03-15-2024 Update Artist's Commentary (Patreon)

JAMES, Director: Mama Mia..

HAVEN, Al’s 3rd biggest fan: meats back on the menu!! Production on this one was intense because i was doing the same unwise thing i was doing at the start where i was writing and drawing 2 updates at the same time, luckily Chumi had my back for the front end/end of this.

Chumi, consumer of meats both fancy and not fancy: Meat’s back on the menu! It’s been awhile, hasn’t it?? I know a lot of fans have been waiting to get back to Meat, and it was really encouraging seeing all the enthusiasm! Haven and I were the artists for this update, and I wonder if it was obvious who did which panels. Let’s talk about ‘em!

HAVEN: This update starts with the schooner passing by a pair of binary stars, the ship flying directly in front of the red dwarf to show we’re in Al’s territory now.

HAVEN: Soooo many drawings went into this one, luckily i had chumi’s help for a good chunk of it.

Chumi: Haven did a lot of the more complicated panels PLUS he storyboarded the entire thing. Goddamn!!! Thank you Haven for your hard work 🙂

HAVEN:  Just doing my part 🫡

HAVEN: We exit candy with kanaya turning from rose, enter meat with kanaya sleeping alongside her rose. She is not seen wearing the rose for the rest of the update.

Chumi: All of the scraps of fabric on her table are either black, white (symbolizing her mourning) or pink. She’s sleeping on the pink one too… Naya clearly misses her wife. 

ANDI: :(... take it easy, naya.

Chumi: The shades have come off!! 

ANDI: Lalonde eye moment.

HAVEN: i was like “can i make him take off the glasses for this one” and everyone was like “yeah”

HAVEN: art director KIM helped with the board on this one

Chumi: Replicating Jade’s handwriting took a bit of studying. So many curls!

ANDI: I think you nailed it Chumi! Whenever I saw Jades writing, I just thought… Wow, that is a lot of curls.

HAVEN: this panel came out soooooooooooo good chumi went crazy on it

Chumi: Beautiful, beautiful, unpossessed Meat!Jade! We finally get to see her! And she’s in a new outfit! And she’s playing the flute again! This is one of my favorite panels ever, and I wanted it to be reminiscent of the famous Jade: Squeal like a piglet and fertilize some plants panel. See below. 

ANDI: YESS, I remember when you were working on this panel, it felt soooooo homestuck to me when she did this. Very good.

Chumi: Haha yesssss. I stopped the animation and studied it panel by panel to try and recreate the same amount of enthusiastic jumping around. Girl I love you.

James: Yeah, I remember we spent an afternoon in the work chat refining it. I said “add a random one where she flips the other way every now and then” and you got it immediately.

James: Wow this was like literally days after launch. We were all so cheesed.

HAVEN: new outfits means sprites! also the trees in this panel are particularly lovely!

Chumi: Some new sprites! Credit to Haven for making them! I missed you, Jade Harley. Not to knock on Roxy’s ‘jamas and slippies though, they are also very cute! 

James: They are cringe actually. Just kidding. I’m just jealous nobody has put my face on any pajamas.

ANDI: Calli x Roxy pajama clothing merch, when?

Chumi: Okay, Jade is talking about something that is a little important to the story, but I want to talk about how cute she looks here. Little bean mouth smile!! Girl I love you. And now… Let’s talk about Jade’s new outfit!!! 🎉🎉🎉

HAVEN: take it away chumi!

Concept art of Meat-Jade designs by Annie “Chumi” Lee

Chumi: When we were talking about a new outfit for Meat!Jade, I produced these concepts with never-before-seen speed. That’s why they look so shitty!!! We wanted to have an outfit that was reminiscent of Jade’s old outfits: casual, cute, and simple! 

We all based our concepts on the Three in the Morning Dress + the dress possessed!Jade was previously wearing. However, we didn’t think that Jade would want to keep wearing the same outfit that Al!Cal put her in. Plus, it’s a rather fancy outfit that can get hard to draw. At the time, I was thinking about buying a shirt-dress combo outfit for my own wardrobe. It occurred to me that it would work perfectly for my girl as well: a casual way to wear the Three in the Morning Dress!!! Jade’s new outfit was thus born. 

The entire art team contributed concepts of her outfit. We had a whole vote and everything! Let’s check out what could have been…

Concept art of Meat-Jade designs by Andi R.

ANDI: These were also done very quickly, so please don’t mind the shittiness. Anyway yeah! We were trying all kinds of stuff based off that 3 in the morning dress!! So many ways it could go. I think we were also fiddling with the hair on her sprite as well and seeing if it should stay long and messy or not.

Concept art of Meat-Jade designs by Kim Quach

Concept art of Meat-Jade designs by Haven

Concept art of Meat-Jade designs by Haven

Concept art of Meat-Jade designs by Haven

Chumi: We also discussed whether or not we should revert her hair to its normal style, alter it slightly, or keep it as wild as it was during her possession. In the end, we chose to change it back! One of the other ship passengers must have given her a haircut. 

ANDI: I think reverting her hair was a great choice as it shows that she is taking control back from her body. I’m also very happy we came to vote for the little hip string with becs face on it, it's just so cute. 

James: Part of the reason we voted for this one is because it seemed like something a 20-something would actually wear casually. Another win by local clothes-wearer Chumi.

Concept art of Meat-Roxy and Meat-Calliope designs by Haven

HAVEN: i drew these matching pj’s a long time ago but im still really happy with them

Chumi: These are so cute. The matching pajamas. The faces on the ‘jamas. The character slippers. Both are fully equipped to get some prime-time sleep and forced Jade and Kanaya join them as well. That is frankly unfair because Jade and Naya did not get matching pajamas. Or maybe they just didn’t get a chance to switch into them before getting a face-full of sleeping powder.

James: I keep thinking about this face

Chumi: Thank you to the team and Andi specifically for helping me with the panel transition! I originally envisioned it as a door slowly, sneakily closing, but we decided to speed it up! Here’s the original, which feels a bit painfully slow when compared to the final.

ANDI: Yeah this one was tough because we tried a lot of speeds, a lot of frame cutting and adding. Making sure it reads well and finally I suggested adding a little “Close” blurb to punctuate the door. And I think it helped! It’s little stuff like this that we put attention to.

HAVEN: into the dream world and the return of the bubbles. i love making these photobash type panels, when i was reading homestuck in 8th grade seeing how andrew combined photos with drawings blew my mind. there was a couple years where this was all i’d do in photoshop.

HAVEN: shout out to kim for helping with the boards here and the timing of the animation in the following panels

HAVEN: 3 bubbles here: violet, maroon, and sea foam colored. Not really much to say about them other than that i'm fond of these 3 in particular.

Concept art of panel 587 by Haven

Concept art of panel 587 by Kim

HAVEN: as you can see we went through a lot of versions of this

Chumi: I LOVE THIS SHOT AND ALL OF ITS VARIANTS!!

ANDI: I loved these a lot. I’m happy with the one that was published, it had so much depth and you can feel the dreamy-ness from it.

HAVEN: i think this was the first panel i sketched out for this update

HAVEN: i’m a big fan of mixeling and deliberate use of image degradation so i almost wanted to leave roxy and callie looking like that 3rd photo but with callie facing forward.

HAVEN: the only colored part of the space bg being red leads into the door because unbeknownst to them, they’re being followed by al

HAVEN: once again thanks to kim for these thumbnail edits!

HAVEN: The Home. this agonizing panel. This was kind of a non-negotiable part of this update and what's funny about that is that I wasn't even sure if it would be possible to implement it the way i wanted to all the way down to like the week of the update itself.  It’s not even that complex all things considered, it’s just big. But this was the first like “weird panel” I got away with and with it i keep pushing for more non-traditional pages and sections of the comic. 

HAVEN: done in a similar style to the illustrations by Shelby Cragg in Act 6 Act 5 of Homestuck, I aimed for a feeling of both nostalgia and shock with this one; and I wanted to trigger vertigo with it. The feeling of scrolling down the massive winding tower like a water slide. 

HAVEN: apropos of nothing aren't those flowers at the base lovely? The purple flower on the far left is a particularly gorgeousColor don’t you think?

Chumi: I love how this came out, and how it looks on the site. I really missed page-breaking panels like this one.

ANDI: Legendary.

HAVEN: this panel was completely redrawn but i still really love this callie drawing

HAVEN: big al in the building, went through a number of iterations and i’m really proud of how it came out. The first time we Al radiating with the power she claimed from eating her big bro. The swirling space alongside her wraithlike appearance... like an avatar of the dead. Although she does fight for life; In this way Al is like the Adam Warlock to Dirk’s Thanos, Caliborn is of course the Magus. Is Callie The Goddess then? You guys should read some Jim Starlin comics.

HAVEN: i don't have much to say about these, i just really like drawing al.

HAVEN: the 2 groups split by Al here is an ideological one. Defined, and adjourned just as quickly.

HAVEN: And the nightmare ends, but the dream continues! Bonus update art below, i toyed around with the idea of doing a little sketch for each update post on the main accounts but we decided it might be too much extra work to set a precedent for, though i might continue to do them if i have the time.