When you prove you can do it, you can get away with not doing it every now and then. 😜

When you're older you can even have ice cream for breakfast~

More cadets in the void (for now)

yes sir

Still goin'

Some form of Danu is in everything I do at this point.

Last one if this batch, finally!

More cadets. I might have some stuff to show from the game I’ve been working on as art director, but for now, just unrelated personal stuff.

Progress! More characters! Eventually I'm gonna have to give them all something to do.

I realized I don't make enough smug prick characters, so here's Guy.

I haven't posted any of these to the portal yet because I don't really know what to do with them. I always had a bit of a thing against presenting a single pose of a character with no solid background as a "finished piece," but that seems to be the way to go with these while I world-build separately.

This gives me extremely mild and inconsequential anxiety because I'm literally the only mass of cells in the universe that gives a shit about this.

Know that feeling all too well man. The only way to get people to care is by making porn of them or animating them.

Aren't you tired of being nice? Don't you wanna just go ape shitt?

Yeah I guess I'd get a lot more traffic if I drew all my characters fucking, shooting big ol cum ropes out they dik, but I aspire to the day where I'd draw enough mildly sexy characters that other artists would pick up the torch and take it to the finish line for me, absolving me of all wrongdoing. I could say "hey! Cut that out!" but do absolutely nothing about it and just let the internet get overrun with fan smut. That's how you know you've made it.

Look at me, not even showing WIPs and going straight to finishes. Had to add catgirls.

Last guy for now; I'm moving on to vehicles next.

Figured I'd make these space elves gravitate more towards being mercs and assassins. Zelana (the lady from earlier) probably has more of a moral compass and professional standards, while this guy (probably has another "Z" name) is just an edgelord. Can't make everyone likeable I guess.

My team's game is in early access but I'm not gonna talk about it until I think it's ready. But the discord icons are done!

Moving on to vehicles; I think I'll go through a bunch of these before deciding on one I actually like.

Refining the base ship design. Still a ways to go.

Gotta love the asshole mouth

Refinement process continues, with tons of design mistakes. I need to reduce the size of the air brakes, increase the size of the jet intakes and probably move the guns to the underside of the wing so the muzzle flashes won't blind the pilot. Only sharing cuz I think going more chonky and boxy is a better look.

Sometimes it feels good to do studies, other times it' eye opening how dumb I am. Right now it's a bit of both.

I'm obviously going for a sort of unrealistic depiction of a personal fighter craft, something along the lines of an Arwing from Star Fox, but even then, despite all the feature placements being dumb on a functional basis (they just carried on the design of a SNES-era 3D model that had like 32 polygons tops because it has a readable silhouette) they still have more jet-like proportions than what I've been doing.

One of the big things to do is significantly reduce cockpit size and the amount of glass used. Two-man recreational aircraft occasionally have larger domes, but for a personal craft designed for combat, anything that isn't widening the pilot's field of vision is just needless exposure that would be better off covered in armor.

Real fighter jets place the cockpit way out in front of all the stuff, and for good reason. Turbines and weapon fire would deafen you, the heat of the exhaust would burn you, etc. etc.

This is something the Arwing took zero consideration of at the beginning:

It looks like fox is sitting directly on top of, or leaning directly against, an engine capable of effortlessly leaving a planet's atmosphere. Iconic look, but undeniably silly.

Starlink redesigned the Arwing with a bit more functional consideration, making it more of an insulated chonky boi, putting more distance between the cockpit and the engines, etc. Not sure about those clam neck looking things on the wings though. Someone must have decided it wasn't aero-undynamic enough.

The only other air/space fighter I know of that I like the design of are the VFs from Macross, but those are essentially just MiGs with folded-up robot legs acting as thrusters.

Anyway, it's a little embarrassing in hindsight to have jumped into something like this without choosing where the realism goes. All improv and no grounding makes for shit design.

Genuinely sounds like an engineer explaining their thought process lmao, while I'm at it really nice work, loving it!

It really do be like that sometimes. When I was learning the draw-through method, any time I'd do any kind of fantasy/sci-fi vehicle or mechanical object, once critiques rolled around, I'd find out real quick who the military enthusiasts and gearheads were. They were right most of the time, so I try to think like them to fix my own mistakes before one of them finds me and tells me everything I do is wrong. 💀

Can't beat em, had to join em, most of them still kick my ass with crits but at least I'm closing the gap a bit.

The flip side of that is that whenever I lean too hard into source material, the critique is always "it looks like you just tried to draw [existing mechanical object] but did it wrong." You can never win.

Hey, I don’t hate this one

It’s getting there. I guess this’ll be the standard issue craft, and I’ll modify it depending on the pilot’s specialization.

Put that jet in a non-void. Gonna do custom crafts for each member, but they'll all be alterations on this one.

Friendly b̶e̶g̶ reminder, you can recommend posts for front page here. That's my NG equivalent of "Comment, Rate, Subscribe," but it doesn't even preface an ad for Squarespace, so I figure I'm not that bad.

Oh, agreed. But having experienced that feeling, and weighing it against the really unrewarding and empty feeling of pumping hours of free time into something of equal or greater quality that no one will see just because I didn't get lucky that time, I'll take the cheap win. It salvages much more than it takes away.

Plus it's uniquely nice knowing there's folks out there that'll go to bat for you. Maybe it'd feel less dirty if we leaned on each other to grow our audiences a bit more often. Your art can do all the talking up to a point, but it doesn't matter how well you preach if they can't find the church.

Agreed, this place is the house built on a "LIke for like" economy along with a healthy spritz of artists clawing to the top of the mountain of artists until they get into the nice rotation of people who just get Front page again and again without having to ask for it or show their art to the "Right People" and then they slide from "Whoa got front paged again? Lol" to "Front page isn't that hard to get lol :9" .

Wish it was more natural, but the general art community is run by goofballs and there's not enough people to vet decent artwork anymore due to the overwhelming population of artists vs everyone else on this site. And even then most people who see artwork just like it anyway. It's hard to find anything that's not fetish material that gets below 4 stars. Watching people do "Portal Patrols" just liking and 5 staring everything shows how this will never change.

So do your hustle baby, it only benefits the site and you in the end.

Just to be clear, I don't fault anyone in charge of running things for how some stuff falls through the cracks; trying to make a purely meritocratic platform where everyone gets exactly as much recognition as they've earned is a fool's errand, so I don't expect that from them. We know what the content biases are and a handful of ways to circumvent them, so in order for me to keep doing what I find fulfilling and get eyes on it, I need to cash-in some of the points I hopefully earned by being an omnipresent forum pedant to tip the scales a bit.

Besides, it's a NG tradition for little circles of influence to form and grow through mutual aid, for lack of a better term. No need for everyone to go it alone; let's cheat the system together.

All that said, I think I only saw like 6 pieces get frontpaged throughout April 11. There are things you account for, and then there's whatever the hell happened there. I think I'm cursed.