% opaque. I’ve done this before (in the bird-fishing drawing), but it’s more noticeable when there’s more of the guy. There’s a few places where it’s noticeable - the most prominent example is with the thinking pose, where part of the hats are visible through the slime.

That thinking pose, by the way. I’ve had to shrink the head size a fair bit so it wouldn’t look weird. Can’t really describe it, but it’s another reflection of the limitations of my artstyle.

So I've been playing Fuga: Melodies of Steel recently. Won't comment on it (I feel very, very conflicted about the trilogy right now, despite really, really liking them), but the two characters who I'd consider my favourites - in both design & character - are the Montblanc twins - Hack & Chick. The twins are notable for pulling pranks (though Chick is ambivalent about it in the first game, and inarguably not into it in the second), and, well, since I had a pair of child OCs of my own (and was running out of ideas what to draw), I figured may as well. This piece has Aideen & Rosaleen pull a prank by tossing some hot chillis into a soup. This is pretty much exactly what the twins did in Fuga: Comedies of Steel (Vol. 8). 

Yeah, as per usual, plagiarism is my M.O.

There's not a whole lot to say about this one, really. I've actually taken to the thing I said, like, a year ago where I'll try and draw hands even if the situation doesn't really necessitate it.

As far as it goes, it's going.

This comic is a very, very abridged summary of Anchor's life, from his entry into La Marine to his conscription into the Second Woodland War. Something fun I've noticed is that the first three rows can be considered their own standalone stories - Anchor's, time in the navy, how meeting the kittens has turned around his life, and just a general 'slice-of-life' story with symbolism on conquering alcoholism through his daughters. It's a little scattered, but I feel that the significance of Anchor's story is that it doesn't end at these points - it goes on, and his identity shifts with the changes in his life.

The title, 'Loyalty', was chosen very intentionally. A sailor of La Marine from the age of 14, he has strong patriotic feelings for L'Impératrice and her Empire. He feels he owes his life to the crown, and for the longest time, he felt that the Empire loved him back. The Crown is shown everywhere in Anchor's comic - his belief in his nation is so strong that he attributes all his fortunes to L'Impératrice. The cracks in his national pride begin to show when he's conscripted - he's a single parent, single parents are exempt from military service, but neither of his daughters legally exist. It was no secret that his retirement from service was hated by La Marine, and they jumped at the opportunity to bring him back. And as he watches his daughters slowly disappear over the horizon, he takes off his shield and stares at The Crown, the symbol that had represented everything he thought he loved.

This is the start of his identity crisis.

Okay, first and foremost, I need to get this out of the way. The armour is not his. It's his former partner's. And the hat in panel 4. The shield is his, and so is his gun. The shot glass in panel 4 is filled with whisky - Anchor's partner's favourite brand of cheap, shitty whisky.

Another thing I need to get out of the way is the question 'Why is La Marine so desperate to get him back into service?' The answer is simple as it is elegant: Alexander Kilgour is famous across the Empire under a different moniker:

The Steel Sailor.

It's a serious morale boost to know that a sailor clad in armour and screaming at the top of their lungs is fighting on your side. It certainly helps that Anchor is an excellent shot, a cooperative sailor and compassionate - a rare trait in the navy - if a bit abrasive. Anchor was not the first Steel Sailor, but when his partner was killed in service, he donned her armour, her title, and of course, her fame. The navy wanted him back because he's a skilled sailor in an organisation with serious competence issues. The navy wanted him back because he's actually just famous, the legend of The Steel Sailor known within and without La Marine. The navy wanted him back because he is seen as a natural leader amongst his peers, even during the Second Woodland War where he didn't hold any actual authority.

Panel 8 (somewhat successfully) shows a bottle filled with a brown liauid - beer - being shot at. I had this headcanon that the last bottle of alcohol Anchor bought was never drunk out of, but was propped on the fence and shot at - a beautiful symbol representing Anchor finally conquering his vice. And then I realised '"Headcanon"? I literally invented the guy!', and this comic was me decreeing it to be so.

The navy wanted him back because his presence, without fail, brought an entire fleet together like a family.

