katoo

More fake video game things

Very slowly shaping how i want this project to look. i've drafted out the premise under the working title Mutagenesis and now i need to start thinking about the layout of the actual "game manual" itself for a directed approach. it's been really fun to be designing characters again, and since this won't be a comic i don't have to worry about the reproducibility of each design which means i can get as detail-oriented as i want lol. More to come.

Haircut

Alecs gives Jake a buzzcut during their stay on the ISA lunar training base.

Goliath - Process

The process for an illustration I completed for Armour Astir, a TTRPG by Briar Sovereign (@weregazelle)! You can see the full image here. 

The pose and composition for this drawing came fairly easily as i had spent a lot of time thinking about that during the design process. my usual style of composition is "x-shaped", where i create two diagonal paths of direction in the image that inter...

Ideas for a game manual for a scrolling 2D shooter that doesn't exist

hi! sorry for not being active for the past while. all kinds of good and bad stuff has been happening over the last few months and basically i haven't been sketching very much, but i'm starting to get back into things. my commission queue is almost cleared and i intend to put more work into the several personal projects i have open. this is one of them.

here i want to experiment with a different narrative format and make a zine in the format of an instruction manual/story booklet for a ...

Weewoo (wip)

A painting in progress, based on a photo of a friend... weewoo is the swan's name

Mutation paintings

a few collected thoughts about where i want to go conceptually, as well as gathering resources for certain story developments... inspiration includes: satellite photography, microscope photography, fractals (various), conway's game of life, cancer biology, that one scene in Akira, data visualisation, kodak gold film photos, and the southern reach trilogy

2020-05-28 06:51:03 +0000 UTC View Post

Telescope

still haven't been drawing for myself much lately, so i decided to take a small break for it this weekend. khalida and sonny go stargazing on a cold night. possibly to be coloured in the future... 

sketchbook april-may 2020

hello! i have a few new sketches to share! i haven't had a lot of time to doodle since i've been busy with commissions and also cracking on with my draft, so these vary wildly in quality. also because i've slowly been getting my life back on track. please enjoy some more silly drawings.

CWs: drug mention, nudity, needles, my bare ass, the usual

2020-05-12 05:17:38 +0000 UTC View Post

Sunny Ridge (cw: fire damage)

a painting from last year, based on a media photo of the 2013 nsw bushfires. i intended for this to be a series, so i may come back to it at some point later

sketchbook march-april 2020

i hope you've all been doing alright through these truly shithouse times we are living through. i've been journalling a lot to process things on a day-by-day basis, so there's a lot of writing in the pics below, my apologies! but my chicken scratch is absolutely not required reading! other than this and commission work, there hasn't been a whole lot else happening aside from writing here and there. i hope this is kinda interesting, at least...

2020-04-06 08:53:28 +0000 UTC View Post

a question about sketchbook uploads (poll)

i'm wondering about switching the way i post my sketches here, so i would love some feedback... would you prefer i continue sporadically posting longer, compiled pdfs; or post short collections more frequently, all visible in the one post (so no download is required) (also gives me room to type notes) ?

UPDATE: so based on these results i think i'll go with the 2nd option, but at the end of the year or whenever i'll compile everything into a pdf you can download for free :) how's that s...

chess club boys

main character designs and style test for my upcoming chess comic. i've finished the thumbnails and the page count came out at 34 pages, but i'll get back to working on it after i've finished my commission queue. the working title is "Gambit" (unless i can come up with something better) and it's about the mental and physical intimacy of an abstract war game and the psychosexual desire to get stepped on by your opponent.

Weird horse returns (& rambling about spec bio and hard scifi)

Fenn, my oldest character, gets a fresh design. as a foreword, i've decided i'm switching to they/them prounouns for them since it feels more aligned w their character. as a member of a shapeshifting alien dragon species w no distinct sexes, gender is a fairly abstract concept to a lot of individuals.

Fenn is a professional athlete who competes in flying races, but they're also good at running ...

Some march commissions (WIPs)

I'm afraid there won't be much in the way of personal art this month as i'm mainly working on commissions, but i'm able to show you the colour roughs for these two i'm currently doing. these have been great at getting me to try out different lighting styles and continuing to push the way i think about and use colour. 

for both of these i wanted to try something different to what i've been doing and go for very strong light with vibrant shadows. in some ways it's much easier than th...

