dubiouslog

GIGANTIC ARTWORK POST!
still without laptop, but since I’m currently at Jacopo’s I can use his awesome computer and do stuff! yes!

This was made at the same time as the Xivilai painting, so we’re talking about stuff that’s already two months old. Oldest joke ever, but still cute. For me, at least. :>

stop complaining, you’re just 257 and that bedroll was pretty comfortable too

playing with pencil shadows. naked because he looked silly with underpants.
…lol I forgot the chair
HE’S LEVITATING ON HIS MAGIC MAGIC BUTT

I don’t even know why I made this

Isaac Clarke from Dead Space
well this could really be anyone else with a RIG, but since I used his figure as a reference we’ll say this is Isaac

then I played Riviera yet another time and wanted to find a way to draw the characters in my style, and this is what I got. Here we have Serene and Cierra. In case you were curious, the note on the second page is the name I wanted to give to the shrine to Serene I was planning to make, but as you already know I ended up falling in love with Malice instead.
I’ll never stop repeating it: drawing in anime style is
SO BORING

These are the artworks for the test I’m making for Angeltower Page. The space on the left is where the text will be.
I think they turned out great 8>

Now to something completely different. This painting is a gift for Cercatesori and was inspired from the song Rachel by Klimt 1918. It’s a very moving song written to a true story, you should really listen to it. The painting was based on these lyrics:

Death is down at the end of the street, it brings me on my knees
But I live in a world where nobody loves, nobody hopes
“Please hold me now, don’t let me fall” She says, her skin dirty with mud
“I hold you, love, like a wounded bird, I won’t let you fall!” I scream with pain
Rachel knows her blood still runs, the ground turns red so close my arms
I see the sun going down her eyes, she won’t forget to sleep with me tonight

The blood in this painting is actually not paint, it’s my blood.

Now back to something less intense. When Cercatesori came, we spent part of the evening drawing silly stuff. Here, have a Pelipper.

After that Pelipper, crack ensued.

Chingling is useless, hence this pic

penises and bowties make everything better
Mantine’s cry is hilarious
also check that sexy Lopunny out

hi, I’m the Left Hand Snorlax

Carnivine’s Platinum sprite is silly

tiny wingull

Cercatesori asked me to make the opposite of this infamous pic
I’m so going to hell

Back to my head

Sheila makes a comeback with a new design. I think she’d look great in a digital work, but NO COMPUTER HURR HURR
For a few days, I toyed with the idea of actually making a comic with her as the main character but then scrapped it because I couldn’t make any other characters in her same style and because I really don’t want for this to be my first “serious” comic. I don’t want to give people the wrong impression about my work, since Sheila is my only anthro character and I don’t really care about furries and such, if you catch my drift. Well. Sheila lives on, though.

there’s no such thing as not enough Daevion

Classic!

this is really for my own amusement
you could say it’s fanservice, except this is not a fan art so I don’t know
I left a blank page after this one so that Daevion can cry in there when I’m not looking

At this point, Daevion is not a derivative character anymore, so it wasn’t fair to keep drawing him with the Oblivion outfit and to have his backstory fit with the Elder Scrolls canon. He’s really my own creation, so I wanted his outfit to be my creation too.
This is Daevion’s final design. He no longer lives in a fantasy universe; he now lives in an alternate present. Alternate, because how else could he still be an elf then XD I still have to write his new backstory, but he’s the same as before as for his personality. I’ll have to draw a better reference picture with colors, but as you can imagine his sweater is crimson and grey, his trousers are grey and his shoes are black. As for his necklace, the actual design is the one under his right hand.
He looks so elegant :> I like him even more now.

This is Hydride. Here we’re talking about another alternate present in which people are beginning to modify their bodies using cybernetic parts. Hydride - which is not his real name, of course - modified himself so to enhance his physical capabilities. He had a very strong reason for doing so. I don’t know what this reason is yet, but I know that, since he implanted a cyber hand on his dominant right, he had to learn to write with his left hand. The wires on his upper body don’t allow him to wear anything on his torso anymore, thus why he’s half naked. The rest of his clothing is very practical. As you can see, the upper part of his trousers is a bit larger than how it should be so to not rub against the wires down there, but they are also very tight on his legs and tucked into his boots so they won’t fall down. One could ask why didn’t repair his eyes so to stop wearing glasses, but he likes them, and that’s all about it.

