Who's Your Favourite Character? Which Character Do You Think Changes The Most Or Has The Biggest Arc

River near Cut Bank, MT

What college did you go to to learn how to be such a fantastic artist? And what was your major?

ahaha I don't know what you're talking about, I was a fantastic artist way before college *snortsnortsnort*

In SLIGHTLY more seriousness, I never finished college and part of the reason was because I felt like I wasn't learning anything (except how to be pretentious), I had professors looking at my work and asking me why I was bothering, and struggling with a severe depression ended up losing my scholarship, the only way I could afford to go to such an expensive school (Carnegie Mellon University).

... Though hindsight is 20/20 and honestly my mistake was majoring in Fine Art, it was a terrible fit. Still dealing with some residual bitterness to this day, for an idea of my Opinions on the matter I recommend the movie Art School Confidential, it mirrors my experience pretty accurately!

Worldbuilding = the best topic in the history of mankind. I'm kind of obsessed with making races and cultures and such. My question for you is do you think there's a limit on how many different races/cultures you can have in one world without making it busy? Whenever I make a new race I tend to shove it into the same world with all the rest. Those two small-ish continents and random islands seem rather... packed. Do you think it's a better idea to have different small worlds with a handful of races each or a giant world with lots of land but also lots of different cultures and races running around all over the place?

I totally think its a matter of personal taste, but MY personal taste is to avoid having too many because then you'll never have time to show them all off! In which case the only solution would be to revisit your world in lots and lots of unrelated stories... which is a totally awesome thing to do too though.

So I have... seven races in my fantasy? And sometimes that feels like too many because my story is alll about elves. And then I feel almost as if I tossed the other races in there instead of bothering to add more culture and history to the world, or just an excuse to make crowds in the background have more interesting shapes and faces. It might be helpful to figure out what evolutionary niche your races fill, and if there are a bunch in direct competition with each other, to consider combining them into a new race that has all your favorite aspects, or moving some to a new headworld? That's just my thoughts though.

As for my other stories they just feature regular humans with the occassional demon, alien, or robot, so I don't think that really counts.

This time I WILL apologize for not posting cos I am SUPER proud of this and worked SUPER hard on it, its just that as soon as I finish a thing (which is rare in itself, UGH), I immediately move on to the 5,462,000 other Things. It sounds so terrible to complain about having too many ideas but I can’t keep up and I at least try to get them all into my sketchbook but then have a hell of a time picking a thing to work on, tho if I HAD to make an excuse its because I’m teaching myself lots of new things these days and a lot of it is experimental and failures LOL

Learn by doing ;p

Anywaaaay, I am obsessed with gigantic posters and that combined with fangirling was all the motivation I needed, apparently. (obviously I won’t be selling prints of this, sorry, its fanart) I have a hard time explaining all the stuff I do to add Rainbow to my art so uh, its a lot of strategic outline coloring and layer fx and filters?? Photoshop frickin *~magic~*

I kinda miss livestreaming cos I love to chat about ART but I don’t have the patience to draw at my desktop when I can doodle on my tablet PC at a coffeeshop… And I have been spending a lot more time with my soldering iron rather than my tablet pen, sooo.

super late to this hype train also its been ages since i stayed up super irresponsibly late to color something but it feels awesome (for now ;p ask me again at work in the morning 8|) 70s prom douchey elf wizard atcherservice

pcb milling time! #othermill

Madranek looks like a pretty sweet guy. What's his story/what's he like/got anything interesting to tell us/etc? :) Spill! <3

Madranek is a minor councilman for a small wealthy province of Esterahad, he's psychic and is sort of a mentor figure to Lillia who is a very young powerful psychic. Because my story is mostly about politics a huge portion of my characters are politicians of some kind D: 

When creating/designing anything- fantasy races, settings, clothes- do you prefer to try isolate them from this world and let your imagination flow by itself or do you like to do things like deliberately draw from history, base cultures off other cultures, places off other places, etc?

