I love drawing in charcoal because when you're in the beginning of a work, instead of looking like something reasonable it's perfectly acceptable and natural for them to look like this

...okay, so I'm probably not the first person to notice this.

But gear's earing that he points towards when he says that he did the same ritual he wanted to help kuro with already on himself before:

actually looks pretty similar to the pieces of the necklace the count used to create the servamps:

The different pieces of the necklace seem to contain one demon each and the count used them to create the servamps.

So...did the count either learn this technique from the werewolves or is he possible even originally a werewolf himself? It would explain why he's immortal, that's why I'm wondering about this.

Gear says that the ritual is used to remove spirits, could it be that the count removed his own sins using the werewolf ritual and created the demons this way? But he went too far and removed too much unlike gear who only removed one part of himself? Him removing the sins from himself would also explain why he's so weird and doesn't understand other beings. As the sin demons say, they are a natural part of being a human and we have seen multiple times that denying their existence is harmful, removing them all from you would probably lead to you not being able to relate to other people anymore.

Maybe removing all these parts of himself is also why he has no appearance. Without his demons he's not a person anymore.

The count originally being a werewolf would also explain why he has magical abilities (gear can also use magic) before other magicians existed and why he's so anxious about certain people dying. Gear talks about how his immortality makes him sad because human friends do die, but unlike the count gear seems to accept death, grieves in a heathier way than the count and is able to move on and make new friends. Could also explain why his magic and creations are all strongly tied to the (full) moon.

Another similarity is that while werewolves apparently can't reproduce gear was able to have descendants by sharing his life force (it's mentioned in chapter 135 which isn't translated yet) with a woman and through her human children tsurugi is related to gear. Sigurd explained to nicco that the magicians came to be because the count let humans drink his blood, three survived, got magical ablities and became the ancestors of all human magicians:

Maybe the count is more of a werecat though. He and the sloth demon do seem to have a closer connection, even though the count's appearance changes depending on the person looking at him he does usually keep his tail and the tip looks exactly like the one of kuro's cat/lion form and similar to the the one of inner sloth's non-human form.

It was also stated multiple times that the sloth demon is the strongest. I wonder why that is. Servamp comments on the fact that being lazy is often actually a sign of depression/anxiety through kuro's arc, so maybe the count was depressed and that's why the sloth demon is the strongest? Basically the demons strength depends on how much the count suffered from the different sins? It would also explain why melancholy is so strong, I assume kuro refusing to see him no matter how many siblings he sent his way to tell him to come looking for the count made him extremely sad and probably even made him come up with the plan to have himself be killed and then put in the same body as kuro through the ritual.

I assume he was behind C3 ordering the servamps to kill him because he's the one who created the magicians and thus C3 and lily who is kind of working for him was probably the one who put the idea that the count needed to be killed into the head of his eve (aka a member of the alicein family who hold a lot of power in C3 basically since the beginning. I explained this in more detail in another post). The people from C3 even said that the count can only be killed if he wants to and yeah, kuro didn't truly kill him, but he did destroy his body and kuro seems to have met little resistance when he attacked the count. Which probably means the count wanted this to happen.

the lunar chronicles are so funny torrin will be like "your feelings towards linh cinder are clouding your judgement" and kai will be like "no I'm being perfectly objective" and turn around so he can draw hearts around cinders name in his notebook

When in doubt, and without access to your tablet, scribble some gijinkas on the back of calendar pages, and edit the ones you liked the most. Worked for me!

With Pepperman's brains, brawn, dashing looks, incredible talent, silky voice, tactical prowess, quick thinking, and Vigilante's great amount of explosives, surely they'll defeat that rascal together!

Okay, maybe these were all just an excuse to adapt the blorbos to my anime-ish style.

Pizzahead and Noise would shoot a puppy in the face.

Funmy how I ordered the images so that it looks as if Mister Stick is looking at- Uhm. Uh. I c. Uh. ... I can explain.

Peppino Spaghetti is so babygirl to me. I wish Italians were real!

the anteater family :)

Do you have any tips on drawing the Swatchlings?

frankly i am happy that i have gotten good enough at drawing these bird boys (gender neutral) that someone wants my opinions. anyway

i see a lot of fun ways to draw swatchlings tbh and i don't really know what you want tips on Specifically so i will just make notes on a few of the main things i think about when i draw them, most importantly: just make them bitches broad and fluffy, man. they're all canonically Ripped, but an important thing to remember is that they are likely completely covered in feathers! that's going to smooth out those muscular details, so you wont be able to see them, just the broadness of them.

my style is all based in gesture and shapes, so i use a lot of blocks so they look nice 'n sturdy. it's okay if you don't nail the anatomy on the sketch, i am constantly nudging things around all the way into the coloring phase trying to get the shapes right. frankly i would probably bulk out even this Example Bird if i were drawing them all the way. i usually add more fluff or muscle or chub or whatever when i detail them but the absolute bare bones of them is dedicated to blockie

i give mine these sort of vestigial wings on their arms to make them look softer, and i think about how feathers move and stick out on real birds to help inform how they'll sit on these birds, too. and i carry the soft, pointed feather shapes into the fingers so they also look soft.