Concept sketches. The colored sketch is his very first concept; the glasses were added later. I spent a good day working on his design, in case you were wondering. The first idea was to make him into an enemy for Sheila, but that was very silly since he’s a human and Sheila is an anthro fennec. This idea was dropped for good right after sketching him here.
I should really write a more detailed entry about my creative process, but know that for me is very important to understand how a character feels into his skin and to have his design making sense rather than being just pretty. For this, I even spent a few days wearing wires all over me to understand how does it feel. One would think that all those wires make walking hard and tripping easy, but I found out that’s not true and that after a while you end up considering them a part of your body. I also found out that people is more prone to notice someone who walks in a weird way than a person covered in wires. How else could I have made these discoveries?
But I’m getting off topic. Anyway, Hydride will probably be something like an evil guy in his universe. He seems to be such an important character, so I’m taking my time to write his story.

Margareth Stone belongs to the same universe as Hydride. She’s 31 and works in a cybernetic parts research center. She’s not brilliant at all, though; she just makes some components and that’s it, the big projects are in the hands of her superiors. Margareth is very average in everything, actually, and she’s not a beauty either. Her fashion sense is also questionable.
Her husband left her a few years ago because he realized his life was boring and that he could have much more. He was really one for adventure; he married Margareth before he could understand that part of himself. Margareth even let him have his way with other women without objecting, but in the end he couldn’t cope with this lie anymore. The problem is, he left his wife alone with their three-years-old child. All that’s left of Margareth’s family is her old mother and a sister who lives far away, so she had great problems in taking care of the kid, who had in the meanwhile become her only reason to live.
Luck turns to her side when a project for enhancing the brain’s capabilities with the help of technology comes to the human testing phase. Offering herself as a test subject, she has the right to work a lot less and be paid a lot more for only being in the project, with the downside that of course it’s her brain, so if something breaks down she’ll have to run to the center and get fixed as soon as possible. But even like this, the risks are not very high - she was also among the people who made the parts for that project, so she knows how the whole thing works.
So, she undergoes surgery and the top of her head is changed with a metal dome that can be opened to check what’s going on. Because of that she can’t have hair anymore, but since she doesn’t want to freak out people she always wears a wig. Now that she’s a test subject she has got enough time and money to take care of her kid, but she’s also become a lot different from before; she can now memorize and learn everything without effort, retrieve information from any part of her brain at any time and think a lot faster. So, her way to see the world changes as well…
And that’s when her backstory ends and her story begins.

You’re going to hear a lot more about Hydride, Margareth and their universe. There will be new characters and new details. For the time being, every post in which I’m mentioning this alternate universe will be tagged as “unnamed saga”. I’m going to rename the tag in the future, of course. It’s just a placeholder.

LOOK WHO’S BACK
this didn’t turn out as planned but well it’s still cute
There would be two more pics with them but they’re suggestive so I’ll be posting them in another entry, another time.

Phew, I’ve finally finished writing this epic entry, to bed now

The Xivilai is still in the works, but it’s looking good so far. In the meanwhile:

melting the lock with his reality alteration skills, he looted everything he could take and headed out of the marauders’ hide

Now that I think about it, I’ve never ever drawn him not smiling in some form.

I’ve spent these last few days at Jacopo’s for his birthday. We had an awesome time. Originally, this entry was about what kind of awesome time did we have, but then I noticed that I just can’t blog about my life. It makes me feel stupid. Long story short, we had an awesome time. 8)

Hey look I drew a me. It should be my Pokémon Trainer but really, it’s me. I blame Kate for that.

as ridiculous as it may seem, it’s actually a very accurate representation of my person. which also explains why I tend to draw people with weird anatomy when I have no one who can model for me: my whole body is double-jointed. and yes, I can actually do that with my tongue.
THE TIME HAS COME FOR ME TO EMBRACE MY FREAKINESS

