#i did this style again on accident but i like it too much to redraw it | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

shachihata · 3 years

Text

me rating the “Cut of Meat” raw steak emojis

this one is nice. instantly recognizable as a raw steak which is really i guess what an emoji is going for. i like the general shape of it and the shading on the fat is very nice, good translucent effect on the sides. poor marbling on the meat though, kind of makes it look like a grapefruit. 7/10

............weirdly shiny and not in the way that steak is supposed to be shiny. looks like a badly-shaped stress-ball balloon (yknow the ones you used to fill with like cornstarch) with the fat/bone part printed on the balloon. no marbling at all to suggest quality of the meat. 2/10

this is just overall a worse version of the apple one. no marbling at all. literally not even joking this just looks like someone tried to redraw the apple emoji like even the parts where the fat dips in on the right side are similar but worse... don’t like how realistic the fat is rendered compared to how Flat the meat itself looks either. 3/10

REALLY fucking dislike this one like there is NO fat running thru the meat this is stylized in such an awful way. wtf are those weird little protrusions on the bone in the middle??? What is that weird grid cross-hatching texture on the meat??? Everything besides the meat color itself is awful. 1/10

this color is absolutely the worst. Literally absolutely the worst. Like i’m genuinely curious... did the artist of the whatsapp meat emoji ever see a GOOD FRESH cut of steak before or have they only ever seen like raw steak that’s been left out in the arizona heat for too long. In what world is your steak this color. Don’t even get me started on how weirdly bulgy the meat is from the weirdly smooth fat -5/10

this is stylized better than the microsoft meat emoji but once again the colors are just....... off.......... really really curious how they got That shade of yellow from looking at pictures of raw steak........... the shape of it is nice although i’m disappointed in the lack of detail and the weird fucked-up bone in the middle. 2/10

girl help this is a fillet of salmon with more saturated colors. very confused about how they got Orange as the color for bottom sections of fat on this steak???? Not even joking the first time i skimmed thru these emojis i genuinely thought that they’d put a raw salmon emoji in as an accident in the meat emoji section sorry this one just isn’t instantly recognizable so i can’t give a high score even though i like all the subtle details in the meat itself 2/10

now THIS is how you stylize a cut of meat. joypixels’s isn’t as realistic as apple’s but it’s not meant to be. this steak knows where it’s going in life. this steak is so clean-cut i could see this steak representing me in court. nice colors especially on the fat... the gradient lighting is a bit weird but i’ll let it pass because it fits the overall style of the emoji. 9/10

i think this one is cute (-: it’s not realistic at all but it’s instantly recognizable as a slice of raw steak. it is utilizing iconography to its fullest potential and not trying to make it stylized-realistic like google or microsoft did. shape could be a bit better but overall it’s just a cute little cut of meat! 9/10

awful. awful. awful. THAT shade of hot pink and orange???? why is this steak covered in a candy coating???? why is the fat such a similarly salmon-y color to the meat itself????? girl this is a piece of jelly candy you’d get for halloween send this one back to the factory -10/10

hmm. interesting take on the classic t-bone steak. much better attempt at marbling than any other meat emoji on this list but also like... this steak is rendered like it is coated in a layer of glass. like if emojidex is selling gummy candy fake steak emojipedia is selling hard lollipop candy fake steak. i wish i could rate it higher because i like where they tried to go with it. 4/10

this is shinier bulgier less-successful joypixels steak. this is like if you put the clean-cut businessman of joypixels raw steak and pumped him up like that blueberry bitch from charlie and the chocolate factory and then covered him in plastic wrap. Why does the meat bulge like that against the fat sections. Where did all the marbling go. Somebody go get the oompa loompas for help............ 2/10

#ciphertexts #sorry i had to express my feelings about these i have very strong emotions about raw meat.

1 note · View note

finsterhund · 6 years

Photo

Finsterhund’s 2017 Summary of Art (and by extension, the rest of my life)

I’d be lying if I said that 2017 wasn’t an incredibly difficult year for the easily excitable finsterhund but it was also a very productive year for my art. I’m not going to deny that. A lot of issues came about that pushed me really hard, and I did break, but I mended too. I grew stronger in some ways. My writing took a nosedive and I’m not sure how to repair that, but my art, well... this is the first time I’ve ever done one of these. That should speak for itself.

In some months it was difficult to pick which one. I decided against choosing ones that may have been partially rotoscoped (such as my reaction images and most memes) and also because I tend to draw too similar to reference images I use. So no redraws of blurry HoD concept art or stuff.

