The Moment I Read 2.1.45, I Knew I Had To Draw This Lady. Exams Can Be Worried About Later.

Artwork by Nataliya Mashinskaya

some unserious Fulgrim and Ferrus Manus doodles because I have been also crying about them

I call this one

Fire Starter.

This is Dainix from @comicaurora. Not a whole lot of symbolism to say for this piece. I just wanted to draw my favorite fire boi <3

As for technical things, I used 6B Pencil from Procreate for the ink (I’ve been using it so much since I discovered it; WHY WHERE YOU ALL HIDING THIS FROM ME?) and a custom coloring brush I made. I used a whole bunch of chromatic aberration and red/blue rendering bc it looks amazing, but the hardest part was trying to render the fire in Dainix’s cruicible form. This was mostly a practice for an upcoming project of mine, but it went out of my control and ended up as a fully rendered piece.

Slowly making my way through the TOTK B roll stream, had a few thoughts on the emptiness of the sky islands. In a way, would it not be more surprising if there were more remains to be seen? Ignoring the whole 'it's a game, decisions were made by the developers' bit, nature can take over surprisingly quickly in the right circumstances. In a way, it's more surprising so much survived in BOTW (like the bomb hut ruins. Fire damaged wood? Should be gone in a decade or two anyway). (contd)

So the thing about the Sky Islands in Tears of the Kingdom is that, not only are the ruins fairly well-preserved - presumably due to having been in the Sacred Realm for the last 10,000+ years - but even with them damaged and tumbledown, it's fairly clear from the layout of the islands and their structures that they were not residences. That's not something that would've been lost to erosion and time, that's something foundational to the architecture of the place.

When the game designers want to show a place people live on the surface of Hyrule, they hit a few key points: distinct-looking homes with beds, places that make food, and an inn for travelers. The buildings are different sizes, decorated or personalized by the residents. They're laid out relative to one another in a way that allows for easy, convenient traversal. It's intentional design that makes the villages feel lived-in, cozy, and worth protecting.

Inside the buildings, little details show the presence of living people, even if the building is empty at the time. Table settings, notebooks, pictures on the walls. They feel like they've been shaped by the influence of people, living and working and customizing their environment.

These are all, to be fair, things that we wouldn't expect to last very long if the town fell to ruin. When we explore the sky islands, we aren't expecting to find well-preserved paper maps or notebooks or anything. But if they were lived-in - if they were Zonai population centers rather than temples, ritual centers and factories - that would still be reflected in the basic layout of the structure itself. A residence is designed to accommodate for every basic need, meaning we'd expect the buildings to have places for them to sleep, to eat, and to relax. On the Sky Islands, we find none of these things.

The most common buildings on the sky islands are these isolated stone one-room ruins. They look and feel like storehouses - a few pots, some crumbled masonry. No doors or interior rooms for privacy, no comforts, no sign of a place to sleep, no adjoining buildings. These things were never homes.

The Great Sky Island is the only really plausible candidate for a place the Zonai might've actually lived, being about town-sized with several buildings, but it's not laid out like one. The buildings are either small one-room storage sheds or the massive Temple of Time, and there's no sign of other specialized buildings that could have been used for things like food, rest or other necessities. The Great Sky Island feels like a large, beautiful public park built grafted onto the Temple of Time.

The larger dungeons are more internally complicated, but not in the way that residences are complicated. The water dungeon looks like some kind of huge open park - wide avenues, plazas, devices built for mobility. It feels like a place meant to be traversed and admired, not stayed in.

The wind dungeon is more clearly built as a weapon platform, nowhere we expect people to live. It makes sense that it feels sterile and lifeless.

The larger, more complicated sky islands are also designed for clear utility. The spheres are some sort of celestial observatories, featuring a control system, a treasure chest, and nothing else.

Wildcards like Lightcast Island were clearly built to serve a single purpose - in this case, a lighthouse and attached microdungeon - but contain no signs of life. Zonai came here for a reason, but they didn't stay.

The glide challenge islands are visually impressive, but ultimately the rings are empty - they don't even have structures on them. They exist for the dive challenge and nothing else.

Same deal with the labyrinths, which exist explicitly as puzzles and challenges.

The mines in the depths are also clearly structured for utility - storerooms, construct part repositories and a lot of conveyer belts for moving zoanite. The purpose of the building is very clear just from the layout, and these are not places where anyone was supposed to be staying outside of work hours.

This, along with the layout of towns on the surface, shows that the designers are very good at constructing architecture that reflects the in-story utility of a place, which means the lack of signs of life in the sky islands is not a limitation of the console or the imagination of the artists - it's an intentional design choice.

