This actually happened. It was great.
This character design was inspired by the cat-people in Escaflowne, a fantasy anime that I remember aired for a brief period on Fox Kids once upon a time (this really dates me). Later I learned that it was really a heavily-edited version of the series Vision of Escaflowne, which was decidedly not a kids' show. Lesson to dubbing company producers: if you're bringing an anime over to the English market with the intention to present it to kids, it would help if the title in question was aimed at children to begin with.
I also based this design after one of my previous cats, a lovely tortoiseshell. She was a sweet girl.
(Looking at this piece now, it's nice and all, but I seem to have had no concept of the idea of line weight. Those thin lines are really getting lost beneath the bold watercolor. I'd love to do something with brush pen and watercolor one of these days.)
This was a design I concocted in college for a tabletop roleplaying campaign where my character was an eccentric mechanist in a world with Renaissance-level technology--kind of like Leonardo da Vinci, but female and questionably sane. It's always a great day when your character's skillset allows them to build their own combat vehicles with a few good dice rolls. (She ultimately ended up building her own airship, so that was fun.)
As an aside, I like the idea of tabletop roleplaying, but I haven't participated in any of it for a while because I had some bad experiences with groups who were unpleasant and unfriendly. I think if I were to do any more roleplaying, it would have to be with family and/or close, trusted friends.*
*I actually wrote a Neopets fanfic about this issue that I never bothered submitting to the Neopian Times. I'll get around to posting it on this blog eventually and ranting more about the importance of being a decent human being during highly social games that have to do a great deal with both group synergy and treating every player with respect and kindness.
Is this blog turning into less of an original artistic content blog and more of a ranty gaming blog? Perhaps the question I should really be asking myself is, does anybody actually care either way?
With some recent occurrences in video gamery, and just overall thinking about things in my spare time, I've come up with another batch of items to discuss and no better place to put them. Read on if you're bored enough.
At any rate, I still like her design.
This creature design stemmed from a frankly bizarre story idea I concocted in high school, about a motley group of humans and aliens living on a derelict deep-space station. The main character was a preteen boy whose ancestor on the station had stumbled upon a sinister entity from another dimension who had emerged in the depths of the station, but no one believed him and his family became regarded as a joke through the generations. There was also a mysterious and brooding young man who was secretly the lost prince of a planet that had experienced a civil war some years past, and a moody teenage girl with an alien stepdad whose biomech she regularly "borrowed" for space escapades.
(It's okay, you can laugh.)
The biomechs in the story were very odd creatures that were organically grown in laboratories and had armor plating and control systems implanted into their bodies. They were sapient and capable of communicating with their pilots.
I never really went anywhere with the story; I think I was trying to be cool and come up with some conceptually super deep sci-fi, but, well, I was 14.
(I executed this piece much later. My art definitely did not look like that in high school.)
Okay, actually that "Fifty Reasons" article is pretty decently funny by high-school-me standards. It was basically me poking fun at how, for two consecutive plots, players could choose to fight on the side of the good guys (Isca, Hannah, et al) or the bad guys (gangs of pirates and thieves, respectively), and so many people inexplicably went the "evil is cool" route instead of seeing the logic in trying to keep Neopia safe. This article was trying to point out, in a tongue-in-cheek passive-aggressive manner, that both thieves and pirates are pretty gross when you stop to think about it.
"The Ensorcellator" is a tepid little short story from when I was going through a writerly phase where I had just plain run out of ideas, and decided my inspiration process would basically be "pick random stuff and make stuff up about it". Yeah. I'm glad I grew out of that phase and moved on to "let's wait until I actually get an idea for a story".
The AI summaries are also a little off. "On Developing Your Neopet's Character" is actually an op-ed that discusses various ways one might go about giving one's Neopet a personality and biography, with examples of how I formulated my own Neopets' characters. And that's a pretty generic description of "Ylana Skyfire: Protector of Spring", which is actually more about Ylana and a clingy fanfic-writing geek (who is totally me making fun of myself) searching for a missing Illusen. (I actually do recommend this one, as it's more recent and I had great fun writing it. Maybe I'll put it on this blog at some point.)
As an opinionated aside, I'm still not a fan of the directions Neopets is heading under its current management and I have no desire to start playing the website again. I much preferred the Adam-and-Donna and Viacom days, when Neopets was more "we're marketing this franchise to kids but we know plenty of adults play too" and not "Hey Gen-Z's! Let's make your childhood on-trend!". Way to alienate everybody else, guys. Thanks.