January: [x]

This was supposed to be the picture for holidays 2016 but I’m a lazy earth boy who must’ve been slacking off because I finished and posted it right on January first! I remember at the time I was really proud of this one, and spent a lot of time on it. It was drawn traditionally and then scanned and digitized in GIMP... yes gimp. Fishy loved it and that made me happy. Nowadays I can pick apart so many flaws, especially in Andy. The lines look so shaky! Maybe I’ll redraw it for January 1st 2018! Assuming I don’t slack off again.

February: [x]

It was hard picking one from this month because I didn’t really like my drawings from then. Here’s art in paint of Red Spot eating a burger. I used to draw him with food when I was hungry for a while. Mmmmmm borger.

March: [x]

This is the month things started to take a nosedive. There was lots of good things happening, but some bad stuff too. A few new problems arose, but at the time the biggest was I found out my birth mom was being evicted and I would have to help her clear the old house. THAT old house. I retreated heavily into my artistic comforts and drew a lot of pictures of Red Spot being comforting and supportive to Andy. Red was created for that purpose after all, and Andy being a character I so closely identify with ended up being the comfort I needed especially then. Despite its crudeness in ms paint I do love this picture and should redraw it in Sai at some point.

April: [x]

The trials I had to face were unreal this month. The Wannabe War(tm) is well underway, and the time to return to the old house rapidly approached. I drew like there was no tomorrow, and these paint pictures were the best. Smoother lines, and more detail. When the time came to face that house things got ugly. Mom hid that my dog Jack had been dead for over half a year and broke the news only when I became distraught when I arrived and he didn’t come when I called him. My fixation on the “monkey’s paw” that was ruining everything I ever wished for started around here, and I kept breaking down. Bad regressing back to before I left that place happened. But something else did too. I DIDN’T. STOP. DRAWING. I drew more and more. Choosing to bring my laptop allowed me to make more pictures. A lot of Red Spot and Andy comfort ones, some mean little immature vent comics, and memes. Lots of memes. I was able to do the job I went there to do and returned home exhausted but VICTORIOUS. My art? Well I think I actually improved a lot then. It was predominantly due to surviving in spite of everything and the sheer volume of cruddy little paint drawings. I didn’t want to pick a mean comic and already had one ms paint Andy and Red picture in this line up so here’s a surprisingly detailed xenomorph queen being licked by a prequel era character who is a massive spoiler. Not only were both characters very complicated to draw, but I’m genuinely shocked I was able to draw an xenomorph at all.

May: [x]

After the painful embarrassment of April I tried really hard to relax. I was still really scared and anxious about the Wannabe incident, but it had more or less turned into a post-arms race stalemate where he wasn’t really doing anything and I just had my weapons of mass destruction pointed at him with my grubby little orange paw over the launch button which is where things have been ever since. My art took a relaxation break, but it was still steadily getting better. Late May I wanted to come up with a reason to actually celebrate my birthday (June 3rd) so I did a silly little “June is International Heart of Darkness month” post featuring Red and Andy sharing a slice of chocolate cake. I went on to say that June 3rd was “International draw heart of darkness fan art” day (real smooth you egocentric mutt) but I thought it’d be a good way to actually celebrate the day but make it about the video game that gave me a reason to live another year instead of about me aging, as I openly hate that I grow older.

June: [x]

A few of my friends drew HoD stuff this month, but a lot of my friends were busy due to jobs, school, life, etc. We used to be a lot more active in 2015 and even in 2016 so this did hit me pretty hard. As a result, I become very frustrated and out of spite decide it’s finally time to test my “new toy.” I don’t remember when Kale actually gave me his old tablet, but in June I finally install its drivers, get a copy of paint tool sai, and draw a lot with it. At first I hate these pictures and go back to paint whenever possible. There’s something wrong with my copy of sai and windows 10 doesn’t like the drivers. But I push myself, and I start to make more pictures of Andy, Whisky, Red Spot, etc. Not a lot of my early Sai pictures ever got posted or even made it past the inking stage, but one night I just couldn’t sleep so I drew Andy cradled in the crook of Red’s wing and got it to the flat colors stage.