Last night I had some weird dream. Basically, I was with Jacopo in a medieval city; after visiting a few places, we entered a tree. The inside of the tree was some sort of dark world completely secluded from the outside, which gave us an idea about how to use that to our advantage. You know what happens next. In the middle of it, something happened. When we got out, I realized that from midway to the end I’ve been doing it with Daevion. Then he kidnapped me. Random people tried to rescue me, but Daevion casted all sorts of spells on them and they went away. Jacopo was outside too, and he said that I had to choose between Daevion and him. I answered that he only exists in my imagination, so it was not like I was cheating on him. He said that’s ok, but since we were in my subconscious he was actually real there!
…I’m not sure what does this all mean D: though I was really waiting for Daevion to appear in a dream, I did not want for it to be like this D8 also I’m sort of disappointed that this was such a blurry dream and that I couldn’t get a good look at his face. I wish I could get lucid dreams at will.

I had the swine flu and it was underwhelming at its worst, thus proving that the media can really manipulate people down to their very fears. It’s not a revelation, but it’s also not an unfounded lament from a black Myspace. I only have to think about the conversation I had with one of my housemates. When I said I had the flu, she started going on about how I should go to the hospital as soon as possible. Well, I can just imagine the face of the doctors if I told them that I wanted to get hospitalized because of a few lines of fever and a sore throat.

Anyway, let’s get to this entry’s real reason. The other day I was archiving my artworks and, among the other things, I came across a number of forgotten Volkner and Flint sketches. They were either unscanned or left unfinished, but still too adorable to never see the light of the interwebs.

Judging from the looks of it, this must be about a year old. I don’t even recall drawing it, but it melts my heart already. The anatomy makes no sense, but Volkner’s expression is just awwwww.

This one should be from February 2009. I think I couldn’t get Volkner’s face right and gave up in frustration. Now that I look again at this one, they also have no nipples. :o Why was I drawing this, anyway? Looks like an excuse to draw naked man torsoes, but uhhhhhhhhhh it’s not like you wouldn’t expect that from me. 8D

I had big plans for these, but lost interest somewhere during the process. The second one was even on watercolor paper, so figure that. They are still somehow cute.

A PHOENIX WRIGHT/POKÉMON CROSSOVER. WHAT HAVE I DONE. Although I must say that it almost makes sense. I’m sure that Gumshoe and Flint would get along.

I could say that these sketches re-ignited my love for this pairing. Sorry for the awful pun but there was really no way I could avoid it. Do you know if there’s any English speaker out there who has made some decent fan art of them? I am so isolated that I almost feel like I’m the only non-Japanese to care about them :(

In the meanwhile, have some random stuff:

No complicated animations, just a tiny blinking fennec that could kill you with its cuteness.

You just know that I’m becoming obsessed with a character when I start posting meta like this.

On another note, yesterday I finally built up the courage to scan the Myuutsuu no Tanjou booklet. It’s a rather delicate item so I feared to cause damage, but it seems that it went better than expected. The intention was to put it on I AM², but this got me to think about what I really want to do with that website. As much as I love Ai as a character, my real object of interest is the complete Mewtwo saga. So I may turn that shrine into a full tribute to that arc and leave the fanlisting go. Too bad though, I kinda liked the name. Hmm.

Ultimate Mission got its layout upgraded! Look at the brand new navigation with those little flashing screens. I always forget how much I love to make sprites :> The fonts got changed too.

I also solved the problem with Soaring Dread’s navigation by removing it completely and making that fanlisting into a single-page website. The logo was also remade and is now classier. I think.

This should do it for step four. 8)

Have some random crap

I LOVE HOW THIS TURNED OUT
the pose was taken from a screenshot, but everything else is original

tiny sprites are tiny

man I’d so like to make some animated sprites
I think I’ll start out with something easy like Volkner and Flint talking and then I’ll move to Daevion casting spells or Samus walking. I’d also like to do something with Pokémon but I really don’t know, I thought of Sneasel slashing but I don’t really know how to make it loop decently. Suggestions?

I’M NOT DEAD
just been busy with those exams. man. couldn’t get any sleep for days. but now they’re gone! so I can get back to my usual work. I’ve got stuff that’s on hold since a few months now - both for me and for other people. lots of stuff. you’ll see soon.

ANYWAY, SCANS?

