Saturday Update! (Patreon)

CG Completion: 40/181

Hello again folks!

I'm afraid that last week didn't go so well ^^; I had crappy mental and physical health and the whole week kinda played out as a real uphill struggle. I'm not surprised or worried though, I definitely saw this coming x'D I was very anxious about US politics for like 3 weeks, so now it's time to pay the piper and crash down for some depression. (ノ-_-)ノ

It's a bummer but I know what it is and I know how to deal with it so I'm not really concerned or anything. Can't do anything but my best! And I think it's already getting better anyhow. I feel like I'm 'evening out' and hopefully a weekend of relaxation will help too xD

Anyway! I dealt with this tough week by picking extremely tedious CGs. I figured it would be easier to do long slogs of busywork than to try to be creative. So I'm afraid it's uhhhh, boring leaves this week x'D sorry!

First up is CHOMP! the bear trap xD This one took me 3 days of labour even though my typical time limit is 2 days >_>;; It was partly because of the bad week, but also partly because it just needed a lot of technical work. I didn't have a reference of a bear trap in the perfect angle so I had to eyeball everything and construct it from scratch. 

I now completely 100% understand how bear traps work. I had to watch a lot of youtube videos. I'm sure I forgot something useful to make room too. I bet I don't know how to boil eggs any more or something ಠ_ಠ

Luckily for me, I at least got to be soothed by the fact that this CG is worth 3, because I needed two slight variations for time [ this event can occur at any time of day so I needed a morning/evening version and a night version ]

All that I changed on those is some fancy tinting :D Finally a super easy job! xD

I also talked about it with my alpha testers and brainstormed an idea to jazz it up a little in the game! I ended up putting it in with a moderately intense zoom effect.

I actually really like the transition, and even though this CG was a bitch to me, I'm happy with the result xD

As for the second CG that I did over thursday and friday.... it was more leaves =_=

And I know this picture is essentially of nothing, but trust me, it was VERY tedious to draw x'D

I've developed a whole strategy for forest floor/leaves. I start with a very dark background, then I use blotchy texture brushes to make a layer of nonsense. Next, I start drawing the actual leaf shapes. Once I have a layer of leaves, I shade them with a hard round opactiy brush set to a very slight color jitter- so every I touch my pen down, I get a slightly different color/shade than what I picked. This makes all the leaves look different without me having to switch my color for every leaf. After that, I do a layer underneath and carefully draw little shadows for every leaf. Then I do it all over again! x'D

^ That's the second layer of leaf shapes I was doing. I'm getting pretty fast at drawing leaf shapes x'D

I also only bother with that whole system for the parts of the drawing that are in focus. For the foreground and background of this CG, I used leafy debris brushes or vague blurry scribbles.

But yeah. That shit takes forever x'D Next week my brain will be functioning better so I can get back to more interesting character-focused CGs!

Hopefully EVERYTHING is more relaxed and normal next week LMAO

Anyhow, thank you guys so much! I'm sorry it was a kinda boring update this week ^^; But I am also glad I got it done.

I hope you guys have a wonderful weekend <3 As always, it's an absolute pleasure to work for you! [ even when I complain LMAO I'd still rather be doing this than anything else xD ]