July: [x]

I try to calm down. it’s a good month I think. Not much happens. It’s the month I finally give myself a new fursona. I decided that Red Spot isn’t “me” and I can’t use Andy in furry communities so I come up with a solution. It... it’s just Andy as a doberman. It’s a little orange doberman that wears a red bandanna and Andy’s hat... Doberman Andy. But he’s cute, and I can draw him, and so I do draw him. And he helps me get better at drawing in Sai.

August: [x]

The month of the solar eclipse! Me and my friend were going to go down to the US to see it together and... nope... that plan fell through. It makes me a brat, but that’s okay because I can just draw six hundred thousand drawings of Andy. That’ll help me feel better. I ended up having a sabbatical from my blog after some people on tumblr began to bother me and I put up a drawing of Andy’s shoe so nobody could go in. This is an MS Paint picture! Sadly, I’ve stopped really drawing in the program. I like how I did Andy’s face even if his hat and hair weren’t the best.

September: [x]

I return from my sabbatical and begin to spam my tumblr with Andy drawings I’m making in paint tool sai. The quality and style of Andy in these pictures varies drastically as I try a whole manner of new things. At one point I make a post that has five color pictures of Andy in it. It’s slowly becoming difficult to pick which picture I wanted to put here. Not because I didn’t like any, but because I liked too many. SMOL Andy was probably my favourite of the bunch. I made him more chibi and cute than I normally do. It was on accident but I thought he was too cute to go back and make him more on-model.

October: [x]

I was supposed to do an Andy version of Inktober but I guess the extreme amount of Andy pictures was a September thing because I burned out relatively quickly. I had some drama involving a prototype disc and also ended up having to pay way too much extra money every month until further notice but it’s a relatively calm month all things considering. The way I drew Andy in this art isn’t particularly stellar, but I love what I did with Red’s mouth and nose. I wanted to show that the way I draw Red improved too.

November: [x]

My chronic pain gets worse for no good reason, I get a very disturbing creeper threatening me online, and I’m generally depressed, but I’m drawing. That’s good. I start a new revolutionary technique when I rely almost entirely on the cinematics as reference and don’t reference other cartoon styles whenever I can when it comes to drawing Andy. I enjoy the result. Drawing him in a cute penguin-themed suit made my day. It was so hard to decide which one to pick this month. I loved so many of them.

December: [x]

Like November, but somewhat better I think. I’m still drawing Andy a lot, with Red coming along for the ride too. This one I tried to draw Andy in a more Disney-like style. I love how I did his face and freckles. The drawing of Whisky from the same post is great too. I look at a lot of my newer drawings and feel genuinely pleased with the result. I think I actually am improving, and whilst I think it is due a lot to getting sai and a tablet, it can also be because I’m becoming more skilled and getting more practice as well. Lets hope the new year brings us smooth sailing, lots of fun, and happy times our way. HoD will be 20 in 2018 and I’m ready to bring the subject of my love and joy a great two decade celebration.

#summary of art #2017 summary of art #my art #long post

2 notes · View notes

oneletterwrites · 7 years

Text

Tinker Tailor Tattoo Shop

Junkrat tattoo artist au because this post (X) with D.Va and Roadhog.

Though Lucio swore by any and all things he owned, Hana still had serious doubts about the place in front of her. The building looked like it had been welded together with cheap pieces of metal, scraps just shoved next to each other and forced to stay that way by fire. She never would have guessed this to be the place Lucio praised so highly if not for the sign hanging above the door.

Metal & Ink. In a bold copper glinted in the sunlight. When she first mentioned really wanted to get a tattoo this is the place her friend had told her about with not a shadow of hesitance. Maybe she should have brought him with just to tell him off for directing her to such a place.

Lucio’s tattoos looked great though and the artwork had been in the exact style she loved. There had been no reason for her to not trust his suggestion. Still the place loomed over her in a mess of metal and second guesses. She grips the paper with her design on it and marches in with all the false confidence she can muster.

The inside is far cleaner than she expected. The designs on the floor look like rusted gears and piercings in glass containers take a turn for bullets and spikes more than the simple jewels she’s seen before. The walls are lined with artwork and other designs that are amazing but not things she would ever get for herself.

“Oi.” A deep voice shocks her into a jump, gripping her hands tight to her chest she spins to face the overly large man now standing behind the counter of piercings. He looks far too bulky to be standing behind the delicate array but she keeps her mouth shut.

“Hi,” She squeaks out and goes to the counter, every step closer to the man reminding her how small she actually is. This man is gigantic, the t-shirt that covers his torso is stretched and ripped in some places, designs peeking out underneath and circling down their arms. Two piercings wrap around their lower lip and a bull ring hangs down from their nose.