Given that this comic is pretty much his entire life story, I found it interesting to consider what I omitted from his comic. Probably the most obvious one is his deceased partner - the whole reason for his mourning & alcoholism. I've made it a personal rule to never draw or even depict her (yes, she is a she). It's more engaging narratively if you let people draw their own conclusions. Additionally, there's a fourteen-year-wide gap where Anchor is willing to talk about his past - there's only one person who he has told about his childhood, and she is dead. Not even alcohol could loosen his lips enough to tell anyone. I could write here what happened from birth to fourteen, but I find it more interesting if I let people fill in the blanks themselves. Sometimes is it better to let sleeping dogs lie. 

Panels 3 and 12 have Anchor partially cut into the gutter. Both wee done to convey a sense of grandness - of scale - but the result was different for both. Panel 3 was meant to convey that the mast was huge - it almost feels like Anchor had to leave the boundaries of the panel just so you can properly appreciate the scale of the mast. Panel 12, though, was meant to be more 'distant'. Have you ever had a moment where it felt like you were looking at someone else puppeting your body, and not the normal 'I am me' perspective? There was probably a less concerning way to phrase this, but you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, panel 12 is that. Anchor is almost staring at his own life, and the final panel, the reflection of his face on the shield, is the natural conclusion of that - it's literally him reflecting. Reflecting on his life, reflecting on his beliefs, and reflecting on the symbol on his shield and what it means to him. Anchor's face only being visible through the reflection was very intentional - in all the other panels, you're looking at the back of his head. I'm not sure what effect it has on the comic, but it sure has an effect!

I'm quite proud of this, but it still has a few flaws with the structure. This comic requires prior knowledge - if you didn't know the gist of Anchor's life story before seeing the comic, you would barely have any idea what you're seeing. This is a pretty glaring mistake, honestly - I want to avoid this for the next two.

Oof, this took a while, huh? And I'm not even done - I haven't touched on the 'art' part of this!

With the drawing process, I've tried something new this time. It's kind of hard to explain, so I'll just post a screenshot here of what I did. It's even labelled! I don't usually label things - organisation reduces your masculinity by about 300% - but it would be even less clear what I did without 'em.

As usual, there's a lot of practice with drawing circles in a project like this, where hou can't just copy and paste one same-sized shape across pieces. This is also the second proper time I've done shadows (funnily enough the first time was also with Anchor), and the first time that the environment has lighting/shading effects on the characters. I still don't really have an idea what I'm doing with shading, but I'm learning for sure.

I, uh, actually don't have a lot to talk about on the art side, now that I'm writing it. This piece was more familiarising myself with the format of comics - as I said in the previous post, there's way more to comics than doing several standalone pieces. 

I've noticed that I now treat DTPAY as mostly a place to blow off some steam after a relatively large project. And after Dusk's comic (and since I have no idea what to do with Anchor's), I figured, may as well.

JohnApplewoof's artstyle is actually fairly similar to mine - fundamentally, it's 'five cylinders and a sphere'. JohnApplewoof's artstyle is weirdly perfect for me to use and adapt. It certainly helped that the characters had both appealing visual designs - a blend between detailed & simplistic that I always appreciate & admire - and dynamic character designs. Salvage is described as a prince from the lava caverns, who is 'evil' and loves to have a good fight, but is still finding their place in the world. Paraphrased here, obviously, but genuinely, I almost instantly snatched them up when I saw they were up for grabs in the DTPAY channel.

But on to the subject of the art. Since Salvage was described as 'evil', I modelled it after a gif captioned 'me when i purposely spread misinformation on the internet:'. The specific one is of the character Abbie from Mindwave throwing flowers and prancing about - I've never played Mindwave, I just saw this gif on tenor.com. The caption of this drawing - the rhyme... thing - is meant to allude to that, while still keeping in to the 'cheeky and evil' character he's described as. I didn't actually caption it that when sending it to them, though, since I was unsure if it would be taken well or not. But it was certainly in my head when I drew it, and therefore shaped the piece to fit it.

I know he has two drawings of him being uncertain/unsure and exactly one of him actually smiling with any level of sincerity (and it's his reference sheet, no less), but come on. Smug characters are kind of my thing. I'll draw him with more complicated emotions in two months or something.

The background was fairly simple to do. No black outlines so it wouldn't distract from the foreground, of course. I had initially planned to have a sun in there - hence 'The sun is shining' in the caption, but since it would conflict with the shading (i.e. light source inconsistency), it was removed.

On to the 'art' part of the drawing.