I would say a mixture of both but I think it's SO important to make the distinction that creativity doesnt happen in a vaccuum ever, springing forth purely from mysterious dark recessess of your mind, everything you think of has a previous frame of reference. I feel as an artist (and ahem as a human being) the goal is to learn and study as much as possible, collect as many experiences as possible, stuff that into your mental reference library and a creative inspiration will do the rest. Even ideas that pop into my conscious are never fully formed, so it is often at that point I work on it more systematically. What are my goals for the idea, what interests me about it, how can I make the idea more effective.

I think maybe an example could illustrate this best? I've been working on a sort of fairytale thing, it's based on a dream I had that had a couple of characters (a singing robot guy, and two witch princesses) but not much else to go on if it would be made into a story, which I totally felt needed to happen as soon as I woke up! So I started with the character, and the starting "facts" of them. And then I had to decide the type of story I wanted, and the tone (fairytale! cute and romantic... possibly... a love story). Then the ideas for setting and genre were important (if one of the characters is a robot, and there are also shenanigans involved that are suspiciously magical, well then let's go with steampunk. Ottoman Empire steampunk). New characters are developed to serve the needs of plot (a protagonist/other half of love equation was needed, so I created Edie and made her a mechanic), and once those things are figured out I start doing lots more research to fill in all worldbuilding details (this is not important to the story at all.. maybe... lol sometimes I am so torn about what is plot relevant or not- but I made up a country for the alternate history timeline and the reasons for its existence, its political system, economy, and culture) so that in the end, everything involved in this imaginary story and world and people is actually coherent. That helps the emotional aim of the work to feel more true, even in fantastical settings and situations. Sometimes the setting is closer to "reality" ( near or distant future perhaps, historical fantasy, urban fantasy, parallel universe), sometimes not as close (making a world from scratch, decidedly NOT in our universe, totally different laws of physics apply- or don't apply- its misleading to think that this type is simpler and requires less research; but that's a whole looooooong extra thing to talk about imo).  Either way, things have to make their own type of sense or the story won't be as engaging. If art is self-expression and you are communicating, it's about being a good communicator, making a connection.

BLA BLA PREACH PREACH. Point being is that this is a both/and thing, but also niether. Creativity is problem solving. When its in the form of art instead of say, engineering or even design, people make out the process to be more mysterious and abstract but my personal view on this is that it's not really different, its just that the problems art (and philosophy, etc) try to address are more emotional and existential.

I don't know if I'm making any sense :( But that's how I feel about it and I articulate it as best I can man this ended up long and rambly

FFFF I guess I could... delete the door?? I haven't looked at the comic in months and the only page I saved before it was taken down was the one with the exterior of the manor, for reference. It looks like there's a door there but I suppose it could simply be a hole. OHGOD I have no idea I need more to go on HALP

WALTER MANOR?

Ok this is gonna be rambly bear with me. I don’t blab about what I post here usually cos portraits and clothes whatevs, self-explanatory. But ARCHITECTURE, OK. I am so happy with this you don’t even know. I’ve messed with sketchup a few times in the past with the intention of modeling locations in my stories but this is the first time I was motivated enough to power straight thru 3D’s infuriating learning curve (I still can’t function in Blender at ALL the interface makes me cry but I’ll keep trying). I traced the elevation from the comic and the rest has been a series of educated guesses from what I know about architecture. It’s pretty straightforward to figure out scale and floor locations based on window placement. I reeeally want to do the whole manor because it’s fun to think about all the wacky stuff that must be in it and I’m seriously looking forward to the comic for exactly this reason. Seriously, where is Bebop.

So YEAH I totally want to do the interior, etc, but that depends on what Bunny and Sam share with us. Hint hint.

Hint hint

Another commision, D&D Tiefling! I was torn between overdoing the fog and... not overdoing it. Did I succeed? Psh I dunno, I like it though.