The Complete Sherlock Holmes

First December = first page of The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.

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I had way too much fun drawing them 😭

Thanks @windmaedchen-oceanhorn’s Lavi, @meepinmeat’s Tempest, @confusedeldritch’s Scylla and @irislazulee’s Iris for joining 💕🙆‍♀️💕

They are so CUTE! Except for Scylla, who is cute but ALSO very devilish. Do not trust that face.

My Year of Art.❤️

JANUARY - Actually my last big piece for Oceanhorn. Depicted is Chronos, the god of time and space, about to give judgement...

FEBRUARY - ... judgement for this man: Mesmeroth. Here without the mask in a more modern setting. I aaaaaactually did this in Jan, too, but I have nothing for February .... T_T

MARCH - Due to the new job, I couldn't finish the illustrations for an Oceanhorn short story. But I shared what I had.

APRIL - The only thing I published was another part of a year-long commission: telling the story of Ivan Dreyar from Fairy Tail. (Oh, also, AFK Journey dropped but no art yet).

MAY - Help. Valen arrived. I didn't think I'd draw more. I seriously did NOT think I'd draw more.

JUNE - Still not believing I'd draw so much more. But, I was too tempted to draw Valen in AFK Arena style, so...

JULY - More doodles and sketches. Also this small masterpiece: a pin-up Valen.

AUGUST - My famous art trade with @feli026 . The start of my AFKJ style journey. <3 I am finally joining the Discord and apply for the EsperiArt role.

SEPTEMBER - There we go. The new Season came round and I celebrated it with a Sinbad (before I knew his personality). I also completed my Knight Of The Dark story with Lavinia (a great achievement for me).

OCTOBER - That's why she's properly featured for October: Lavinia, my AFK Journey OC.

NOVEMBER - Toughest group picture to date: Thanksgiving for the Maulers. I am exhausted from work, but I am looking forward to the Christmas break.

DECEMBER - Finally a chance to draw a Christmas themed image featuring Hogan, Valen and Fay. A worthy conclusion to the year, full of colourful art, new friends made and a great game experienced.

People outsource their brain to AI for the most trivial of reasons.

People stop using their own brain. Especially children. It is shocking how many students in school already cannot READ and UNDERSTAND a simple question put forward on paper. Instead, it's phones to aid with translation (for native speakers no less!) and obviously, to get the answer. Now in schools, there can be a certain policing of this, given the fact that teachers don't allow the use of phones but what about private lives?

Do you even understand the scope of this? People use their phones and all sorts of AI tools to get quick and easy answers, to the point that they are utterly unable to actually focus for long enough to read a newspaper article or a baking recipe (unable to spot any errors !! ) or complete the most basic of calculations on their own. And worst of all, they simply trust AI to be right. And I am sorry to break it to you, but AI only uses what has been fed to it (and why would you trust that by any means?) and once everything has become AI (like half the internet is already, given the quality of many if not most every-day resource websites and blogs) then it only continues to learn from itself. Pay close attention to what AI spits out, because if you have a fraction of your brain left, it most often than not doesn't make sense. (How many students have given be wrong answers in casual quizzes just because they were allowed or even required to do "research"...)

outside of your mutual circle, you will get one or two reblogs thats like "#i dont know what this is from but—" like they are just incapable of realizing there is art outside of fanart. i no longer blame people that go "oh this isnt my oc its actually just my au/take on [popular character this looks nothing like] from [big media everyone loves]" bc you literally cannot get people to engage w/ your art unless its a one off design or already connected to something .

There is a fascinating pull for us humans towards watching others behave themselves, the amount of time and effort we spend on consuming books or watching films or shows and animes... it's staggering.

The problem with any original art is that... the art itself just doesn't offer enough WOW effect on any particular human being because there is no great emotional attachment to it, and how could there be? How would anyone know about your OC as much as you do, if they never saw or heard of them before? Someone engaging with such a one-shot does so because the aesthetics of the image particularly appeal to them.

I may be wrong about this, but it seems to me, that those who have plenty of follower engagement with their original works are particularly skilled artists, with unique styles. People follow them not for their OCs per se, but for the artistry and the visual interest in their artwork. I personally would never follow Van Gogh, for example, despite his fame or acclaimed art, because I just don't like it. xD (Unless he drew something I can emotionally connect with... like fanart LOL).

