A Simple Blik

"A simple Blik. This guy is fun to draw (being that suits and sharp teeth are two of my favorite design elements, and he has them both)."

 - 2018 Brennan


Nothing has changed since then.

The Chromatica Gods

"Some more Chromatica stuff! Here are all six of the gods, which each preside over (and can’t leave) their own zones. In, well, rainbow order, we have Mania, Agape, Stroge, Pragma, Ludus, and Eros. Their elemental affinities are pretty apparent!

For some background, these guys weren’t always gods. Initially, they were acolytes for an eldrich-horror-y monstrosity, who had created humans for amusement. Considering that this previous god really didn’t give a hoot about humanity and treated them like people might treat Sims (”Ooh, how long will one of them last if I lock them in a room without food or water?”), people… Weren’t happy. The six acolytes, tired of seeing their friends tortured and murdered for the god’s amusement, killed it and took its symbols – the source of its power – for themselves. These symbols, as long as they’re attached, give them different elemental powers, extreme longevity, immortality, and also make them glow really bright colors. This was fine and dandy for a bit, but humans aren’t really built to handle that much power, so these gods are a bit, uh, unstable from time to time.

I’m having a lot of fun with the world-building for this universe, even if I’m not sure what I’m gonna end up doing with it. But hey, what’s fun is fun, even if it doesn’t have a point, right? I’d like to make a map of the various zones (they’re all based on colors, of course) at some point, too, so we’ll see how that goes!"

 - 2018 Brennan

"The Sehens"

"Why are all the actual paintings I make so tall?

Anyway, this is a quicker thing, but I’m happy with it anyway! I wanted to showcase all of the Sehens (well, half of them are only silhouettes, but still). From left to right and top to bottom, they’re Rimewell, Ellesheba, Octalabrous, Alkavire, Soylent, and Blikivallian."

 - 2018 Brennan


And then I just never stopped drawing Sehens.

Brumation? Or Vacation?

"My skink is brumating! I miss her a lot – it’s weird to have a pet that just kind of… Checks out for several months on end. Meanwhile, my family have been joking that she must be vacationing elsewhere for the winter, so have a colored sketch of tourist Tillie.

For those curious, here’s what she actually looks like!

She’s pretty over-exposed in this picture, but I hope her lizardy beauty comes through! She’s such a cutie! Has quite the attitude, though… But we love her anyway, huffs and all!"

 - 2018 Brennan

"Hallia Family Portrait"

"And here we have another picture that took months and months! I’ve been working on this one since March, though a lot of that time did come from the fact that I took a break for a while in there.

It’s family portrait of the Hallias, when Blik and Vera were children! From left to right, we have Charm, Vera, Ulgaria, Ashley, Sorikthena, Jasmine, Blik, Rubidya, Soylent, Rhudall, Sierra, and Carrlio. I wanted to style it like an old back-and-white family portrait, and I think it worked out pretty well! The line art is a bit outdated, since I drew it at the beginning of last year, but I’m still happy with it!"

 - 2018 Brennan

Inktober 2018

 

"I think I might try out doing Inktober this year! No promises that I’ll be doing one every day, but it seems fun, and I’d like to at least give it a try.

What I’ve learned from this exercise is that I really need better pens, considering that the one I have only actually tracks ink about 70% of the time… And that I also need a better camera. And better paper. I think I’m just really unequipped to draw on actual paper in general, honestly."

"We’re done! It’s been a really fun time making all these pen sketches, and it’s honestly really helped me relax and decompress, even if it’s just for a little bit each day. I lagged a bit during the end of the month, and I had to play catch up some of the time, but I managed to get every one of them done before October was out, which I think is a pretty nice achievement! I’ll probably post a compilation post or something of the sort in the coming days.

Have a happy Halloween, and a good November, too!"

 - 2018 Brennan


If you're all curious, I got two drawings into Inktober for 2019 before deciding to move onto something else instead. That something else ended up being an animatic, which I thought was probably better than a series of small drawings, since I've been wanting to make more of them. If inspiration strikes, don't look a gift horse in the mouth!

Just for the sake of simplicity, I'm not gonna tag every single character that I have in this mass of pictures.

Suited Up

"I really get a kick out of formal events for one reason and one reason only.

I meant to upload this a while ago, but just got way too busy and lost track of things, so have it now! I don’t usually draw self-portraits much, but this was a fun one."

 - 2018 Brennan


Man, I need to find an excuse to wear this thing again.

Eros Bio Test

"Since I was just talking about Chromatica, have another one of the gods, Eros! He… He speaks for himself, I think.

As a fun fact, I have a hard time drawing people looking right at the “camera” – it makes me feel like they’re staring into my soul. Combine somebody staring into the camera with the fact that he’s making that face, and, yeah… I had to cover up his face with a scribble on another layer while I colored and shaded for a bit. He’s making me uncomfortable. Still happy with how he turned out, though! I don’t think that this will be his actual official concept art, since if I make ones for all the other gods I’d like them to all fit together as a set and I’m just not gonna be up to doing detailed shading on all of them, but as fun jokey picture I like it."

 - 2018 Brennan

"Defeat"

"As in “de-feet” if you know what I mean

Y’know since he lost his foot

Anyway, have some characters from another project of mine: Chromatica! I don’t think I’ve posted anything relating to it so far. The gist of it is that the world is ruled over by six gods, who are all associated with different elements (and glow different colors, because I like the idea of having beings of ultimate power also be human glow-sticks). The gods have symbols on their bodies that give them their power, and they’re pretty much immortal – unless their symbol is removed from them, that is. Storge, shown above, used to have his symbol on his foot… And, uh, now he doesn’t anymore. His captain, Anthony, isn’t happy about that."

