S&F Extra: 114 Platformer Hero mega-mural, the making of Neutral Chaos, and more!

Hello, friends! It's time to take a deeper dive into what I've been working lately, including my Platformer series, my Neutral Chaos shenanigans, and updating a classic corgi.

Platformer Mega-murals
Believe it or not, there are now 96 pieces in my Platformer series, illustrating a staggering 114 playable platformer characters. (As well as a handful of enemies and NPCs, haha!)

I've put together two updated murals of the full line up. The first one is more vertically oriented, and uses the circle backgrounds...

 
...while the second uses a grid of full solid-colour backgrounds:

 
I've been poking away at this project for a few years now, and I probably will continue to do so now and then. It's a nice change of pace, and a fun excuse for me to engage with one of my other hobbies.

Neutral Chaos Archipelago - A tale of two universes

As many of you will know, I'm currently working on two distinct comic revolving around Alicia and her favourite cancelled television series, Neutral Chaos Archipelago!

On my main website, I'm been running a comic about Alicia and her friends attempting to revive the show as a low budget fan film.

Meanwhile, on the Saucy Hippo tier, I'm running a comic that is set in the actual fictional world of Neutral Chaos Archipelago... or at least, Alicia's unrealized vision of it. The idea is that this is the version she would make if she could.

Anyhow, what this means is I get to depict the "fan film" in the main story as a low budget, early draft version of the Saucy Hippo story. To have a little fun with this, I used a similar shot composition for a particular scene. Here's the version from Alicia's fan film:

 
And here's the version from the Saucy Hippo story:

 
Not to spoil too much, but Alicia gets some feedback from her friends about her script in the "real world" main story... and some of this feedback is then reflected in the Saucy Hippo story. Aw, she's listening!

One running gag about the original Neutral Chaos Archipelago show is that it was actually made by editing together several different unrelated anime shows. So for a scene where Alicia brings up some screenshots of the show on her phone, I took a few different Alicia-as-Princess-Endura drawings from the Saucy Hippo stuff and altered them to make them seem like they could have all come from different shows:

 
I mainly just focused on altering the eyes and haircuts. My thinking is that Princess Endura's commander, super hero, archaeologist, and princess identities were four distinct characters from four distinct shows, before they were combined for Neutral Chaos.

Of course, in the Saucy Hippo version, they all look the same... since it's Alicia's vision of the show, and she envisions them all looking like her. (lol)

Dress for the Job 2.0

With the summer con season approaching, I was thinking about updating my Dress for the Job t-shirt to reflect my current art style. Here's the original version:

And here's the updated version, which is more reflective of how I draw Baker these days:

It's going to be a strange year for conventions, with all the stuff going on here at home with Jesi's treatment. They are a big part of our income, but I am definitely cutting back on them for this spring. (And in some cases, I'm sending other people to run my booth for me while I stay at home.) If everything goes as planned, Jesi's treatment will be long done by the time San Diego and Gen Con get here, but we'll just have to see how things go.

Platformer inks
Last but not least, four of my new Platformer characters were drawn ink-on-paper... so here are my traditional inked art photos!

 
That's all for now, team. Back soon with more fun stuff!