The end result of all of this? The Sky Islands feel like somewhere that the Zonai built and visited, but not where they lived. They feel cold and unwelcoming and liminal. There's no sense of loss or tragedy, just a feeling of emptiness - people used to come here, but they don't anymore. There's none of the poignancy of an empty dining table's unused place settings or an abandoned child's toy. None of the Sky Islands that descended during the Upheaval were places where the Zonai lived. At the peak of their power they were mistaken for gods, a massively thriving technologically advanced civilization - I'd expect their homes to be cities, towers of jade and marble bustling with the activity of a post-scarcity utopia. None of the Sky Islands show us anything like that, and given how well the designers can portray a lived-in place even without any people in it, this is assuredly intentional. The Zonai built and visited and used the Sky Islands we can explore, but as a whole they lived somewhere else.

But throughout it all, there's this pervading unease - the fact that there's no obvious tragedy makes the sky islands feel more unnerving. We know just enough of the story to infer that something happened to the Zonai - something bad, if we read into Rauru and Mineru's reaction - but whatever it was left no scars. The Zonai constructs don't even realize anything's amiss. The buildings have been damaged only by time and gravity; the forges and mines and observatories and temples are silent and abandoned, like the Zonai all went home one night for dinner and just never came back.

The Sky Islands don't feel dead, they feel lifeless. A place people passed through but didn't leave their mark on. When Link traverses the islands, he isn't just alone - he doesn't even have the comfort of signs of life. The only evidence he has that anyone ever came to these islands are the fact that somebody built them in the first place. They left no marks, no art, no notes, no diaries, no toys, no graffiti. They're just gone.

I could've solved this +60 million years dispute easily

The seeds of heresy started here. okay so nothing sad, nothing emotional, I just want to draw my fav scene :3 Bonus:

so i made a blank version, right? and here's what I came up with.

"Can I use the blank to make him say any-" yeah do whatever you want idc put the whole bee movie script if you want

How do you manage to motivate yourself when you're feeling tired or depressed?

Usually I try to give myself time to rest until those feelings lessen, since they're generally symptomatic of having pushed too hard, but on occasions where tiredness seems to be getting a little too cozy with depression, there's a few things I do.

I've observed in myself a habit of sort of… waiting in a holding pattern for something to push me into action. "Something" isn't defined clearly, but it becomes a real problem on depressed or low-executive-function days. This might just BE what low executive function feels like, tbh; like there's some invisible trigger and I can't Do The Thing until something trips it. When I notice I'm stuck in a holding pattern, I have a few tricks to snap myself out of it:

Flip a coin. Heads I get up and Do The Thing, tails I don't. The simple act of challenging myself is enough to motivate me sometimes, regardless of the outcome, but sometimes this makes me realize that I am legitimately tired, so I stay put and recharge a little until I want to flip for it again.

Set a five- or ten-minute timer and do whatever I need to do until the timer runs out. An artificial deadline can bypass the holding pattern. Sometimes this gives me momentum, and when the timer runs out I keep going. Sometimes this does NOT build momentum, and I crash after the timer runs out - but I crash with five more minutes of progress done. Any progress is better than no progress.

Assume Direct Control. This one only works sometimes, but sometimes it's as simple as breaking down a list of individual units of tangible progress - Get Off Of Bed, Put On Pants, Plug In Tablet, Etc Etc - and just grab the manual controls in my brain and make myself do each thing in turn. Sometimes I'll assume direct control to make myself take a Stupid Mental Health Walk, which has thus far worked every time to improve my mood and energy even though when I am in a Low Mood the last thing I want to do is subject myself to the mortifying ordeal of wearing pants and dealing with people.

I also find that sometimes it's helpful to pull the thread of what you're waiting for. Sometimes I'll realize I've locked myself into a weird paralysis because I've accidentally made something a prerequisite for other tasks. For example, I might realize I'm feeling weirdly frozen and uncomfortable because I haven't taken out the trash, and I've told myself I can't do X Y and Z until the trash is taken out, but I don't want to take out the trash, so I've locked X Y and Z behind Unpleasant Task in a subconscious attempt to motivate myself to Do The Task but instead I've just dramatically reduced the number of things I feel I can do. Often just noticing this pattern is enough to break out of it.

I also find that sometimes the invisible trigger I'm waiting for is just waiting to want to do something. That is unfortunately a trap. There are many things you can enjoy or benefit from without wanting to do them beforehand, because the thought of it is unpleasant or scary or anxiety-inducing or otherwise loaded down with what-ifs and caveats. I will never WANT to have a doctor's appointment, but I feel very good AFTER arranging and going to one. I very rarely WANT to exercise, but after the fact I feel very rewarded and more confident in my abilities. I've only WANTED to go on like a third of the walks I've taken this year, but every single one of them has been pleasant and beneficial to my mental health. Sometimes you just gotta say "I don't WANT to do it, but I'll be glad I did it" and manually pilot yourself into Doing It.

drew these different hairstyles for Fulgrim because I was bored...

I finally managed to draw more aurora fan art :)