 - 2018 Brennan

"Taking Care of Things"

"A Warriors animatic I’ve recently finished, about River Ripple and Gray Wing!  I don’t read the  books much anymore, but I liked their interactions enough to make something for it. The music used is the latter part of “Taking Care of Things”, by Cavetown, who makes beautiful songs! For some more commentary, read below the cut.

So Warriors, huh? I used to read tons of it when I was younger, but stopped for several years, and I’ve only just recently started reading it again. I picked up Dawn of the Clans, since it’s completely new to me, and it’s really good! Going through the books, some of my favorite interactions between the characters were the ones between River Ripple (the blue striped cat in this animatic) and Gray Wing (the gray cat not having a good time) – their relationship is really sweet to me, and I just like the fact that River Ripple is kind of the unofficial hippie therapist of the clans. He’s just a genuinely nice dude that wants everybody to hang out on his island and feel better.

As for the animatic itself, it took some time to work out the colors and style I wanted to go with. I decided on three distinct color palettes based on the time of day – one for night, one for evening, and one for morning. I also went with a more simplistic cat style and used hard lines separating colors and shadow instead of blending them more naturally like I normally do, since that made it much easier to color quickly. A smaller detail, but you might also notice those flowers in the background at certain points – those are anemone flowers! In the book, when Turtle Tail (the tortoiseshell cat in the beginning) dies, it’s mentioned that she was covered in petals after falling through wildflower bushes, and I thought that that was an interesting image to work with, so I expanded on that and added the flowers in various scenes to represent suffering. I chose anemone flowers specifically because a source I saw said that they could represent forsaken love, which I think fits, but then various other sites said they meant completely different things, so I dunno. For a final tidbit, here are the designs I first drew up when conceptualizing the animatic! They didn’t change much, but I stuck with a color palette instead of their actual colors and the stripe on River Ripple’s head went missing somewhere along the line.

You know, I honestly never thought this animatic would actually be a thing. It started when I found the song and thought “huh! This would fit this situation pretty well” and then escalated to “well, story-boarding it would be a fun exercise!” and then to “well, the story-board’s done, I might as well just start making complete frames and see where it goes.” And then boom. It was done. Something that I never even thought I’d start. Inspiration is a strange thing."

 - 2018 Brennan

"Janu-Mation"

"I don’t animate often, and that’s probably for the better, because the entire process is interspersed with me going “URRRGGHHHHHH” every three seconds. I… I’m not the biggest fan of animating. You know what I am a big fan of, though? The finished products. Like this one! It’s Janus, showing off rhir magic. I’ve only mad a couple pixel art GIFs before, and they’ve all been pretty small-scale, so finishing something bigger like this is nice. I also made it in Photoshop instead of MS Paint, which honestly works better than I thought it would for pixel art."

 - 2018 Brennan

The Quetzel

"I… I just really like species-creation, okay?

Anyway, I bought Stellaris from Steam about a day ago, and the second that I opened up the “create custom empire” function I knew it was love. I can’t get enough of stuff like this… I spent two hours in that creator before I even started the actual game. Naturally, as any sane person would do, I had to flesh it out a bit on my own, outside the game. So here we have the Quetzel – my arid planet-native, Irenic Bureaucracy-having aliens that I’m currently taking for a spin around a fictional galaxy.

They look like this in-game, and that portrait really is much prettier than what I drew, but hey, I was bored and didn’t want to spend more than an hour or two on it. Mostly because I wanted to get back to actually playing the game. Let’s see if the actual game-play is as good as the creator… It’s gonna be tough competition."

 - 2018 Brennan

"Marred"

"I took a day-long break from comic-ing (I’m on page 37 – officially over halfway done! Two pages per day is a tough pace to keep up in the long run, though – it really wears you out.) to produce a warped Bludmar. Because warps are never not fun to draw, in a weird way.

This is a re-draw of an older piece that I did before Bludmar’s design and story were really cemented. The old one looked like this!

I’d say this version is an improvement, yeah? Much more pleasing to look at… If warps ever can be pleasing to the eye.

Anyway, both this old version of warped Bludmar and her current version have one story beat in common – she was driven insane by her hemokinesis, which resulted in her essentially becoming a telekinetic vampire, ripping blood out of people’s bodies in order to add to her own mass of it. She was eventually put down by her own children in order to keep her from hurting anybody else.

…Bummer."

 - 2018 Brennan

"Griffin and Aisley"

"I’ve been replaying Pokemon Mystery Dungeon lately (specifically, Explorers of Sky) and, for all the many years that I’ve had this game, this is the first time that I’ve actually gotten all the way to the end of the after-game! Which is why I thought it’d be appropriate to draw my protagonist and her partner: Aisley and Griffin! I must have hundreds of hours in this game across all the saves I’ve had… PMD always has such a special place in my heart. Though newer games like Super PMD and Gates to Infinity are pretty good, the Explorers series will always personally be my favorite.

(Also, I’m running Sing + Dream Eater on Aisley, and it destroyed every single non-ghost type (agh, normalize) in the game right up until enemies started having Non-Sleeper… At which point it sorta became useless. Rest in peace, example of how broken linked moves are – you will be remembered.)"

 - 2018 Brennan


I still dearly miss that combo. It was so good while it lasted. I never had the heart to remove it from her moveset, so I just beat the post-game with effectively two moves on her. Luckily, +7 tackle kind of just... Ruins everything. So I was alright.

Things with Wings Completion

"After five months of work, Things with Wings is officially finished and available for everyone to read!! At 78 pages, it’s my longest comic yet! I hope you all like it!

You can read it here!"

 - 2018 Brennan


And this was the most recent comic I've made! I'd like to make more, someday, but things are busy.