I just want to draw attention to probably the single most eye-catching difference between this piece and all others I've drawn - the hands. They exist now. And not only hands - fingers. I meant it when I said that JohnApplewoof's artstyle was perfect for me to derive from, and Salvage's claws served as the singular best springboard for drawing hands. Naturally, drawing open-palm hands is a lot simpler than doing literally anything else with them, but the fact that they're there at all is already huge. Of course, my own characters don't exactly have claws like Salvage's, so it's not exactly one-to-one transferrable, but, again, they're there. And that in itself is already huge.

Other than that, there's actually not a whole lot to talk about art-wise. Salvage has six 'appendages' (don't exactly have a better word for them) attached to his head - two ears and four other bits. He's tagged as some kind of reptile/cat, and I don't exactly know reptilian anatomy. I got the vibe that they were attached to the head itself, so I drew it like that. Probably wrong, but idk man. Salvage is never actually drawn with his head angled away from the 'camera' (none of JohnApplewoof's characters are, actually), so it was a unique challenge for me to do. Things like bringing up the outline of the 'main' head shape so the orange marks on the side can show were small things that built towards the whole. 

As is evident, I really only draw anthros/furries, since my only alternative is a perfectly circular head. I had originally drawn Salvage with my usual muzzle shape, but since JohnApplewoof also draws perfectly circular heads, I wasn't sure if I wanted to continue with it. I could have asked, but I had already asked them about the nature of their tail (as it turns out, it has a 'false mouth' to ward off predators - importantly, it cannot eat, which meant my original idea - Salvage feeding his tail, was scrapped), and I didn't want to bother. But again, I can't just draw them with a perfectly circular head, or else it'll look weird. I ended up with what I did with the rabbits in Dusk's comic - shorter muzzles that protrude off of, but don't quite 'cut into', the head.

And it was at this point in writing this post when I realised that, as it turns out, I've been improving at art. It's kind of hard to put into perspective improvement in something as subjective as this, but when you draw from previous experiences to improve upon the next (pun definitely intended), you are unequivocally improving. Case in point - learning from Dusk's comic how to draw muzzles without 'cutting into' the head and applying it to this piece is a very measurable, very noticeable mark of improving.

So remember that one time two and a half years ago when I said I was going to make a comic?

Yeah.

This is a comic of Dusk's experience in the war - from convict cannon fodder to the commander of an army. In the three 'combat' panels, Dusk is always depicted in front of everyone else, and the subtle transition from 'meat shield' to 'tip of the spear' is pulled off. Is it done well? I dunno.

The caption is of someone else speaking negatively of her, and I think I'll do something similar for the other three. I think it's interesting to have the worst perceptions of each one put in the foreground - it's not of who they are, but how they're perceived.

The title, Esprit de corps, is a French term that, in the context of war, means morale. But it's not just of willingness to fight, it also describes camaraderie, trust in each other, and the pursuit of a common goal. I found it a fitting name for Dusk's comic - Dusk finds more friends in the army than she has found anywhere else, and in being accepted by her brothers-in-arms, boosts her units morale & cohesion.

This is also the first time I've formally drawn characters in the setting that aren't cats. The rabbits and mice were pretty simple - I've just drawn the rabbits as cats with long ears, short muzzles and a cottontail (or in this comic, notably no tail) and the mice as cats but with round ears and a thin tail. Foxes were a bit more involved - I had to pull the gaussian blur gradient trick with their hands & ears.

But onto the 'art' part of the comic. There's no sugarcoating it - it's not good. It's a weird trend I've noticed - first attempts are not good, but also phenomenally, and to my utter surprise, not shit. And I mean, oh no, my first attempt isn't the flaking Mona Lisa of comics, who could have guessed, but

I don't know where I'm going with this.

Anyways! As it turns out, drawing a comic has more to it than drawing several solo pieces in sequence. Hell, it's a very different experience. I probably will forget to put everything I want to in this blog, but future comics will definitely be touched on.

The first thing I encountered was size. I've used the same circle for heads for a while now, copied and pasted across drawings, but now I had to draw them smaller to fit each panel. I've made the decision to both keep the line thickness the same, and also not draw facial features - I think it's more interesting if you can't see their faces. And why do I think this? Well...

It's no secret that Darkest Dungeon has heavily influenced my choice in design - it's most obvious in Trashcan, but it can be found in places everywhere. This comic though was heavily inspired (read: stolen) from Darkest Dungeon's own comics, specifically the one for Crusader. If you take them side by side, it's pretty obvious that it's a one-to-one recreation but with different characters.

