Bluestar - Coyote

 COYOTE IS HERE!!

I'm super happy to have this thing done! I talk more about it in the video description, but in a nutshell: another Warriors animation, centering around Bluestar and her life experiences. I've been working on it since August of last year, and I tried to get as wacky as I could with the designs and colors.

I hope you all enjoy it! The positive responses I've already gotten have just blown be away. : ) Onto the next project!

New Species Portraits! (Starks and Pennies)

 

After three thousand years, I've finally redone the species portraits! ...Or, well, most of them. Pennies and starks have some spiffy new pictures on the Platform website. They're also completely image-mapped, meaning that you can hover over each character in the images to see their names, and click on them to view their biography, if they have one. You can see them here! It was fun to get to draw Caeder's domum after all this time, and it's always a joy to draw baby Blik and Vera. Who doesn't want to see baby Blik and Vera? Humans, strelks, maskers, and kangies still need updated pictures, but that's for another day... Just these ones took way longer than they should've, ahah. 

(Also, dang these pictures are tiny -- clicking them is probably best if you want to actually read the text.)

In the meantime, I've also uploaded a new MAP part to my Youtube channel (which can be watched here), featuring Janus and their wife Solei! It has a more detailed explanation in the video description.

The reason that I've been so busy for a while (beyond school work and actual work) should soon become apparent... A new video should be out later this month! I hope you all like it. : )

Dexter and Sinister

 

Happy 2021! I've been working on some big projects lately, so I haven't had much time to do smaller stuff. But I took some time out of my week to draw a very quick rendition of some characters I've had since high school but never actually drawn once: Dexter and Sinister! A dynamic duo of espionage androids. ...Of course, I have very little idea of what I'd actually do with them. I think I'd like to write something with them that involves the two fighting crime and rouge robots in a futuristic cyperpunkish city, but it doesn't have much of an actual plot to stand on at the moment.

Well, maybe someday! For now, enjoy their LED-lined clothes and the knowledge that Sinister's hand can turn into a plasma cannon and Dexter's hand can turn into a laser sword. That's the most important part.

The Bird in Good Humor

 

Toying around with some new art of Caeder! It's been a while since I've drawn an updated fullbody of this guy, and he's gotten significantly beefier since last time. I also got to show off the new leg and arm updates for pennies, which is exciting! I love that talon-y look they've got to them, and they're now the only major Platform species to be digitigrades, which sets them apart from the rest a little. Whatever my reasons for drawing him, though, it looks like he's enjoying himself.

A fun fact! I posed him to obviously be sitting on something... And then didn't draw any background at all. So it looked like he was just floating in a void on his rump, which was a little odd. Hence the oval thing in the background now -- at least it looks like there's some sort of ledge he's sitting on. Messy, but effective.

Also, I tried a new method of drawing peacock trains. And while I think it looks alright in the end, oh my gosh, it was incredibly hard to draw. I spent five hours just on his train. I know I'm a slow artist, but even for me... Dang. 

Platform Site Update

 

Aaaand the updated Platform website is done!!! Complete with a new layout, updated content, and a URL that actually makes sense! Let's celebrate with this creepy creepy infographic I made about Sehens.

This all stems from the fact that old Google sites is, sadly, going away, and I really hate the look of the new service. So, I've gone through all my old Google sites and deleted the ones that I no longer use (with many a tear...) But the Platform is something that I still use, so I needed to find a new place for it. So I tried out Wordpress, and I think I was able to make something even better than the old version! It looks much cleaner. It'll still be sad to get rid of the old site, though -- so much of the Platform world-building was written for that site, since I was fifteen and writing whatever came to the top of my head just to fill space (and only later came to flesh it out). Ahh, youth.

I also went and updated a whole lot of pages while doing this, since so many of them (looking at you, cities page...) were painfully outdated or very bare-bones. So, the cities, religions, and culture pages have been completely overhauled, and the species and Sehen pages have received some major updates, too! All this updating really made the site transfer an undertaking, though -- it took me almost two weeks to get everything ready. But now it is! Yay.

My wrists hurt. A lot of these updated pages are long...

Mama's Gun MAP Part

 

These are just... Very fun to make. 

I think it's because they're so short, honestly -- I can make a 30 second, independent project and experiment all I like while not feeling roped into any long-term commitment. Just a nice little way to test stuff out! Very fun. And it was also fun to get to draw some of my favorite aesthetic elements in this one: ominous Victorian architecture, harsh lighting, unnerving animal symbolism, and Sehens. 

...Only three of those are things that I actually like to draw, though. Oh my gosh, the backgrounds in this thing. You see how every shot has a fish-eyed background with no straight lines? That serves two purposes. Firstly, I can write it off as adding to the weird unnatural feeling that I'm going for. But secondly, if my lines are a little out of place because I just flew by the seat of my pants when drawing them, no one notices. But if perfect two-point perspective is off, then everyone notices. 

Either way, I'd say this is my favorite MAP part I've made! Of two, but still. I'd like to do more in the future! As always, I've written more about the project in the video's Youtube description, but for the sake of being redundant, I'm gonna cut it short here. Enjoy!

Bruno is Orange MAP Part

Oooh boy, a lot of firsts with this one! My first MAP part ever, my first time using OpenToonz, my first time uploading a video and then taking it down like two hours later because I noticed a mistake and having to reupload it... Ahhh. Either way, though, this was so extremely fun! I had a blast getting to make this, endless thanks to the MAP host for letting me be a part of it. : )

For those not familiar with MAPs, a MAP (Multi-Animator Project) is an animated video, normally to a song of some kind, made by lots of different people.The host puts out a MAP call, asking people to sign up and volunteer to animate small parts of the song. Then, when everyone's done, they put all the parts all together into one big video and upload it! A super fun thing to get to do, and a great way to get to make very short projects as practice and to experiment with things.

I also got to animate baby-faced Blik and Vera, which is always a fun time. The story is explained more in the video description!

Since this was my first time using OpenToonz (and, oh my gosh, is it better than Movie Maker), and I have a terrible memory, I also wrote up a quick tutorial for how I do some things in OpenToonz! It's very simple and not hugely in-depth, but if you just want to make something simple like this and don't know where to start, I think it can help.