Remember how a few weeks ago I mentioned I'd like to get my niece into My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic? Well, in a twist of irony (I've learned God likes those), I was able to spend some time with her and her sister this summer, and now they're fans of the show. So of course I had to draw them as ponies (along with their cat Fred, whom I have previously depicted as a dromaeosaur because why not).

I imagine their pony names are Cosmic Swirl (she wants to be an astronaut when she grows up) and Milky Puff (do not run out of chocolate milk when this toddler is around, or there will be terrifying consequences).

Another animation assignment that I think turned out nicely; this time, we had to animate a jump cycle. I can't remember if there was a frame count limit or not, but these are obviously just keyframes. (It loops, if you're bored enough to click through the thumbnails over and over.)

 

For this assignment, and a few others in the class, I used Toko, a character I made up in high school for a not-very-well-thought-out story idea* involving heroes fighting for justice on a lawless desert planet. Toko was a young hacker who used his skills to take down criminal computer networks and obtain valuable intel. The story was super corny and uninteresting and I eventually scrapped it, but who knows, maybe someday I'll find another story to fit Toko into.

*Does anybody ever actually have any well-thought-out ideas in high school, though?

Another animation from college; we were practicing the good old bouncing ball subject that most animation courses start with. If I recall correctly, there was nothing in the assignment about anthropomorphizing the balls and making it into a fight scene, but I overachieved again.

The rest of the frames are after the jump because there are quite a few frames in this one and I didn't want it to stretch out the main blog page.

I saved a few projects from my animation classes; I did a program in animation production, which covered not just actual animating, but just about everything else involved in producing animation for film and television, including storyboarding, character design, and screenplays. The only other animation-related degrees at the school had more to do with animating for video games and general 3D animation, which mainly just involved learning how to use 3D animation software. The animation production program gave a much more well-rounded education, and I also really loved that it included a couple of courses on good old-fashioned drawn animation (which I like better than 3D animation, but that's a rant for another time).

This assignment was to animate a dance in 10 frames; typically for me, I got carried away. The end is a bit truncated because of the 10-frame limit. Anyway, because of the way Blogger displays images, if you click on any of these thumbnails, you should be able to click through the other pictures sequentially and get a good feel for what it looks like "animated". (This character is just a random character design from back when I used to make up random character designs.)

 Before I get anyone asking me if I can animate such-and-such for them: I'm actually a really bad animator, so you're better off asking someone else. Also, I don't have any animation software on my computer right now.

Now for some real blasts from the past--I was rooting around my hard drive and found the folder with all my old projects from my animation classes in college! I thought I'd share the good ones here. 

I'm particularly fond of this assignment from my storyboarding class; we had to storyboard a commercial for a fictional breakfast cereal. (The technology in the first panel really dates me.) I got to make up my own cereal, and, well, it's not a kids' breakfast cereal* without an over-the-top mascot and questionable nutritional value.

*I'm pretty sure breakfast cereals "for kids" are primarily consumed by 18-24-year-olds no longer under their parents' thumbs.

 Back in college, I had an extravagant idea for a tactical video game set in a fantasy version of historical Asia, where various cultures and communities were represented by humans with animal features (Shaolin monk rabbits, samurai dogs, etc.). The idea never really got off the ground (I'm an artist, not a programmer), but I like this piece of concept art that I did for it. The qilin in the game were supposed to be very rare, demigodly creatures who would be difficult, but worthwhile to recruit. I know the proportions are a little off, but, I dunno. I just like things with deer faces I guess.

More old art, namely a character design for a Digimon roleplay I did with a friend back in college. My character was a scrappy swordswoman who chose to stay behind in the Digital World when it was disconnected from the real world because she disliked her "real" life. She trained as a warrior under Leomon and Ogremon, and continued to wear this getup even when she returned to the real world years later, not caring how many heads it turned.

(Yes, she does greatly resemble Terra from my Neopets fics. I did a lot of character recycling in college, before I started taking my writing seriously.)

 Another wildly reinterpreted player character outfit from Kingdom Hearts Union χ (which I really hope they someday re-release in some capacity). I feel like she looks like a character from some 80's cartoon that never existed, but should have.

 Another doodle from back when Pokémon GO first came out and I was like "finally I can romp around with monsters in real life sorta". I'd be a pretty terrifying Pokémon trainer actually.

 I doodled this back in the day when Neopets was still good, because there were a few editions of the Neopian Times editorial where the editor decided to have some fun and let site characters King Jazan and Hanso answer player-submitted questions... much to their consternation. It was hilarious.

I've actually written multiple Neopian Times short stories about the misadventures of the long-suffering Jazan and the Ixi thieves who keep him on his toes (i.e. both Hanso and his wife Queen Nabile). I haven't been putting them on this site because I wanted to keep focused on my main Neopian Times cast, but maybe I'll add them to the collection someday.

I also wrote an NT short story that's a series of correspondences between a desperately penitent Jazan and a very vindictive Princess Amira, in which she makes his life miserable as politely as possible and he tries very hard to be diplomatic about it. It's got a Jane Austen-esque vibe to it and I had a lot of fun writing it, so I'll have to post it here eventually.

(To be clear, I like Jazan; I thought he had a really interesting character arc in the Lost Desert plot and I loved further developments of his character in subsequent plotlines. His high-strung personality and complicated relationships with other characters just make him really amusing to write situational comedy about.)

I doodled this to commemorate the end of the Cassini-Huygens mission back in 2017.* Cassini-Huygens was one of the big planetary exploration missions going on when I started following space stuff more closely in college**, and I really enjoyed keeping up with the plucky probe's adventures around the Saturn system over the years, until it was finally time to say goodbye (and did it ever go out in grand fashion).

Here's hoping we get missions like this for the ice giants one day!