This and the following two were made for that techniques exam. They are actually renditions of photos found on the web, so if you search hard enough you should be able to find the references. In any case, fennecs are the most adorable animals ever. Who could hate a fennec?

mantissss
her shadow was fun to draw

A random mask. Mostly for the shadows.

I think they turned out well. At least, the teacher seemed very pleased. He was all omg these are so great yet you’re so young, and you’re even mostly self-taught, you’ve got a bright future ahead…quite an ego boost. See, there are some times in which I don’t know if I can really make a living out of my artwork or I’m just a waste of time and money. Harsh, I know, but sometimes looking at the works of other people I get the impression my work is…not bad, but not good enough either, or at least not as good as theirs. Then sometimes I have to deal with the occasional flamer/hater/whatever, and even though I don’t care about what they say I cannot help but think that there’s people out there who hate me with passion.
What I wanted to say is that I’m happy to receive unexpected appraise, ok? This got a bit off track.

I have no idea, the second before I was working on the exam, the second after I was painting this. You and your magical tricks.
As a side note, this is also incredibly tiny. Smaller than a finger. What’s with me and small-sized drawings?

I don’t feel like writing about those projects now, though. I still have to leave the ideas bubble a bit before writing them down. But you’re all used to it, isn’t it? I mean, to me never being coherent. :B

Introducing Daevion. Born under the stars of the Ritual and therefore blessed by the goddess Mara, he belongs to the ancient race of the Altmer, the cultured, tall, magicka-gifted elves from Summerset Island.

Unlike many of his kin, he doesn’t think of himself as belonging to a superior race; while he’s certainly proud of his cultural heritage, he’s also well aware that it was the same advanced society that sent his mother in permanent exile on the mainland for being the offspring of an illegitimate union of her Altmer mother with an Imperial man, thus making her of impure blood and unworthy of living on Summerset. Daevion himself was born and spent his childhood in the Imperial City, considers himself like a citizen of the Empire to all extents, and believes that his kinsmen should begin to seriously rethink their core values instead of acting all haughty and collecting distrust from the other races.

Like all elves, Altmer can live longer than a thousand years. Daevion is 257 years old, which would make him about 26 in human years. He is always seen wearing a red vest which he took care in enchanting so to grant him greater magicka resources; one might say it’s his signature item of clothing, and it comes as no surprise that people in Cyrodiil have come to refer to him as “the crimson mage”.

Calm and of pleasant disposition, Daevion is well loved among gents and rulers alike; as an adventurer he’s always the first to lend a hand with dangerous jobs, and he has fame of being selfless and heroic. Even though he genuinely likes to be helpful, it must also be noted that he genuinely likes to go on adventure and get his hands on a good loot, so those claims are not completely true. Anyway, he is a sworn enemy of everything evil and believes in purging the world from wretchedness. He is especially concerned with freeing the world from the ones who live off harming other people, since they’re a hazard to society; he has no pity for bandits, necromancers, assassins and vampires.
Apart from these strong opinions, he tends to be a mild and forgiving person. He is cheerful in a quiet way - he greets people with a smile, but is never overly jumpy. It’s funny, cause even though he dislikes his stuck-up kinsmen, he can’t help but keep a certain Altmer poise.

Very spiritual, Daevion worships the Aedra in the Altmeri ways; most of his worship goes to Mara, who’s been protecting him since his birth, but he’s also devout to Zenithar, Kynareth, and - of course - Auriel. He also worships some Daedra princes; he is especially fascinated with the powers of Vaermina and Sheogorath. He thinks that sanity and madness are actually often overlapping, and he wishes to know more about this subtle balance. One of Daevion’s strongest motives is his unquenchable thirst for knowledge; this has often led him to follow the orders of some deities to better understand their sphere of influence and position in this world. However, he will not just blindly go on any quest: if there is evil, there must be deities connected to evilness, and he’s not going against his principles in exchange for knowledge which is best not to have.

In spite of being so intelligent and wise, Daevion is also very possessive as for what concerns his belongings and always looking for more to own and more money to make. He says that he likes to surround himself with beautiful things; the obvious truth is that he’s just plain avid. Also, because of his ability to talk himself out of any situation, he’s considered by some to have a manipulative streak - which is not entirely wrong, even though this is something that’s probably beyond his control.

