Who better for this prompt than Katara, famous for her stirring speeches about hope? (Who then got mercilessly roasted for them by the Emerald Island Players)
Some in progress images are below:
(Personally, I think she looked her best just before being colored in – I just didn’t have the markers I needed to really do her justice.)
What this drawing is reminding me, is that I really need to draw some more ATLA fan art. It’s really fun and good anatomy and dynamic pose practice…
I had a really sore wrist for a few days during Inktober and ended up repurposing some extra drawings I’d done just for fun into Inktobers #6 and 7. Since I had just re-watched Avatar the Last Airbender, that centered around Kiyoshi – one of my favorite characters – and her iconic look.
Bonus fun fact, Kiyoshi is canonically a lesbian. She was a massive, imposing woman whos girlfriend was a petite ass-kicker who also doubled as her merciless combat trainer and they loved each other very much despite pretty much constantly trolling each other. I just thought you should all have this information 🙂
I’ve been having a hard time doing creative work lately, and sitting down to work on some of my ongoing projects like the Monster Girls or a mini comic I’ve been putting together has been a real struggle. I felt the itch to do something artistic last night, but I just didn’t have the wherewithal to polish my other existing work, so I decided ‘screw it, I’m going to draw something fun, just for me’. I still have Howl’s Moving Castle on the brain, so I decided to start on some fan art from the books. It’s still a work in progress, but I’ve had a great time working on it so far, and I plan to post the finished version in color soon 🙂
Aesthetically, I blended some elements from the books and some elements from the movie, as I love both versions of the story. Sophie’s hair will be red (“red gold”) as it was in the books, but I have to admit, I like movie Howl’s straight-iron blonde look. I figure his natural color (when he’s not playing with magic dyes) is probably a muddy dish-water blonde or very light brown, so that’s what I’m planning to give him here. I haven’t decided if I will color Morgan’s hair at all, but I keep picturing him as having chestnut hair for some reason… If you have suggestions for that, feel free to comment and let me know 🙂
More commentary (and maybe even a mini-fic?) will accompany the finished version down the road.
I’ve never been a big fan of Christian mythology as a thing, especially when it comes to demons. So for this prompt, I decided to draw something a little more fun.
This is Tanya Darkflame: Tiefling Activist for Dragon Welfare, seen here with Irwin, a slightly cranky gold dragon hatchling.
For those playing along at home, yes this is absolutely an homage to Steve Irwin.
Tanya has an educational TV show that shows her tracking dragons (and occasionally wrestling them, when they need to be tagged or treated for injuries). She absolutely loves the scaly killing machines, and regularly advocates for their welfare. In her spare time, she works at a dragon preserve, educating visitors and helping care for the dragons that live there. Typically, these will be abandoned or orphaned hatchlings like Irwin, or injured animals that can’t survive in the wild anymore.
Irwin the dragon is a little grumpy and bitey, but Tanya knows what she’s doing so she probably won’t get chomped. Iddn’t he cute?
For the curious, I also made an in-progress compilation of the drawing from sketch through completed image:
I had thought about having more speech bubbles to really get the Crocodile Hunter feel, but it just ended up feeling crowded and busy, so I eventually went with just the one.
More monster girls are coming up. Stay tuned!
Today’s post is a bit of fan-art I did for a webcomic I’ve been reading for the past few years, called Selkie, It follows the titular Selkie, an orphan who comes from an aquatic humanoid species and ended up among humans through events I won’t go into (no spoilers). The story picks up with her being adopted and follows her life from there. (First page if you want to start at the beginning is here. The art grows over time.) It’s a fun comic that seems pretty silly initially, but actually ends up diving fairly deep into world building, prejudice, and some other interesting themes. Also it’s just kinda cute.
(Click here to see the work in it’s natural habitat, down in the comment section :D)
More Monster Girls are on the horizon – stay tuned!
I’d been having some art block lately, so I thought it was probably time to set down the Monster Girls for a minute and do something else to clear the cobwebs. Coincidentally, I just finished finally watching Gravity Falls all the way through the other day (yes, I’m slow), and had it still somewhat on the brain. I decided to doodle some fan-art and this is what came about.