“I called earlier, and made an appointment?” She forces words to come out. The man raises an eyebrow at her words, the scars across their face making their expression more twisted than it really is. They snort and grab a single sheet of paper from a stack behind them.

“I need to see and I.D.,” They say and Hana scrambles for it. The man takes it gently from her which almost surprises her. He peers at the numbers then places it in a copy machine hidden in a cabinet. He hands it back to her along with a pen.

“Read this over, initial here and here, date and sign here,” He circles the areas he mentions then drops the pen, hobbling out of the main room towards the open space in the back. Hana leans back to watch him walk that way then snaps her head back to her paper.

A simple consent form, saying that she is of adult age and that she hasn’t taken any pain medication in the last 24 hours. A few more questions about health and her name is scrawled on the paper.

“This your first?” The huge man comes back and Hana takes a deep breath, wondering how he managed to sneak up on her. She nods her head and slides the paper to him. He looks it over and then sticks his hand out to her politely.

“M’ Mako, I do most the piercings here,” He says. Hana shakes his hand, wondering if he did the ones on his face himself or if someone else did it. She taps the counter awkwardly when the man yells down the room for someone else.

“Jamison get yer ass out here!” He shouts. Hana tilts towards the back room just in time to see someone face plant to the ground, one leg and one peg sticking up in the air behind them.

“Ah shit!” They shake their head and jump back to their feet, nearly tripping again if not for Mako grabbing their arm to steady them. They grin wildly at Hana, making a squeak when Mako whacks them in the back of the head.

“Be careful,” He grumbles. The other just laughs, bumping Mako in good fun. The bump does nothing as he’s way smaller than Mako is, lanky and gangley and not much bigger than Hana herself is. He’s in a simple black shirt with tattoo’s peeking out from under the sleeves. His shirt is ripped too.

“Not me fault!” He cries out but with a smile. He lifts up his leg, showing off the metallic peg, and jabbing the end into Mako’s side annoyingly.

“Stupid thing doesn’t want me to stand up right.” He drops his leg and still nudges Mako obnoxiously. His entire being stops for one glorious second as he notices her but then jumps into overdrive.

“You looking for a tat? I got you covered follow me,” He says excitedly and snatches her design out of her hand. Hana’s jaw drops and she swears she will kill Lucio for sending her here. She could handle the sketchy building and scary piercing man. Even so she follows along blindly to the back room. The artist runs from corner to corner, grabbing small item after item, never seeming to grab everything they need in one trip. They don’t stop moving.

“Come take a seat, I’ll get that picture on you,” They say patting a chair and almost toppling to the ground as they reach for another item. This scattered brained clutz is going to do her tattoo, and Hana has never had so many doubts in her life.

“You’e the artist?” She asks tentatively. The man stops short and then laughs holding out his hand.

“Yeh, name’s Jamison how do you do,” He smirks at her and she flops down to the black leather chair that is to host her while the tattoo is being made. She’s too locked in a dumbstruck state that she doesn’t notice him peering at her possible design.

“A bunny huh?” He says to her with a wicked smile. She glares at him with a twist in her nose. It’s not just a bunny, it’s her bunny. A logo that has been with her for years and years. It’s changed over the course of her career playing games online but the main shape is still the same. A white bunny against a pink circle with a bit of an angry expression on it’s face.

“Yes,” She spits at the artist with a reserved seriousness. He snickers and raises his hand in a surrender fashion, tweaking the design just slightly to have more full lines for the actual process. He redraws it on a separate sheet of special paper then flops into a rolling chair next to where Hana is sitting.

“Where you want it?” He asks and Hana stutters for an answer. She’s thought of so many places she could have it and enjoys them all. Jamison’s head tilts back and forth as he waits impatiently for an answer. Mako comes back to check on them eventually.

“I want it to be seen,” She says and both of them nod their heads in understanding though Jamison’s is more frantic than anything. Mako holds out his hand and makes a motion for Hana to hold out her arm. She does and he twists her arm to show the skin just inside and below her elbow crease.

“This would be good but it can be painful,” He gives his advice plainly. Jamison holds the design to the area just so she can get an idea of what it could look like. She finds herself smiling at it. The spot will show of the tattoo as well as let her see it if she should please.

“Yeah,” She says and looks to the two of them.