No, I have no shame.

The next thing was colour. Oh god, colour. I've never had it made so clear that I don't know what I'm doing with colour more than this piece. With comics, the audience needs to have their eyes smoothly led from panel to panel to avoid confusion. Once the linework was done and the base colours were put in, it was made pretty obvious that what I had right now? It wouldn't work. It was too bright, confusing & distracting, and detracted from the whole quality of the comic. I've done a couple of things, like darkening the characters that aren't Dusk or the person she's fighting, but at most it feels kind of band-aided. Funnily enough, the 'paper' colour is jet-black instead of off-white to help aid the whole 'too much colour' issue, and did some funny things with the gutters - the second panel has the boundaries of the gutter intersect with the silhouette of the guard, and I think that's pretty cool, if unintentional.

The last panel has some gutter-play (no idea what it's properly called), where the tip of the banner exits the panel boundaries. I'll probably do a bit more of this in future comics (I have an idea for Trashcan's one specifically), but I kept it to a minimum here. It's my first comic, after all.

But overall, I think it's pretty alright. Not great, not terrible. Bit of an eyesore to look at. Once again stolen directly from another, better piece of media. Kind of cool.

This is my honest reaction when 'Maximum layers - 26':

So yeah. For some reason, I've decided to prepare for Artfight... two flaking months in advance.

Bruh.

Since the 2026 Artfight teams have (obviously) yet to be announced, I've used this year's Fossils character board as a stand-in (well, really I used the Seafoam one as the template, but idk man). The Artfight character board gives you five character slots to 'feature', as well as a list of character types you have & what you are willing to 'attack'. The five characters were pretty easy to choose - it's just my 'sona and the core four - but instead of just putting pictures of them into their boxes, I thought it'd be fun if they interacted with the character board in some way! It was a lot of fun drawing this, and, well, it goes to show how much of my brain drawing takes now, huh?

My slimesona went in the circle that's meant to be for your profile, and I've also made its hanging legs take up the first box to, in a jank way, show that it's also a featured character. Yeah, this one is pretty simple - it's just hanging off the frame. I had originally wanted to give it clothes, but as it turns out the trench coat looked weird when its shoulders are pushed up like that, so it's just naked slime. Honestly, considering that this is meant to be a visual hook for others, it was a better idea to have the fact that it's a slime be visible and prominent. I separated the entire drawing into two layers - one in front and one behind the board - to properly sell the idea that the board is a physical, tangible thing that the characters interact with. This two-layer trick is something that I pull with Anchor & Powder Keg to a lesser extent, but it's most obvious with Tophats.

Fun fact: I've been using the exact same circle as the head shapes, copy and pasted for forever now. Tophats has the main size head, and the core four have the 'children' head (the circle used for Aideen, Rosaleen & child Aleksandr) in this piece.

Dusk was also a pretty easy one. I'm... weirdly good at drawing smug people, so her pose just came naturally to me. There's actually not a whole lot to say about her, to be dead honest. The entire thing is layered above the board (so no layering tricks like with Tophats, Anchor & Powder Keg). I've actually desaturated her shirt a bit, and while I can't be bothered updating her reference sheet it's definitely less of an eyesore now. I almost did the same with her coat, but since I kind of consider that her 'core colour' (and that desaturating it made it BROWN instead of dusky-orange), it can stay.

Ah, Anchor. Easily the character that gave me the second most trouble drawing him on the board. Tophats is number one, but that's because it was mechanically difficult to draw - since it's partially translucent, I had to be careful with how I went about separating layers & applying gradients inside the slime. Anchor went through many, many different poses, each one less successful than the first due to the core part of his design - his armour. I've already known for a while that his armour is just objectively poorly designed - there's no way a bunch of metal tubes on your arms & legs are even remotely comfortable to move around in - and this directly impacts how I can pose him. What I've settled on - Anchor physically trying to make himself more comfortable - is kind of a terrible meta-commentary on how he'll never be comfortable so long as he wears his armour. I've worked around the issue of his armour ergonomics by just... making them clip into each other? Funnily enough, it looks alright - a little jank, don't get me wrong, but it's a lot less jank than it could be. Other than that, I still have no idea what I'm doing with the hands, and making his cheek intrude on his mouth to convey that he's cramped is a little cliché and cringe, but this guy has gone through several iterations. I could not care less at that stage. I've also made part of his tail show in Trashcan's box, because, well...