tip for drawing Soft: don't get caught up making too many individual strands or feathers, soft things tend to come together in big tufts. you want big gentle shapes, not a bunch of little ones. unless you want your bird to look wet or scared in which case you're doing a great job and you've probably just drawn spamton instead

their faces are really tricky so i think of them as these kinda... non-euclidean semi-hollow pentagonal cones. there's five "planes" with the top two dedicated to eyes and the bottom three dedicated to mouth placement. sometimes you can see the far eye even though, in real life, you would not be able to see that "plane" of their face. you don't always have to understand things sometimes they just look cool, especially when characters are cybernetic birds made out of Magical Darkness. there is no rule about when to draw one or two eyes. it's just whatever looks better.

biggest and bestest tip of all about drawing swatchlings! very important! write this one down in your most favorite gel pen and Really Big! give them either tails, or tail coats. i don't care that canon has neither, canon is wrong. you can switch it out, even - my birds have tail coats as part of their standard uniforms but they can wear their real tails out on special occasions.

lastly, if you want to stick closer to a canon interpretation, i would not try to make the birds too unique, when they're on the job anyway - they like being coordinated! tasque manager is very particular about keeping them coordinated as well. but if you just want to have fun then you can make your birds as fun and unique as you want :) even though i draw them all about the same i personally love love love seeing super funky swatchling designs, making them different colors and species and such.

course summary:

make them Large. make them Fluffy. use really broad, blocky shapes and draw big, thick tufts of feathers instead of trying to detail them too much.

their heads are silly magic nonsense. draw a triangle and get funky with it. no rules, only vibes. if it vibes it stays

they always need some kind of tail or tail equivalent and i don't care what Anybody else says

if you want to follow canon, draw all the birds except swatch just about the same. if you're just here for a good time, throw that out completely and have fun with it.

[id: a digital drawing of Clove and Gia from the waists up. Clove is a pink Zeltron with purple vitiligo and shoulder length brown hair, wearing red and cream robes with gold details. Standing beside vem is Gia, a brown skinned human with shoulder length purple hair and a vest, a security earpiece in her ear and a cane in her left hand. Clove has a hand out from blowing a kiss and winks at the camera, while Gia looks over at them, unimpressed. A gold halo sits behind Clove's head, overlapping with the silver halo behind Gia /end id]

@stonehenge-asexual's guys clove and gia in star wars :D clove is space beyonce whose music definitely isnt rebellion aligned but its So sweet that you think that <3 and gia is his security guard who can't wait to get out of the public eye so the persona drops alskdf

i’m just

there must be so many gaps in jieum’s memory

she was the girl of many trades but can she remember how she learnt any of those skills? No they were all from her past lives so they’re gone. Can she remember leaving her neglectful family to live with ae-gyeong? No because she was from a past life, so where does ji-eum think she grew up? She remembers being good at school and her awards but not if anybody was there in the audience for her. She says in her phone call to her superior that she remembers switching departments before, but she doesn’t remember working in the hotel. She cooks meals the exact way as ae-gyeong taught her and she taught ae-gyeong, but she doesn’t remember having learnt them. if she can’t remember anything to do with her past lives, she wouldn’t be able to remember anything that had happened in the past few months the drama is set over.

that must be such an odd and confusing existence, to only remember small dots and flashes of your life, and a giant gap in recent memory, and she doesn’t even seem to be affected by it either? Did she go to the hospital after coming to consciousness standing on a bridge with no idea how she got there? Did they run tests on her brain to see if something had gone wrong? Does she think she suffered a mental breakdown?

What is going on in ji-eum’s brain in those final scenes i want to dissect her thoughts like a grape

Textured hair really isn't that hard to draw, I just have a skill issue.

- Vanessa

idk about anyone else but for me /personally/ assigning any of the wof dragon tribes a single equivalent human culture or accent feels kind of weird or off. Unless you’re like. Specifically from that culture and know what you’re interpreting

like sure the ‘nightwings are British because they’re voiced that way in the audiobooks’ is funny at first but I once saw a post break down the accents by tribe and assign sandwings a Nigerian accent. Which IMMEDIATELY makes the fact that they’re commonly rogues and thieves in the story not a fun cowboy thing but a vaguely racist thing suggesting that all Nigerian people scam and steal, which. Given the ‘Nigerian prince’ thing is already a stereotype, well…-

and it definitely isn’t JUST that, I’m not trying to call a single person out. But these kind of 1-1 correlations lead to results like this 9/10 times and it just feels strange. Just mix stuff together. Mash ideas from different places into one. Don’t make the dragons a 1-1 parallel to a specific human culture because then any story you tell that may connect to a stereotype of that culture will come off really, really bad