“Yeah I like that,” She smiles widely and Jamison completes putting the template on her arm. Mako returns to the front and Hana is now bouncing in her spot. She takes a deep breath as Jamison dips the needle in the ink and brings it closer to her arm.

“You don’t have a hand!” She yips and backs away from the artist. Mako peeks out from the front and Jamison stares at her kind of dumbly. He holds up his arm, the joint at the elbow half metallic and prosthetic. Where his hand should be is the gun and needle used to push the ink into the skin. Hana just slumps when the artist laughs.

“Oh yeah, got this piece of shit after me arm got cut off in that car accident. Where I got this shit too,” He pulls up his leg just enough to be seen then drops the peg gracefully back to the floor. Hana is too stunned by the revelation. She can’t believe she didn’t notice it before. She slumps back down to the chair with bug eyes as the artist brings the scrappy looking machinery closer to her arm.

She hisses in pain as the needle grazes her skin, worry over her choices runs through her mind. She glances down at the markings as they happen. The outline comes first in a simple smooth black line. It comes in clean and quick and it takes her a moment to realize the room is silent save for the buzzing of the needle.

Her eyes glance up to the artist, quiet and focused. Their bottom lip is between their teeth and they are still except for the movement of the needle. It’s the stillest she’s seen them since she walked in. She looks back to the forming tattoo, whimpering as it’s made but nothing too bad she can’t handle.

“Coloring now,” Jamison tells her softly, like he might break something if he’s too loud in this moment. She nods and squeezes her eyes shut as the pink is applied other skin.

“Shit,” She lets out a harsh whisper. Jamison snickers at her expletive but his eyes do not leave the delicate artwork now tracing her skin.

An hour passes and Hana is getting tired of sitting still and she’s not sure how much more she can take when Jamison rolls back on his chair and away from her, sticking up both hands. She lifts her arm to see the tattoo and a burst of happiness escapes.

“It’s wonderful,” Shhe exclaims and smiles brightly to him. He matches her look and gently pushes her arm back down. His quiet continues as he cleans off the skin and wraps it carefully in a bandage. The bunny on her arm glaring down just the way she likes it.

“Alright you’re all set,” He finally talks again. Hana sits up and woozes for a second. Jamison laughs loudly and stands from his chair only to fall down to the ground.

“Ah shit!” He says and lays face down for a while longer until Mako comes over and lifts him from his shirt collar like he weights nothing. Then he ushers Jamison out of the way and too a back room. Hana stays in the chair as Mako goes over cleaning and after care techniques for her tattoo. Then he walks her to the front, giving her a small granola bar as she fills out the last paper work to pay the place properly.

“See ya later lady!” Jamison shouts at her as she opens the door to leave. Instead of the tattoo gun he now has a robotic looking hand in place. She waves to them both and steps back out into the sun.

“So how’d it go?” Lucio coos into the phone when she calls him on her way back to her apartment. She scoffs at him but catches herself smiling down at the tattoo now permanently on her skin. There’s a bag of cleaning supplies in the seat next to her.

“That man is insane,” She says and Lucio laughs heartily.

“But he’s good right?” He’s still laughing and Hana has to give it to him. Though he didn’t seem like the kind to do such delicate work, the art is exactly what she wanted. When her and Lucio can agree on matching ones, she’ll want to go back to the wild man and his huge partner in the scrappy little shop.

#overwatch #ow d.va #ow junkrat #ow roadhog #not hetalia #drabble

10 notes · View notes

c7thetumbler · 7 years

Text

Monthly Project: January, Week 1

OH BOY HERE WE GO

I suspect at least one person who was slightly interested in my projects was thinking I’d do something vidya related since, well, that was basically my defining interest for the past.... holy fuck, it’s been a decade. hm.

Well, sorry to say, it’s not this month. It might be next month’s, but not January. January belongs to worldbuilding for me; New year, new starts, and whole new worlds to create and explore. So what did I make?

I made a world in high fantasy.

But C, just what is a “Lunos”?

So for a long time I’ve been doing worldbuilding stuff on and off in my free time, and it’s turned into a pile of ideas I’ll never be able to do justice, nor would I want to given how some of them are “babby’s first design” But what a waste of potential that would be!