While the other characters interact with the character board by physically touching & obscuring parts of it, Trashcan interacts with the character board by actively leaving its boundaries. I consider his grappling hook core enough to his design to put it in here, and it had the nice side effect of setting him apart from the others enough to make the whole thing feel more 'fun' to look at. To keep it clear that he's a featured character, I've kept him on roughly the same vertical axis as the fourth character box, and the fact that it's empty should imply that it was initially assigned to him before he just decided to leave. The rope used to be shorter - short enough that Trashcan obscured a fair bit of the 'Characters I Have' section, but I eventually lengthened it so it would be obscured (the characters should interact with the board, not compete with it!). By the time I drew Anchor's lineart, I realised that having five pairs (well, four pairs plus one) of eyes staring at the 'audience' would be, to put it lightly, jarring. Anchor's looking at the board - that's fine, it's pretty clear that he's feeling claustrophobic due to it - but Trashcan is kind of just... staring into the distance? Where is he looking? Not at the screen; that's the answer. It's a little weird, but I feel like I'm overthinking it a bit. He just needed to not look at the screen. That's all the justification I should need.

Powder Keg. Augh. Powder Keg. His posing is easily the one I'm least satisfied with, and it's not even close. The other ones have small bits of jank that prevent it from being otherwise visually appealing, but Powder Keg's is just... awkward to look at. His head sits weirdly on the torso, the arms feel sort of photoshopped in, and the cloak was shoddily tacked on. The quality on Powder Keg is so bad that I almost forgot to put an eyepatch on him. Y'know, the second most distinctive visual feature he has behind his cloak. I remember doing the line art knowing it was going to look like crap - I even thought 'is sunk cost really going to have such a chokehold on me that it stops me from starting over and making it better?'

Yes. Obviously.

But overall, this one was a lot of fun to draw, very self-indulgent (and very shameless, given that Artfight season is two months away), and, if you'll excuse my shameless self-awarding, a lot of fun to look at. I briefly considered making it an animated loop, but honestly I don't think that it'll add much, especially since a lot of the poses I've given the characters don't exactly have a lot of opportunity for looped animations.

I'm starting to have less and less to say about each piece. Looking back, it kind of feels like I'm drawing these out of some kind of weird obligation - I've said that I fear character favouritism, but...

The first idea I had with drawing Trev' & Ollie together was having Trevor complain while they're walking, with the caption being 'The main job of a soldier has, is, and always will be the same thing: Walking!', but then it would be two pieces of Trevor not smiling despite being 'chronically happy', so here we are.

yeah i got nothing. this wasnt meant to further a particular skill, just to 'balance character favouritism'.

I... hesitate to call this a commission, but I don't have a better word for it. I wasn't paid (my art is nowhere near good enough to even entertain the thought of getting paid for it). The process is certainly different from other pieces I've drawn for other people - with all my Artfight attacks, the first piece I've made for the Principe and the one I've done for Lila/Solaerityx, I was largely given total creative freedom. However with this one, it was drawn to order - I was given specifications as how to draw it, and worked with the Principe throughout the drawing process.

I'll mostly leave these screenshots as stand-ins for a regular explanation, since I don't feel like doing it again lol. It's also good to show how I've handled the 'commissioning' (I hate using that word) process. If I was to take more formal commissions (and I have no flaking plan to - people wanting to commission me for my art reflects more poorly on their taste in art than it does prove that my art is worth anything), I probably would have handled this a lot differently - this was a conversation between me and a guy who I consider to be a good, albeit online, friend.

I... I'm pretty sure this is a violation of his trust to leak his DMs, but neither the Principe nor anyone he knows will probably find this tumblr, so.

On request I will delete it tho.

it is not good.

it is just.

not.

good.

There's just... I can't. I've said before that I struggle with angles that aren't forward-facing 45 degrees. This. This is the image that explains everything about that.

I don't really enjoy picking favourites - I'm in a constant state of denial with my core four as to who I like the most, because I fear that I'll pay one too much attention and leave the rest in the dust. But of the minor characters, if I had a gun to my head and was forced to choose my favourite, it'd probably be Aideen & Rosaleen. And I wish it was for some nuanced reason, or the personal process in their creation. But they're two children that are now happy to just be alive. Come on.

