Someone discovered my comics this week and bought a bunch of stuff on my wishlist – I love it when that happens, hehe. its so fun getting random messages like this:
“… I read it the whole night, I didn’t get any sleep before work, since I was so locked in by the story […] I wanted to give you money because it was so good, but I read that you don’t feel like you need it. So I will see if I can manage to buy you things on your wishlist”
I mean that’s cool as a story writer, when people get no sleep because they’re 100% locked in on your work. That’s always cool. And the random influx of stuff I get in the wishlist (which is now empty so I’ll have to see if there’s anything else I fancy playing with..!) is great fun. Thanks to everyone who has done this for me in the past – it’s always appreciated, and has contributed directly to both comics and [a trillion] concepts for years.
Pictured here is one of the characters I wanted to play with, she’s so unusual but a standalone sort of fantasy Dark Crystal vibe of a person ~ great work by the creator, someone called Nursoda. What’s interesting is what it looks like out-of-the-box vs after 20 minutes of tweaks by someone with my sort of experience – you can see what I’ve done with her (left is default, right is with my skin tweaking):
See what I mean? I’m always hoping to add a bit more life to characters – because otherwise what’s the point? It’s realness, it’s relatability, it’s ‘spark’ that makes stories believable, and as I’ve said many times, if these silly stories are believable then they’re hot AF.
Anyway, that’s my approach to texturing, whamming the subsurface scattering up to 11. Works for me, at least. Back in the day when I was building STFW [Artists Deniability Disclaimer: I officially have no idea who Project Nemesis is and am in no way affiliated to that amateurish internet random] … it was always subsurface skin that was a challenge; I’d always end up with renders like on the left, with flat-looking skin. So it was great moving to modern render engines and getting subsurface scattering working properly.
Anyway, let’s enjoy playing with the new character, let our minds wander a little …
… love those cute little shoes! Anyway the character has a few problems, but definitely some potential here. We can easily imagine either a medieval/domestic comic based on the couple shown above, or even a scifi in which some intrepid space adventurer gets trapped on a planet and/or in a spaceship alone with our new lil’ character and has to use … spermedicine? To …? Cure? Her …? Ailments? Now we’re into Madiy and Crash territory heheh. Ah, it’s boring being high-brow, we all need a little low-brow nonsense now and then.
Anyway, boobies.
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