I’ve also toyed around with the idea of wanting to GM a D&D campaign, but that’d be very all or nothing for me. I wouldn’t want my players to be able to look up every aspect of the campaign online, and I certainly would want them to be curious about most aspects of the world. So that means creating an entirely new setting, with lore and map included. That’s a fuckload of work, which is why I was like “fuck GMing”

But fuck “fuck GMing.” It’s a new year, and while this may or may not help me and only me, it’s a thing I can do. So let’s pick up some of that old stuff I did, and throw it into a place that can be used for a setting. Lunos is what came out of taking a crucial part of the lore that I made up for another thing that I’ll never be able to use, and putting D&D style design constraints on it.

I love design constraints. No, really; they’re a great way to get you to focus down. Let’s see where it took me:

Making the Map

So for the longest time this is what was holding me back. I have shaky hands. Very shaky hands. It’s why I can’t aim in a lot of games, and it’s also why I can’t draw. For the longest time, this prevented me from making any sort of visual aspect for things save for stuff you can directly control in vector programs like Illustrator, and some very tiny spritework which requires you to pick which details you want to shine through.

But there is a thing or two I’ve learned I can do in the past few years: I can Google, and I can generate.

I rendered some clouds in Photoshop CS5, used a filter to flatten them, and then took the shapes I liked and turned them into this. Obviously this can’t be a whole planet; this doesn’t work on a globe, but honestly I don’t need the whole planet right now, so this will do just fine.

Looking back at might notes for things I’m keeping from the lore, I need a round faultline which creates a mountain range which blocks rainfall from both sides, a few tactically advantageous places to put cities, some islands, 2 giant mountains in the middle of no where, and a few forests in sensible places in between.

I can do that.

That’ll wor- wait shit, where are the deserts? Rivers?

There we go. The scale of this isn’t really clear, so there’s a lot of big empty space. Let’s put in the places that need to be there. But how do I determine the scale? Unfortunately, the tutorial I was following to help me with this wasn’t as explicit with how it would look at this resolution, so when I got the brushes I used for mountains and forests and settlements etc., it was clear to me that this map wasn’t big enough in terms of pixels to get the detail I was looking for. SO what this means is I need to put major cities, towns, and landmarks in, and then later if I actually do end up using this map, I have to go into finer detail and redraw portions from it with some more added in, as well as better populate it with smaller towns and interesting things. This is fine, but it lacks any really objective standard for scale. But I do have something up my sleeve, but first let’s add in those important places.

By the way kids; never be stingy with your layers. I had to redo large portions of this like 3 times before I got something I liked because of it.

But there we go. And there’s a line you can use for scale. But how did I get that scale? Well in my notes, there is an event for this city and this port town to be 1 day’s travel away due to an annual festival that parades down the road to this city’s front gate.

Yeah, It really doesn’t scale well; I’ll definitely have to redraw on a better scale if I go about using it. But then again, I’m sure I’m not the first.

Regardless, now we have a visual reference for a distance that needs to be traveled in a day’s worth of doing so. That’s ~ 30 miles, and from there we can draw and expand that line.

Now we have ourselves a fault-line which curves from the North Wast where it separates a desert and forest, goes down South, then around East before curving down again. It’s not an accurate line to normal physics I’m sure, but it’s good enough for my needs. This portion of the planet is pretty far south, so lower portions are cold, leading to a different style of forest to the East on that island there than the one up north. That desert is of course just a desert due to lack of rainfall, which is collected further north by that semicircle of mountains there, creating that swamp.

As for the anomalies on the map: the oasis in the northern desert is an artificial one since this is a fantasy world and terra-forming isn’t out of the question when it comes to powerful wizards and sorcerers, and you can’t have an area that big with a potential trade route without a stopping point.

That Volcanic island is similarly not entirely natural, though the reason for that volcano emerging there is a bit more wobbly; haven’t quite fleshed that out as much yet, but I have a few ideas. Sure, I might have some stuff that is fleshed out, but not all of it; This hasn’t hit public eye, and it’s my world so as long as I’m consistent with my reasons when I do make them it could be whatever I want. It is a fantasy setting, after all.

If you’re curious what tutorial I used, it’s this one. Give it a shot yourself if you’re interested!

So what’s for next week now that you have a map?

Lore for starters. There’s a bunch there already, but a lot of my older and even newer stuff stems from a single design idea, and Lunos is included. Just to tease a little bit, while this is a campaign setting for D&D and therefore has all the typical races and plane-related stuff, it has it’s own history independent of all that. In fact, Lunos is actually this lush and active because of an apocalyptic event; it was actually barren, Mars-like, and rather simple before that. This mythical setting stuff is the result of a terrible accident which led to the radical changes that made it “high fantasy”, which most of it’s residents aren’t aware of, and those who are are trying to square the conflicting history of its past with its modern-day appearance and gods.

