11.8.2021

I got quarantined again today.

This is the second time actually, the first one was last year because I was in short (a few minutes) close contact with a person who was Rona positive. This time, I was in contact with a person who was in contact with someone Rona positive.

And you know what? The entire day, I was A-okay but once I received the above news yesterday evening, immediately I had sore throat.

Like, immediately immediately sore throat. <(-_-;). I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

But at least, so long as the intermediate person isn’t positive, then I shouldn’t need a nasal swab – because that procedure is paaaaaainful.

So today is an impromptu work from home day. Bossku advised me to stay at home and use up my annual leave for it because by definition, I’m not a confirmed case. Which is fair. And to be completely honest with you, I don’t feel working from home, or online classes are that effective. I mean, just look at me, it’s 9 am and instead of work, I’m updating my blog.

I actually wanted to update since June. June. I kept saying I’ll do it tomorrow, I’ll do it tomorrow, I’ll do it tomorrow.

Now it’s August.

I’ll up some of my drawings and WIPs in a bit because I just realized that it’s on my other computer and I can’t be bothered to turn off this computer, hook up the other computer and then upload, and then turn off that computer and use this computer, because this computer has all my stuff to start my work. Also, this computer cannot write Simplified Chinese :(

Procrastination at it’s finest.

‘Aight, I’m done with the morning work, time to upload some stuff.

This was done way way way back in March I believe, using CSP. But I wanted to edit it a bit before I posted it but then I keep putting it off because CSP. Keeps. Crashingggggg. Not only that, during the work in progress, I accidentally overwrite a work with a backup old file and had to recolour a massive portion of the drawing. Wanna cryyyy. It was one of the most frustrating things ever. And when it gets too frustrating, I just put it on the back burner and gave up. In the end, I didn’t edit anything at all hahaha. By the way, this was a concept art about Falla, one of my really prehistoric OC donut steel and the overarching plot concerning her going on in my head.

This is fan art of Lowell from Project Moon’s Library of Ruina. (I realize that I actually spend more time drawing fan art rather than play the game). I need a lot of catching up to do but between gaming and drawing, I will always prioritize the latter because inspiration and motivation to draw doesn’t come always but I can play video games anytime. I already have the idea that I want his cape/coat to float to the top and then slap a bunch of oriental pattern on it. That was the plan and I believe the plan worked well (^_^). And that pose though – it was actually referenced from a dancing kpop guy who I didn’t even bother to know who.

‘Iron Lotus’ was something which I didn’t really expect to enjoy; first time I heard it it felt very out of place but after a while I came to appreciate it.

And finally Tiphereth and Tiphereth from Project Moon’s Lobotomy Corporation and Library of Ruina. I can write a bit more about this one because it’s more recent. The initial sketch was a fugly composition of both Lobcorp Tiphereths. But boy Tiph looks dead and girl Tiph looks like she wants to kill you.

I told you

So I revamped the whole thing, tried to find something with a bit more of a dynamic pose. Looked up photos on pinterest and the internet in general, etc. and finally settled on the final pose. And the problem with that is that I did the pose first, and the perspective later – which we will come to in a bit. Then came the colouring.

Tiph’s Floor of Natural Sciences isn’t yellow. It’s GOLD. And gold (as well as silver, or anything that is shiny shiny for that matter) is a colour that I struggle to imitate. Even blonde hair is something which I struggle to colour, as evidenced by the lack of blonde OCs that I have. My usual tactic of using purple as a base didn’t work for once – I had to scrap the whole thing and use brown-red. And the problem with brown is that, in my hands, it turns muddy fast. And, yeah, I combined the subject with the background during the initial base colour stage and lived to regret it horribly. The cleanup was not fun at all.

And then came the perspective.

If there’s one thing I hate most, it is perspective and drawing anything that resembles an object which is non-organic. And it becomes a massive headache when I never learn my lesson, draw characters first and force perspective on them later. In order to make boy Tiph fit sitting on the dead robot, the two point perspective which I got was (1) in the picture and (2) out of the picture.

>:’D

And when I wanted to colour in the tiles, I was like, wait a minute, why does the tiles not look like perfects squares? So I kept redoing the guidelines and wire frames again and again and again, about five (5) times because I’m positive I messed up a basic two point perspective somewhere and made the tiles rectangle-ish. Then finally, I just went with the flow, added some value to the tiles and it finally looked square-ish. And I kept extending, extending, extending the canvas and now the actual size is > 4000 pixels x 5000 pixels (@_@).

Yes, SAI, Photoshop and CSP crashed a lot. More so when I have two of them opened at the same time.

The only thing that kept me sane was the fact that Paintool SAI has a built in perspective guideline which you can use to align your lines with easily. Otherwise, having to redraw lines by yourself using the shift key will make me give up all together. Also, Tiphereth’s battle theme in Library of Ruina just really suits her entire plot and really pushed me to complete the piece. Actually, all the patron librarians have very nice battle themes, but I wish Netzie just had more beer.

Oh and about the massive watermarks.

Hmm, I know that I’m kinda unknown so who cares whether someone steals my art or whatever, the watermark makes it even uglier. But I’m not going to take any chances and I don’t want to deal with it in the future when someone does steal my stuff, claim it’s theirs and sells it. It already happened to a family member of mine (well, not art precisely, but something else) and plagiarism is really really frustrating to deal with.

I’ll be straight honest here – WordPress’ block system for writing does not appeal to me one bit. I don’t know how to revert back to the old system.

Thanks for reading. That was a kinda long, comprehensive post. Have a nice day.