(Alternatively, some people simply have a natural way of self-marketing, or have been working on their webcomics for years, or are just online present on a daily basis winning through mere exposure... xD)

What has Ai really changed for me is the perception of my own art. Years back, I was extremely concerned of my work being imperfect: everything had to look "right", the anatomy had to be flawless, the lines - clean and refined. The pipe-line had to be flawless too: minimal amount of layers, one - for lines, one - for colors, and a few for lighting/shading.

Meanwhile I was yearning for chaos and the standard pipe-line felt too strict, too limiting. I finished the drawing and cried over the imperfections, but I could not let myself create a new layer and just paint it all over as I wanted to - that would "mess up my perfect psd". This was even harder because I started as a traditional artist and traditional art is basically the same as drawing on one layer or stacking the layers on top of each other whenever you wish to change anything. I was so obsessed with the anatomy/perspective looking right that my works started looking boring and stiff. If I was not sure that I would be able to draw a certain body part at a certain angle ANATOMICALLY PERFECT - I just refused to draw it at all. Drawing back then was HARD. I forced too much limitations upon myself, I was so scared of making any mistakes and thus did everything I could to avoid the risk to fail. It felts like an entire world would see me failing and everyone - literally everyone - will disapprove. And don't get me wrong - the art community in my country has always been astonishingly toxic. We had, like, a group of 20 THOUSANDS individuals hunting down children online and bullying them into oblivion for drawing anime and furry characters in their school textbooks. And pretty much everyone except a small group of people (which I was a part of) thought that it's absolutely fine and this is how the things should be. Even the industry professionals were absolutely sure that young artists have to suffer and be ashamed of everything they do unless it is absolutely flawless at an any aspect. I was ashamed of everything I did back then. I was ashamed of drawing and posting sketches because I felt like they are not good enough to be shown to anyone. And then the Ai-boom started. And I had mixed feelings because I was not THAT scared, but I was somewhat disappointed of people? General public praised the generated slop ignoring the mistakes far worse than what real artists got bullied for for DECADES. The synthetic artworks are shiny. They are overrendered. They are liveless, boring, they lack fundamentals and yet somehow people viewed them as some kind of a miracle. I decided to learn how does those little machines generated their slop out of morbid curiosity, just to make sure that I got it right and it is spitting out cadavers created from mutilated, dismembered works of real artists. Used by people who did not care enough to pick up a bloody pencils. And I thought: why would I care enough to look at something that no one bothered to create? And then I started seeing everything I do completely different. I suddenly stopped caring of being perfect. Every piece I have ever done, every work I was crying over for it being ugly, every messy sketch and unfinished doodle suddenly started to matter a lot. Not that I stopped caring of doing my best, no. I stopped wishing to disown my own mistakes. They are my own. I cared enough to try and fail and to try again, and fail so badly that I wanted to cry, scream and throw up. And I repeated the cycle for long enough that I started to enjoy my silly doodles and started loving every tiny imperfection because this is what made my art so human. I still suck at drawing hands and feet. My line-art is messy and I started doing it right on top of my colored sketch. My pipe-line is in chaos and my PSDs look like a total mess of three hundreds of layers. I draw sketches with huge-ass round brush only adding the details that really matters. My works are better than they could ever be because they feel alive and chaotic as we human had always been. This is a love letter to my art and write it while flipping off my middle finger to the cadavers generated by the machine. I will not be stopped by glorified autocomplete and I refuse to be outdone by people who confuse googling an image with the act of creation.

If we’re talking different versions, canon Holmes will always be my favourite, you can’t do better than the original :P

As for which adaptation of canon I like best, I’d have to say it’s Radio Holmes, voiced by Clive Merrison. He gives the character so much humanity and so many dynamics, and the fact that he does it through voice alone is even more impressive. Credit goes to Bert Coules the writer too, he adapts canon in a way that is both authentic to the original and unique. Just the whole series is excellent, in my opinion. They even managed to adapt every single canon story, which as far as I know hasn’t been done by any other group (correct me if I’m wrong though).

(The same applies to Watson and any of the other characters, really., but the question was about Holmes so....)

What I love about Bert Coules is that his additional stories work so well along the many canon ones. If you haven't read ALL of the originals then you might not be able to tell which is which. One of my favourites is the Abergavenny Murder, which is told in real-time and Holmes and Watson never ever leave Bakerstreet to begin with. Amazing.

And finally, if you want another little taste of the Radio Adaptation, I turned another favourite, The Blue Carbuncle, into a comic some years ago. It's very heavily based on the script of the episode, with a few small changes taken directly from the original short story. ;-)