i want a neopets nostalgia website you can't log into, it just always looks like you're logged in to the original site circa late 2000s and the main purpose of the fansite is just to recreate the feeling of going onto neopets to do your dailies as a kid. you can click around the world map, and take something from the omelet even though you don't have an account and thus an inventory, and you can spin the wheels, and you can go look in the shops even though you cant really buy anything, and you can go play the old flash games because they've been converted somehow, and maybe there's even a fabricated issue of the neopian times you can check. like it's all very simplified and obviously entire sections of the site like the battle dome would be missing, but you can Get That Feeling again just by poking around. no accounts, so no logging in needed and no large server space or cybersecurity required for the host (not that the real neopets ever had the latter), i just want to click on little secrets on the world map and play the hannah trilogy or ice cream factory or caves & corridors again

me and the british demon playing 8d mental chess (with time travel)

Cloud Retainer will act so formal and put together, but. In a romantic relationship, there will be. A Notable increase in how affectionate she is to her person.

got desperate asf for some non-shitty heta fanfiction and said fuck it ill read the gerame fanfic cuz the author did make some good shit before (even tho i know it wont be THAT good since ill need to manually edit in my brain alfred as feliciano instead and make a whole extra unspoken lore to explain why feliciano is so ooc).... BUT LORD. IM CHEWING GLASS. IM CHEWING GLASS SO FUCKING HARD RIGHT NOW. BECAUSE GIRL ITALY EXISTS IN THIS FIC AND OH MY GODDDD I HATE IT HERE I HATE IT LUDWIG STAY AWAY FROM THAT MAN STAY AWAY FROM THAT EVIL DEMENTED VILE MAN AAAAHHAUHWUSUDJJS STAY WITH FELICIA PLEASEEE PLEASEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!! LIKE STRAIGHT UP HE DONT EVEN LIKE ALFRED BRUH AND ALFRED DONT EVEN LIKE HIM. ill admit the set up is good (its like a 1950s au and the reason why i trust this author is a whole nother can of worms that i put in my drafts maybe ill drop it later) BUT I CANT EVEN CARE OR TRY TO CARE ABOUT ALFRED X LUDWIG BC FELICIA IS RIGHT THEREE AND THIS AUTHOR GETS THEIR RELATIONSHIP TOGETHER TOO. SHES LITERALLY LIGHT OF HIS LAIF MAKES HIM HAPPY IS SWEET AND NICE TO HIM TUGS HIM DOWN AND RUBS THEIR NOSES TOGETHER LIKE MOTHERFUCKER THATS TRUE. THAT HAPPENED IN REAL LIFE I SAW IT. SO WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU WRITING THIS INTO A DAMN LUDWIG X ALFRED FANFIC IM CHEWING GLASSSSSS!!!! BC I KNOW FELICIA X LUDWIG WONT HAPPEN I HATE THIS STUPID BAKA LIFE I HATE IT HERE RAAAGJWJSIIEKDODKDKDKXKDKZKKS RAGE RAGE RAGE

so far its a genuinely good fic tho with some nice character development and being able to take a "real life universe" spin on heta characters which i find can rarely be done well! id rec it to any ameger fanheads out there!

peace and pascal! <- (im sorry im lying. im lying. tw lies. no peace only pascal. sorry i lied on main. its a good fic thats true. but i want the earth to explode. feels like im shoving my dick in an anthill)

I'm back again! Post number three.... I decided to download the Tumblr app because then (theoretically) I'll be able to take pictures and post them faster! So. Yeah.

(ID: A small, matte gouache study of some small reddish-orange mushrooms emerging from pale green moss. It has a semi-abstract painterly style. /end ID)

(i will edit this soon to include a link to my "references i've USED" board on Pinterest... having some minor technical issues atm. if youd like to see it Right Now though, its in the pinned post)

(additionally, if anybody knows what species this is or even where the original image came from, I'd be happy to know! Pinterest is a cesspit when it comes to credited sources. this goes for any of the reference images I use, btw)

Here, I present a gouache study I did yesterday and today. I feel that it came out okay, but I wish I hadn't run out of painting-stamina so quickly.

"Oh but Marten, you should've just taken a break!!!" yes. I probably should.

In any case, here is this. I'm still unused to gouache painting. Not that I'm terribly used to watercolors at the moment... but alas.

I do like what I did with the colors in the background. I'm still learning about... tones... I guess. Color shifts and stuff. I have a free trial to skillshare at the moment, so maybe I can look that up in the near future. That and perhaps gouache techniques.

There isn't a certain look I'm going for when it comes to gouache painting, but I do hope to achieve at least a cohesive-looking collection of studies and eventually paintings.

I also wanted to say thanks to those who "liked" my second (?) post... I really appreciate it, even if its not getting "reblogged" or whatever. I hadn't thought I'd get any sort of engagement so quickly. I dunno. It's encouraging. So thanks for that :)

He’s everywhere, this guy (Patreon)

Bonus: