Snapshot Sunday - January 28 (Patreon)

Hey there Patrons!

Well, another week struggling with stress and depression, but I'm not going to get into that. I'm getting tired writing about it in these updates, and I'm sure y'all are getting tired reading about it. Feels like it's getting worse at times, so hopefully that changes soon.

Anyway, lets get into the art! Got a moderate amount of work done this week I feel, with the big piece being the commission for CarhinaShark of their Mizutsune Piper. That piece was a lot of fun to work on, and interestingly it gave me a lot of opportunities to try out new brushes and experiment with features in ClipStudio that I hadn't really used before, so on top of it being a fun piece to do, it was also a good source of learning experience. Hopefully I'll have more opportunities to use some of those features in the future! Keeping in the commission wheelhouse, I also got some rough thumbnails for a commission for Glitch done, and more progress on those will be coming as soon as I'm done with this post.

For warmups this week, I wanted to practice different faces again, but this time not just human faces. Lately I've been feeling like my work has started to regress into most different species I draw having a bit of "same face" syndrome, so I wanted to branch out to different species and try and draw them more accurately reflecting their real world counterparts. Obviously with anthro work there's a decent amount of stylisation that goes into making non-human characters capable of being expressive in the same ways we are, but that doesn't mean that I can't try to have more of their features be a more prominent part of their design, so I picked a couple of species to draw that would challenge my usual drawing methods without being too far from what I would normally draw for a dragon face, as a way to explicitly think about the structures and make the species stand apart from the normal stuff I'd draw. The horse was a perfect example of what I was trying to accomplish, as a lot of the very basic aspects are the same, but the execution can make all the difference in the outcome.

The other species I chose to work on also doubled as revisiting some previous character designs. The first of those is Mattie, a super buff skink girl who plays into the "lizards don't have boobs" trope, but wanting boobs herself, she's dedicated most of her time into obtaining absolutely massive pecs that she passes off as boobs. The default was I was drawing her face was a super clear example of how I was defaulting to a "same-face" style, so using some photo ref I doodled up a couple alternative examples of how I should draw her face. It could still use some work so I might come back to it if I have time to. The second of them was Madison Grant, aka "Big Maddie", an enormous pig lady I've been sitting on for a while who owns a BBQ joint. In the first drawings I'd made of her, I'd alluded to her having a family, but hadn't drawn them out, so I decided to tackle that as well and give the whole family some very rough sketches. The lineup doesn't really practice the face shapes, so I did some cut-aways of pig faces for additional practice, though they don't really belong to any of the characters below.

The last warmups don't really warrant much talking points, I was just in the mood for some size difference and had the thought of "What if Onyx was bigger than Vallory?", which devolved into "What if Onyx was a LOT bigger than Vallory?", so I did some really rough sketches of how that would play out. I didn't have a ton of energy that day, and that's reflected in how bare-bones the sketches are.

Anyway, that'll do it for this week's Snapshot post! Hard to believe that January is almost over already, feels like it should be still a few weeks out. Either way, thank you all for sticking with me while I try and get back to feeling normal. I'll have to figure out something to make up for the lack of completed pieces this month, but getting to a good mental state comes first.

I hope your weekend has been restful and enjoyable for you, and that you have a wonderful week!