At the very minimum, I need to go more into depth about 8 gods, several lesser deities, and an entirely new race in the D&D 5e format. There’s still quite a lot of work to be done, and the order’s very specific:

I need to explain the idea behind Lunos, then explain its history, then explain its ideologies before I can even flesh out some of the gods, so that’ll be next week.

Depending on how that goes, I might get started on fleshing out new, actual homebrew content for a campaign that could be run in the setting.

But yeah, that’s for next week; thoughts? Too convoluted already? Map looks weird in places? This whole thing is silly?

What do you think so far?

#Monthly Project #Lunos #worldbuilding #D&D

1 note · View note

thatsonemorbidcorvid · 4 years

Text

“Back in 2002, Steven Appleby inadvertently outed himself in a comic strip about a cross-dressing superhero saving fashion victims from pinstripes and overalls. The strip, published in the Guardian, brought “Dragman” swooping down to earth in a mauve ballgown and yellow wig. Although Appleby had been out for several years to his close friends and family, he realises now that the new character embodied an urge to go further. “I’d had enough of leading a double life. Cross-dressing in secret once or twice a week felt dishonest and stifling,” recalls the 64-year-old artist. “I’d learned to be comfortable with being a transvestite and now I was desperate to live as one.”

Eighteen years later, Dragman is back as the star of his own book. His adventures take him from the tip of the Shard to a fetish club deep beneath London’s railway arches, on the trail of a serial killer who specialises in murdering transvestites. But before he can solve the crimes he has first to overcome the enmity of a superhero community that is not only transphobic but has banned any rescue that is not strictly covered by insurance. By instinctively saving a young girl as she plummets off a rooftop, Dragman has outlawed himself.

Appleby created the book at his studio on a busy south London street, where he opens the door to a colourful gathering. His wife, Nicola Sherring – to whom he remains married though they separated many years ago “as a biblical couple” – is sharing a sandwich with Charlie, a scarlet cockatoo, who sits on her shoulder, watched jealously by Una, an accident-prone one-eyed pug (named from Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies – “U is for Una who slipped down a drain”). Sherring is responsible for colouring the book while Charlie plays a bit part in it, swooping around a conservatory. “He wasn’t meant to be in it at all, but Nicola sneaked him in, says Appleby, “so I had to redraw a whole spread.”

AdvertisementHide

The relationship between fiction and autobiography is seldom as delicately nuanced as it is in Appleby’s protagonists. Like Dragman’s alter ego August, he discovered his transvestism after trying on a woman’s stocking that he found down the back of a sofa at the age of 19. Like August’s long-suffering wife Mary, Sherring was a carpenter when the couple met. “She came to make bookshelves for my flat and we just got on so well that I kept finding more jobs for her to do, and then we fell in love.”

While August keeps his secret locked up in boxes in the attic, Appleby was honest with Sherring from the start – even though he admits that their marriage involved a certain amount of denial. “I assumed my other issues would fade into the background or even go away, because I certainly hadn’t fallen in love ever before. And so I thought, wow this is amazing, maybe it’s the antidote.”

Sherring already had two sons and they had two more together. When their younger boys were nearring the end of primary school, Appleby felt he had to tell them. “I was feeling increasingly itchy about it – not depressed, but just kind of incomplete,” he says. “I wanted to be a joined-up person and I also didn’t want to have this secret from the family and particularly from my boys.” With a couple of friends, he and Sherring went off to a wig shop. “I wanted something short, so people wouldn’t notice a change, but then I put on this style (he pats his trademark black bob), and all of them said, ‘that’s the one’.”

Back home, his sons “didn’t bat an eyelid. They were probably watching TV or playing computer games.” On a car journey to their Northumberland holiday cottage a while later, a school friend started moaning about how embarrassing her parents were. “I said to them ‘What must I be like?’ And they replied ‘Oh no, Dad, you’re not embarrassing at all. You don’t wear lace dresses to school like you do at night.’”

The cottage, which used to belong to Appleby’s mother, provides a link to his childhood, which was spent in a leaky old vicarage near the Scottish border. He was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, the oldest of four children. His mother was Canadian and his father worked for his family’s quarrying firm, which was slowly going bust. After a local Church of England primary school, where he won prizes for plasticine modelling, he boarded at a Quaker school from the age of 11. “I loathed it to begin with, but in the end I wouldn’t wish it away,” he says. “It’s that mixed thing, because I have huge respect for the Quakers and I still have friends from school.”