Most Altmer are powerful sorcerers, and Daevion is no exception. He is especially skilled in bending reality with Alteration magic; he can open chests without even touching the lock, make heavy equipment weigh less than a feather, and transform his body at will so he can run across lakes or breathe underwater. His other specialty is using elemental Destruction magic to scorch, freeze, or electrocute his enemies. He’s also good at Illusion magic; however, he won’t use it for tricking people into following his orders - he just likes to use magical Light to illuminate dungeons and other dark places, and he has enough confidence in his skills that he just doesn’t care about giving away his position to enemies. Should things go wrong, he can anyway use his knowledge in matters of Restoration magic to heal himself and get back up. He is also good at Alchemy, a decent Mysticism scholar and knows the basics of Conjuration.

While his crimson robe is his most prominent piece of equipment, Daevion also wears a few enchanted pieces of jewelry that help him overcome the Altmeri weakness against elemental magic and grant him the ability to reflect spells and physical damage to the attacker.
When adventuring, he will usually keep a balance between charging in and taking his enemies down from a distance. When facing enemies wielding a blade or a blunt weapon, he will get very close so to cast spell directly at them while taking in hits to reflect right back at them; spellcasters are taken care of from a distance, because this way he can dodge their attacks with ease.

Daevion’s mount is a unicorn. Cliché much? It may seem so; the truth, however, is different. As ridiculous as it may sound, Daevion was exploring the Heartlands and just sort of stumbled upon him. Unicorns are aggressive creatures and will think of anyone in sight as a possible threat and will proceed to impale them; however, this one seemed to be friendly towards Daevion and let him jump on. Maybe it was because only a pure of heart can ride a unicorn, or maybe it was because Daevion wasn’t carrying any weapon besides his own magic; in either case, the two have been sharing a close bond since then.

The unicorn seems to be a wandering soul, as it will often walk away when Daevion dismounts. This causes him to be easily attacked by creatures or bandits, case in which his elven friend will hear his cries and come to the rescue. Sometimes the unicorn will run after deers and Daevion will play along and join him in the hunt. Why not? Venison tastes good.

As a result of his adventuring combined with his fine bartering skills, Daevion is very wealthy. He owns a large house in Cheydinhal, and even though he rarely stays indoors for more than a day he sure likes it there. He filled up his place with interesting items he happened to come across during his travels.

His calm expression. I noticed that the playing character in Oblivion can have an array of other facial expressions, but you will probably never notice since you’ll either be playing in a first-person perspective or only seeing your character’s back. In my experience, they can frown, yawn, look grave (like in the second screencap in this page) and smile.
Taking a guess, I’d say the frown is for when your character is in battle. The yawn may either be random or an idle pose, since I spotted Daevion yawning while he was waiting for Count Hassildor in Skingrad’s castle hall. The grave look…the only time I saw it was at the time of that screencap: at the end of Vaermina’s quest, looking at Arkved drowning in his nightmare. I’m sure it’s a separate expression and not the default face, but why should that even exist anyway? I’m not sure about the smile either, it may have something to do with disposition but I’ve not noticed any consistent behavior. Oh well.

fireballs are so good

his amulet
(this is totally not an excuse to draw him half-naked)

what
I-I think I like my own character, is that a bad thing?

woah that was a massive post :o as a side note, I think I may suffer from the blank page syndrome. I could go on writing forever when no one cares, but when I want to write a lot I get stuck and end up procrastinating. The worst part is that this happens no matter how much I actually want to write, and this may also be why I don’t write stuff for ATP as often as I’d like. I should find a way around this.

on other news I moved to an apartment and I’m loving it :D well, except for the current lack of internet connection, but this is only a temporary issue
I think I’ll post pictures when we’ll be finished with assembling the furniture! we chose some freakin awesome stuff. our living room table is white with black chairs with white cushions and looks fantastic; the table for the room, on the other hand, is going to be plain badass. black with red legs. the best part being that it was my roommate to suggest the color combination, figure that.
BUT LOOK AT ME, GETTING ALL EXCITED ABOUT FURNITURE soon I’ll find myself going nuts over new curtains and I’ll get in the news as the first person to become an elderly at nineteen years of age