Христос воскресе - inks, & thoughts about inking

the inks for this commission, now finished! [view here]

i went heavier on the blacks since i was keeping the cell shading very minimal, just using rim lighting to highlight the left character. i could've worked into this even more, particularly with the background, but i didn't for time/energy reasons.

spotting blacks is really one of those things that is heavily down to your own artisti...

Христос воскресе (WIP)

Work in progress for a commission, the client wanted a sci-fi setting with with a  russian/siberian influence so needless to say i was thrilled to get to work on this!

Dec '19 - Feb '20 sketchbook

The past few months have been a little slow in terms of sketching because i've been writing my main comic script and also producing an illustration for an upcoming charity art book, but i cobbled together what i have so far.

this one has doodles, character and visdev sketches for previously mentioned comic, and some stuff for a short-format comic about a chess tournament (i say short-format but it'll probably end up around 30 pages anyway, lol). i also included my hourly comics from the...

Cate with seals

portrait painting practice, from a photo reference. the more i replicate traditional oil painting techniques on a digital scale, the more digital painting "clicks" for me. with the seemingly endless possibilities of digital media what i've really found works best is to treat it like a real canvas, using 4 or 5 colours at most, 3 or 4 brushes max, and painting directly onto one layer with an absolute minimum usage of filter effects. the only thing i miss is holding a real brush in my hand, so ...

Downstairs

things have been a little quiet lately since i spent the better part of the month working on the draft for the comic, so i decided to take a break and paint a scene that i wrote recently.

Tallgeese - inks

doing a bit of fanart of my fav mobile suit from gundam wing

Watercolour journal

A little collection of stuff from a watercolour sketchbook from early 2018 to now-ish. some of it you may have seen, some of it i haven't shared. it's mostly character sketches in different media.

watercolour is pretty fun, isn't it... maybe i should do more stuff with it next year

Happy holidays, and important changes

Hi everyone, i hope you've all been having a restful holiday. heading into the new year i'm going to be making a few changes to my patreon.

due to time and energy restraints, i'm going to stop offering sketch requests for my $10 tier reward. i'll be doing one final round for last month's patrons, but from the december pay cycle onwards they won't be offered. i've done over 80 of these for more than a year now, and i want to keep things fresh as well as dedicating my tim...

November sketchbook 2019

In an attempt to get my creative sensibilities back on track after a long period of academic work, i've started regularly sketching and journaling. here's what i've made so far! its currently a mix of personal, conceptual, and story art, and some studies.

i'd like to make this a frequent thing for my patrons. i also have a large backlog of older sketchbook things i'm planning to scan, so you'll be seeing more of that as well.

let me know what you think! enjoy :)

2019-11-30 08:33:46 +0000 UTC View Post

August requests

$10 tier headshot requests owed from when I went on hiatus. Thanks everyone!!

Lilith

character based off my very first fursona that i may use in the future for Y2K visual purposes. i've also become really interested in the look of PC-98 games, which tended towards crisp aliased graphics, dithered everything, and really elaborately decorated UI. the PC-9800 series had a VGA (video graphics array) that allowed 640 x 400 pixel graphics with a max 16 colour palette (out of the 4,096 total possible) so there are some fun restrictions to work with. when i have time i'd like to do s...

FF Artbook WIP

back from my break! i hope everyone's been having a good few months. here's a peek at something i'm doing for The FF Collective's new artbook. more things coming regularly, including personal project work, hopefully.

bonus: image board i made for inspiration

2019-11-10 05:55:03 +0000 UTC View Post

Update (taking a short break)

Hey everyone, thank you for your support through august. i'm sorry things have been slow, but i'm entering my final couple of months of honours work which means it's crunch time for me. because of this i'll be pausing payments and taking a two-month break, and you should be seeing me again here some time in november. (i'll at least have a big new sketchbook post by then!)

$10 requests from July are going out to those waiting and should be wrapped up shortly. i will be still be taking re...

Denim jacket

relaxing, mucking around with screentones in CSP

Mouthguard (cw: blood)

He's fine. it's an occupational hazard!

Motorcycle

something kinda boring i did tonight to relax. this setting, which appeared in my last painting (the planet BODE-1c, aka. Big Red) is easy for me to draw and paint since i blissfully decided to make mostly flat and desert-like (and also in my favourite colours). when Wolfgang prefers not to get his mech covered in dust his mode of ground transport is by bike.

still trying to get my painting style really tight, crisp and expressive without overworking things.

Bonus WIP because i st...