He hung out in the art room and got involved in a band, going on to do art and design at Manchester Polytechnic, “mainly because I found art fun, and because my academic subjects weren’t brilliant”. The experience delivered an existential shock. “Suddenly I found lots of people could draw much better than me.” He dropped out for a while to join a band, before returning to do graphic design at Newcastle Polytechnic, followed by illustration at the Royal College of Art, where he was tutored by Quentin Blake. “He taught me that you didn’t have to be a brilliant drawer if your drawings have personality. You can draw a car really badly, as long as it has the spirit of a car.” He flips the book open on a sweetly wonky green Mini, in which Dragman tootles around when he is being August.

AdvertisementHide

This revelation didn’t entirely cure his sense of inadequacy, and he took a job at a design firm, Assorted iMaGes, founded by a college friend, Malcolm Garrett. Together they ran high-profile campaigns for bands such as Buzzcocks and Duran Duran. “Malcolm would design the album covers and I’d do the other things like playing cards or bubblegum cards. It was fun, but after a few years I got frustrated, because you’re doing it for other people.”

One of the first characters he created was Captain Star, an obsolete astronaut stranded on a distant planet with an outsized ego, who was invented for a strip in New Musical Express and went on to become the star of a TV animation series voiced by Richard E Grant and Adrian Edmondson. Commissions from Punch, the Guardian and the Times followed. He collected his work into a series of books that make him appear to be a self-help guru: Normal Sex was followed by Men: The Truth and The Truth About Love. His Loomus cartoons about a small boy and his dysfunctional parents, which ran for 11 years in the Guardian Family section, were published as Steven Appleby’s Guide to Life.

It’s all a question of curation, he says. “So for Normal Sex, I collected everything I’d ever done about sex and divided it into sections.” Published in black and white in 1993, its opening pages are a characteristic mix of awkward truths and absurdist humour: “Some individuals are attracted only to themselves. Other confused people believe they may belong to a hitherto undiscovered sex. Of course creepie-crawlies have sexual worries too. Worms have trouble deciding which end is which …”

Dragman is his first venture into sustained narrative, and it has already been optioned for a live action TV adaptation. In some ways, he says, it’s a strange choice of subject because “I’m not crazy about superheroes at all, but I loved the Batman series that I watched in the 1960s and, looking back, I probably wanted to be Catwoman.” He read the Dandy and the Beano alongside his sister’s comics, Bunty and Diana. “I did move on to superhero comics a bit, but not all that much. Then I got into science fiction. I loved Philip K Dick, particularly, because nothing in his books was ever quite what it appeared to be, and that seemed to be reality to me. Maybe it reflected the secret life that I had.”

Which brings us back to the question of gender. Unlike Dragman, Appleby doesn’t have a transvestite alias, though he lives full-time in woman’s clothes. He briefly investigated gender reassignment but decided against it, citing his encounter with “Colin the mouse man” – a pest-controller – as an example of both the challenges and rewards. “Colin arrived at the door and I opened it and said, ‘Hi. I’m Stephen. I changed my image a few years ago,’ and he laughed, and we had this whole conversation. On his second visit he brought me a couple of leopard print screwdrivers, with little fluffy bits, and said ‘I was given these for Christmas. I thought you might like them.’”

He now lives partly in his studio and partly back at the family home with Sherring and her partner, a son and his girlfriend, a nephew, and, of course, Charlie and Una. Friendship is important to him, cropping up time and again in his professional life. When he wanted to try out the ideas in Dragman, it was to a member of his old school band that he turned.

The book is full of Appleby’s unique brand of punning fun. If it has a message, it’s that it pays to be honest, and capitalism isn’t honest: it steals souls. Its warning is knitted into a plot that is indebted to hard-boiled detective fiction and soap opera, as well as to his own experience of the cross-dressing scene.

“I would know people as Deirdre or Susan and have no idea what their male name is, or whether they’re a plumber or a lawyer,” he says. “I just feel so lucky that the world allows me to be myself. ””

Check out this cool man who wears whatever clothes he wants, without feeling the need to chemically alter his appearance or pretend it affects anything other than his dress sense!

#radfems do interact #radfems please interact

0 notes