After retroactively changing Aideen's 'fun fact' to involve her fascination with guns, I ended up drawing this piece. Aideen was originally going to be an almost one-to-one copy of (you ready for a long descriptor?) Bloons TD 6's tower, Desperado's, 4-0-0 upgrade 'Twin Sixes' pose, where the monkey spins two revolvers, but I scrapped this pose for several reasons. The most obvious is that I don't draw trigger guards on guns (due to the core flaw of my chosen art style - thick, unwieldy, geometric, inflexible body parts), and that since this drawing was going to have three people in it, there wasn't a way to make it look like one of the characters was just sitting in a corner doing bunk-all.

The scene I went with - Aideen holding two guns and shouting at Anchor, who's setting up bottles, while Rosaleen sneaks up behind her - looks pretty good. It conveys a sort of amicable yet chaotic energy of an idealised family. It's not immediately clear what Rosaleen is doing, though. I want it to look like she's about to scare Aideen, but since I only have one image to work with, I couldn't find a great way to make it clear as day.

Aideen and Rosaleen look... weird. Compared to their introductory drawing, Aideen's face & hair are a little off. I can't really draw wavy hair all that well, and it's pretty obvious here - it looks a little spiky. No idea how to fix it though - flipping the canvas failed to show me how to fix it. Rosaleen's hair sits way lower on her face compared to her introductory drawing, and the ears are shunted forwards as a result. That being said, although I still want to stick to the original designs where their hair sits on their heads, I can already tell that lowering it will just be another disappointing compromise I'll have to make.

My art style doesn't allow me to change things to make it look better. It forces me to change things to make it look not shit.

Somewhat tangentially, I didn't talk about it before in the intro drawing for some reason, so I'll talk about it here. Aideen's fur pattern on her face is slightly different to the bicolours of Powder Keg & Trevor (I will not be touching on the baffling design choice on why I made three characters have similar coat patterns, for not even I know why), as the line where one colour is separated from the other runs through her eyes, not below. As a result, due to how I treat eyes (solid colour pupils, solid white outsides), the colour stops at the eyes and starts again on the other side, but since the white of the eyes are the same white as the bottom half of her face, it almost looks like the white fur cuts into the orange. In a rare moment in my life, this was not a result of layers upon layers of baffling design choices & disappointing compromises, but a fully intentional design choice. You can see in their 'little guy' drawing that Aideen's fur moves as you would expect, since there's no eye-whites to cut across it.

Guns are based on the Colt Walker, which according to Wikipedia is the first broadly viable six-shooter. They're not Remington 1861s like Anchor's, because as I touched on in the previous blog post, that's a gun that won't exist until several years in the future. 

Much like the minor character introduction post, I was originally planning to draw the minor characters interacting with their associated core character, and lump all four drawings into one blog post. However, after completing Dusk's and midway through Anchor's, I realised that they're both hefty enough on their own to warrant their own blog post, with its own explanation on my thought & drawing process.

I've described Stella as having taught Dusk 'how to read, write and swordfight', and this drawing depicts one such literacy lesson. The main inspiration for this was a short Nine Sols fancomic (I'm pretty sure it's on tumblr, but I can't be bothered trying to find it), where the main character, Yi, is given a drawing by Shuanshuan, and despite his outwardly unimpressed reaction, a 'ghost' of him is shown behind him is moved to tears, with the word 'proud' next to it. I saw this ages ago - my original plan for these two were to show them together in a chain gang, awkwardly avoiding eye contact as they worked together, considering that they, y'know, stabbed each other - but for some reason I never started drawing this idea, and immediately gravitated towards that one fancomic.

With the chosen time period, the 1850s, I sort of just hand-waved the issue of 'Wait, didn't most prisons not have libraries?' with the simple statement 'This one does.' I've really noticed my... decisions have made certain issues with historical accuracy - one example is that Anchor would have received his current revolver a couple of years before it would have been designed, let alone manufactured - but ultimately I've just decided to, again, hand-wave these issues for now. This is a problem for future-me.

First up - Dusk looks weird. The hair is positioned weirdly, what with her hunched over the table and looking up at Stella. I suppose the jank is sort of innate with the pose - it looks uncomfortable, because it is - but it doesn't make it feel any better.