To be perfectly honest… while I know the show has a loyal fan-base and I would recommend it overall, I can’t really say that I *loved* Gravity Falls… Don’t get me wrong, there was absolutely some good stuff in there, and I really enjoyed the overarching story-line with the Stan twins. The show has a way of sticking in your brain after you finish watching it…
But I also found myself disliking some of the characters and wishing they’d just go away already. I was often a little annoyed at how the girls in the show were written in particular. Sometimes they felt like real kids and other times they felt more like “girl” stereotypes that got somehow turned into a named character. The creator is a guy and the show appears to be from Dipper’s perspective for the most part, so I guess that’s not all that surprising and it could certainly be worse – but it irritated me more than once.
There was some pretty good story-telling and the characters WERE all pretty distinct and brimming with personality. I enjoyed a lot of the jokes and found the snarky affection pretty endearing. I just kept getting pulled out of my enjoyment to roll my eyes whenever they made Mabel obsessed with boys over and over, or had her bail out on her promises for stupid reasons. She can and should have flaws, but they don’t need to all be ‘Mabel wants a boyfriend and has the attention span of a drunk hummingbird’.
Mabel is actually a pretty good nexus of my general feelings about the show. She could be really fun and endearing, then obnoxious and cliche, in turns. I found her relationship with Stan pretty sweet – they felt like they had a genuine bond and you really believed that he’d be willing to fry his own brain to keep her safe. Overall, I enjoyed Mabel, but I still found myself grumbling at some of the ‘psh, girls, amirite?’ story-lines about her and her friends that felt like they were really selling her short. Feral-Mabel was a lot more fun than Girly-Mabel for me.
All that bitching aside, there was definitely one thing I could 100% relate to with Mabel though – her weird little girl energy. Being ‘quirky’, if you want to call it that. I was absolutely a weird little girl as a kid, and while I’ve since graduated to ‘weird 30-something woman energy’, I remember my roots.
So, here’s to weird little girls. May they never give up the weird shit that makes them happy. And may they be unapologetically their weird and interesting selves for life. Amen.
Can you tell I’ve played some Breath of the Wild?
Who better to draw for a prompt like ‘jolt’ than the original storm queen: X-men’s Ororo Monroe, aka: Storm?
First, the line-art I drew for the official Inktober challenge. This was hand-drawn with pencil, india-ink, and a sketchbook:
Then I went into Photoshop and did some touch-ups, shading, and coloring on the original sketch, like so:
Storm’s outfit here is inspired by the (phenomenal) costume designs from 2018’s Black Panther. I won’t claim to have done nearly as good a job as they did, but I’m very happy with the design nonetheless.
Primarily, I borrowed from the uniform of the Dora Milaje (Wakanda’s royal guard), but with elements of my favorite parts of Storm’s X-men uniform and a nod to her 80’s punk phase in the shaved sides haircut. (I always loved PunkStorm, but the mohawk just never quite felt like it fit to me.) I left her tiara more or less untouched, because it’s just such a great iconic design that I didn’t want to mess around with it.
I used a heavily blue and gold color scheme as a nod both to her storm and lightening powers, as well as to give a more royal feeling to her ensemble.
While Storm is an X-man these days, her powers saw her worshiped as a goddess before joining the X-men, and she’s definitely served as African royalty at least once in her canonical past – including Queen of Wakanda. Seemed only fitting 🙂
Storm will be getting some more digital work in the future, and will probably be appearing here again in fully digital/illustration form. Stay tuned 🙂
A long while ago, I saw a challenge to draw a Disney Style self portrait. I never got around to actually doing the drawing because life was happening, but I wanted to revisit it when there was time – and then, lo and behold, I had some!
I used the style of Sleeping Beauty for this, with clean smooth lines, flat color, and heavy stylization for the figures, and I drew the artwork to the scale of a traditional hand-animation cell (at least according to Google). The background is minimally lined and done in a soft, more realistic painterly style.
I also borrowed the design of Aurora’s peasant dress, with a gentle palette swap. I think I look about ready to burst into song and go on a life-changing adventure – don’t you?
ChibiSketches 