*If you take a look at the sidebar, you'll notice that I started this blog in 2017. But I didn't put this illustration up then, because Cassini-Huygens ended in September of that year, and I didn't start this blog until October. It narrowly missed out on being one of my first posts, I guess.

*I have been a space geek since I could read, but the proliferation of social media around the time I was in college made space news more accessible, so that's when I really started paying attention to things that were going on in space as they were happening, not just reading about them years after the fact. Plus, as a teenager, I was unfortunately distracted from science by stuff like too many video games, bad friendships, and just trying to survive high school.

Something sort of abstract that I painted in college, purely out of the relief of getting through a really intensive month-long summer mathematics course that left me with no time for art.

 This isn't really supposed to represent anything in particular or have a story behind it; my being a paleontology geek has just left me with an unusual fascination with skulls (but less in a goth way and more in a nature-is-amazing way).

Incidentally, I suffered a major health breakdown a couple of months after that class, and I don't think those two things were unrelated. Take care of yourself, folks--there's no use earning a fancy college degree if you die in the process.

I've been rooting around my hard drive and I found more old artwork that wasn't terrible, so I thought I'd go ahead and share it here.

First up, some rare Digimon fanart. I didn't care much for Davis when 02 was first airing, but as an adult he's grown on me because he's just so ridiculous. Veemon is an absolute cinnamon roll and I'd love to have him as my Digimon partner (I could really use his upbeat enthusiasm and unconditional friendliness on days when I'm an anxious mess).

This picture in particular was inspired by the third Digimon movie (i.e. the last part of the amalgamated Digimon: The Movie that was released in the West), which had a definite vibe to it. It was surreal and weird and the animation was totally different to the TV series, and I just loved the evocative setting of the characters traveling through the American West, the plot culminating in the rolling fields of southern Colorado in the summer. Also, although the film didn't really try to be all that deep, it had some good messages about the value of friendship and that yes, letting people into your life and letting them help you can be terrifying, but true friends are worth taking a chance on.

It was like a road film if you replaced the cars with Digimon, and I feel like it took the franchise and its storytelling in a new and unique direction. I also have nostalgic memories of watching Digimon: The Movie during a sleepover at a friend's house in junior high (that was back in ye olden times when you rented VHS cassettes from Blockbuster). 

I've been on a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic kick lately, so of course I had to draw myself as a pony.

 I swear Twilight Sparkle is my actual spirit animal, and one of the reasons why I enjoy MLP:FiM so much is because fiction needed more egghead heroines who save the day through research, overthink everything, and have friends who help them get out of their own head and live a more balanced life.

I'd love to get my 7-year-old niece into FiM, but right now she's too busy obsessing over The Nightmare Before Christmas, zombies, and mummies. She's every bit as terrifying as her cousin in her own unique way.

 This didn't actually happen while we were playing, but in my headcanon this is how these two met. I thought this would be a fitting sendoff for this comic series. For now, I've got other projects to work on... until my niece decides she wants to play through Tears of the Kingdom. 

 Well, we finally finished the game*. It took us nearly a year (silly school getting in the way of video games), but it was a fun ride and I'm glad I got to come along. These comics also gave me a fun project to work on, so I'm grateful for that. It was nice to flex my cartooning muscles(?) a bit.

Ironically, my niece had been badgering my sister for weeks to just go fight Ganon already. And then this happened. (My sister said, "Do you want me to wait for you?" "No. (leaves the room)")

My sister and niece have started (re)playing Ocarina of Time and I've been watching, but I'm not sure I'm going to draw any comics about that, because a big part of what inspired these BotW comics was the sheer spontaneity of my sister and niece experiencing that game for the first time, my sister having no idea what she was doing (I coached her when she needed it, don't worry), and my niece being totally ridiculous the whole time. When we play OoT, it's more my niece eating snacks while my sister and I reminisce about when we thought N64 graphics were the most amazing thing we'd ever seen. Still fun, but it just doesn't quite fire my creativity the way BotW with them did.

That said, I think we're going to have a lot of fun with Tears of the Kingdom when they get around to playing that.

*Sort of. We freed all the Divine Beasts, beat Ganon, and completed a lot of the Ancient Shrines and some of the side quests. I wanted to take them through all the Shrines and side quests, but my niece's attention span only goes so far and I think they were ready to move on.

Waterhole

Time for more nerdy space poetry!

I find SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) a really fascinating subject, not only because it seeks to answer a very poignant question, but because I think the search may ultimately tell humanity more about themselves than about the beings they're trying to find out there. It's an interesting philosophical exercise.

I've read a lot of literature that runs the speculation spectrum about what ETI might be like and why, after decades of having the technological capability to theoretically detect them, we haven't found any trace of them. One line of thought that I'm not a fan of is the idea that ETI are malevolent, and we should not try to alert them to our presence or else we risk dooming our planet. Stephen Hawking was a proponent of this idea and was against sending intentional messages to ETI (hence the poem's subtitle).

But I really don't think humanity should let pessimism or fear limit us and control our actions. Collectively and individually, we do great things by dreaming big and daring big. I don't see any reason why we should stop reaching for the stars.

(At any rate, I have my serious doubts about the existence of malevolent ETI that could pose a threat to Earth on purely logical grounds. Any civilization advanced enough to be dangerous, with the ability to reach Earth worryingly quickly, would definitely possess the ability to discern that Earth has an industrial civilization on it, with or without us broadcasting our presence. If that sort of ETI existed, we should have been invaded by now.)

 She keeps forgetting the name of Dubious Food and calls it something different every time.

(Yes, I know meat and berries don't make Dubious Food. That's the other part of the joke. No matter how many times I try to explain the cooking system to her, she still doesn't quite get it. I think she's too busy looking for horses.)