I think the redesigned prison uniforms are great - they're ugly by design, but they're not an optical migraine like their first iteration. It's unsightly, but it doesn't give you a headache from the visual noise. However, where the sleeves of the uniform joined the main body was a sticking point. I didn't need to consider it before in Stella's introductory drawing with how her arms were positioned (and how her hair blocked a fair bit of the shoulder), but now I had to think about it. I... am not 100% satisfied with what I landed on, but since I draw shoulders disconnecting from where the neck would be if I, uh, drew them, the sleeve colours have to terminate at the top.

My art is built upon layers upon layers of disappointing compromises & inflexible principles, and I don't want to change it and become an objectively better artist by using an artstyle that isn't foundationally limited, because of sunk cost.

The 'ghost' was made by drawing a regular drawing as is, merging all the layers into one and then reducing the opacity to 30%. Keeping with my not-really-enforced 'keep every layer if possible' approach, I've just copied the merged image, undid the merging and then pasted it into a new layer.

So I've gone ahead and decided to draw one other character linked with my core four (or two in Anchor's case). These five characters each represent a significant person who has drastically altered the trajectory of their lives just by being in it. I'll try and refrain from talking about the characters, since the text block does that for me, and instead focus on the visual design. Broadly, the design ethos was 'keep it simple' - I've had basically two years to refine and revise the designs of the core four, but these guys are heavily sidelined, and probably won't be drawn frequently, if at all, so it has to be simple.

Honestly, if I had to choose one person that has 'drastically altered the trajectory' of Dusk's life, it would be Anchor. However, since the chosen significant person can't also be a member of the cor four, I went with a design I've already made in a previous drawing. I'm honestly not even sure if I want Stella to be the one to stab Dusk, but I'll iron out the details later. Stella's hair... detailing was rather shamelessly inspired from CoralineStarz's character Ezra and accelldraws' character [If you're seeing this, ToxicTophats forgot to check the name of the character. It's the drummer calico]. I also took the opportunity to, y'know, actually research what prison uniforms look like. With my block-body artstyle, I have to be really careful with having too much contrast or detail, and that was really noticeable with the previous drawing of Stella. The prison uniform is ugly - by design it is - but it's not an eyesore like before. The 'Four-Pointed Arrow' is a pretty obvious nod to the Broad Arrow. Funnily enough, I designed it by flipping a simplified Marquisate crown upside down, and then drawing a triangle over it. Weirdly makes it look a lot different. I also removed the shoes, because I asked myself 'why would the prisoners be given shoes?' and came up with nothing.

With the three personality descriptors, I've made the decision to introduce a bad personality trait first, and a good one last. People tend to be defined by their shortcomings (we will not be dissecting why and if it shouldn't be the case or not), and listing a bad personality trait first forces me to consider more about the character as a character. The middle trait is a neutral one - one that could be taken as either good or bad, but broadly isn't leaning on either one. And finally, I thought adding a little fun fact about each character was just, well, fun.

Considering who would be Anchor's significant person was the easiest of the four by quite a wide margin. Aideen and Rosaleen are basically Anchor's daughters, and other than his deceased partner who I didn't draw because she's, well, deceased, these two are easily the two cats that irreveribly altered the trajectory of his life. I briefly considered making their names their non-Anglicised counterparts, but then I realised that being foreign for the sake of being foreign is... problematic so I decided against it. Ultimately, they are just kittens, though, so I drew them playing marbles. Aideen was my first proper attempt at drawing wavy hair - it looks alright, I guess. Rosaleen doesn't have a tail - it's not known if she lost it somehow or was simply born without, but she doesn't remember a time when she had it. Their 'birthdays' are the date that they first properly started living with Anchor (yes, it was the day when they threw a bucket of ice water at him), and the years are just estimations of their age - neither Aideen nor Rosaleen know when they were born.

Nikolai is the one I have the least to talk about with. Formerly Kolya (until I learned that 'Kolya' was the nickname of 'Nikolai' and not itself a name - oops), his design is pretty basic, and I've drawn him before. I've decided to give him cheek scars, from his and Trashcan's confrontation with a bear, since I thought it would be a neat storytelling device to have a prominent scar be linked with Trashcan.

After my previous post of cleaning up the scar maps, I thought it might be fun to draw the core four in the moment/aftermath of getting their most prominent scar. It's also good practice - I've never drawn blood before, so now's a good a time as any.

Dusk's drawing was not necessarily of her most prominent injury, but of her scariest one - a clean puncture wound, penetrating right through her torso. And this is where I say that I had originally planned to write a mini-story to accompany each piece, but came up with nothing for Dusk. The general gist of it was 'she got into a swordfight in prison, where she got stabbed', but that rose way too many questions: how would two inmates in the early 19th century get a sword-like blade, conceal it, get incensed enough to fight using said blades, all without being noticed by prison guards? There's way too many glaring plot holes in it for a good mini-story to be made, and honestly I'll probably retcon the details of that particular scar. I'm thinking she just gets sucker stabbed. Since I customarily do Dusk's things before everyone else, I just didn't write mini-stories for the others.

Dusk's 'hurt' drawing, as I've taken to calling them, is vaguely based on that one swordfight scene in the movie The Adventures of Tintin. I just thought the finisher was cool. There's not much else to say - the prison uniform is striped, and I can't really draw side-on heads well - if you look at the positioning of Dusk's hair & ears, it looks like it's turned 45 degrees, not the full 90.

Anchor's is probably the simplest of the four, and the only one with no blood - he's a sailor, he's on lookout duty in a thunderstorm, and he's struck almost directly by lightning. And really, there's not a whole lot to say. The lightning effect isn't really all that great, but not only would a more realistic lightning flash just cover the entire screen in white. but also doing lightning strikes like how I did is fairly standard in cartoons, so whatever.

Trashcan's 'hurt' drawing isn't of the moment he got hurt, but almost directly after. His most prominent scar is the one on his left torso - a claw wound from surviving a bear attack. I chose to draw what I did mostly because I don't want to draw a non-anthropomorphic bear (remember than in the Root world everything bigger than a wolf & smaller than a mouse is non-anthropomorphic), but also because I got to draw another character, Kolya Avdonin - Trashcan's father figure. And I also got to draw him as a child, which is always good fun.

Powder Keg's drawing is... definitely the least flattering of the four. As his most prominent scar is his left side of his face, there was really only one thing I could draw for his 'hurt' drawing. It's directly based on a painting of a mine explosion (don't remember what it's called), and honestly the background is not great. It's flat and lacks detail, but I don't feel like making a better one.

On a completely unrelated note, it's become increasingly clear to me that I can pretty much crank out a drawing a day. That's a little scary to me, but a tumblr blog no one reads is definitely not the place to delve into why.

I suppose I really shouldn’t be surprised that I’m somewhat adept at drawing Roblox avatars, given that my entire artstyle can be described as ‘block-bodied’.

I don’t really have much to say on this one - mostly just another filler drawing while I gather the motivation to do something bigger. Only noteworthy things is that I traced the hat to get the write angle, and that I gave the drawing a face despite the avatar lacking one. The little bone leg (Korblox leg is what its model is called, apparently) was a little weird, and I did get something out of this drawing - how to do gradients.

This was another animation derived from a video game, this time from SSBU again. The referenced (stolen) animation is Mii Brawler's 2nd side special, Burning Dropkick.

This was a... less than successful attempt at remedying a previous problem I found I had with animating, that being that frames are drawn in isolation. I found drawing Powder Keg now to be strangely easy - at his core now, his clothes are just a basic shirt, pants & shoes, so it was equally as simple to draw him. The most complicated part was his cloak, and how it reacts to movement. His cape was drawn after the rest of the linework was done so I could properly visualise its movement. I pretty much went down the Mao Mao route of 'it's a cloak and cape interchangeably', since I am definitely not skilled enough to model proper cloak fabric movement. It's kind of hard to describe what I did, but even though it looks jank I'm still quite happy with how it turned out.

I ended up deciding to make his motion lines be coloured the same as his core colour, that being his cloak's. I'm pretty sure I'll do this with the other characters in the future - Dusk with the dark-orange of her coat, Anchor with the steel grey of his armour and Trashcan with the green of his clothes - since it further allows me to define each character by their core colour, and make them more distinct without actually changing their design.

Despite the fact that I made his dominant emotion guilt, I still drew him as a rambunctious little goober. At his core, even with his redesign Powder Keg is still broadly the same person outwardly - his main goals - emotional authenticity, doing whatever feels cool and just being happy with friends - have not changed at all. Even though his actions of past taint every thought and action he does, he's still outwardly a happy guy. I tried to keep what made him so fun as a character while trying to make him more interesting, and only time will tell if it actually turns out okay or I end up redesigning him again.

Even after everything, he's still a silly, happy, overenthusiastic little guy.