johnnywander

Percy's Elden Ring Zine is up for FREEE

After 5000 rounds of copy edits and fiddly fussing, Ananth and I finally put up a pdf book of Percy's Elden Ring comics up on our itchio page!! It's pay-what-you-want and it would give me great joy if you just grabbed it for free, please just download it if you'd like to have it!

I drew like a dozen extra pages of bonus material for the collection and it's mostly a goofy collection of Percy's outfits for each leg of her journey. I think they came out cute! Please enjoy my hidden message about the true nature of the Golden Order Greatsword in the last drawing.

 OH OH BEFORE I FORGET!!!! Our big moving sale is running through THIS UPCOMING SUNDAY, June 16th! Our shop will close the morning of the 17th, then it will be down for the remainder of the summer!!! If you wanted to pick anything up don't forget you have an additional 20% off code 2024MOVING!!! Here's the shop link!

Chapter 9 / Page 1 pencils >:)

I've been jumping around chronologically in the chapter 9 pencils while juggling a few side-projects!! BUT finally we locked the opening scene thumbnails so I get to draw a fun flashback of Cameron being bullied :) :) :) :) Please enjoy ~

HOWEVER ALSO!!! The game Ananth and I have been working on since 2019 just shared its demo!!!! If you have a PC/Steam Deck you can play the first 3 days of Fields of Mistria! We've been working with the incredible team at NPC Studio. Ananth worked on the writing and I've been doing character design and environment design. I'm really proud of the work we all did!!!!! Please take a look!!!!

Bad Kitty Percy

I've been TRYING to get into the habit of doodling at the end of a workday, granted I have enough time for it??? Let's see if I can keep it up!

I've been toying around with the idea of just pairing up Dragon Leeds (from the new years art - basically just Regular Leeds with horns and scales) with Calico Percy, just to have some fun furry dolls to play with. This was kind of leaning into that but the full-body shots just didn't work out in the end lol. I'll keep trying!!

Kitty Percy

I wanted to draw something as fast and loose as possible after work and peeked at this year's April Fools drawing again (added to the lineup if you missed it!) I think Percy makes a really cute calico cat!!!

Ok I have to go to a picnic!! Have a great weekend!!! 🌟

We're still moving! (to a new online shop)

Hiii I've been enjoying making a bunch of promotional doodles for the Johnny Wander moving sale, here's a preview of what I'll post tomorrow!

The sale continues!! I think it'll continue until the beginning of June and then we're shutting down the shop for the rest of the summer and moving all our inventory to the new place!!!!!!!! aaa

⭐️ Don't forget, as patrons you all get an EXTRA 20% OFF CODE! If you're picking anything up from our shop please use the code 2024MOVING at checkout, we made it just for you!

https://store.dftba.com/collections/johnny-wander

Also I wanted to mention, we do still have a small stack of this 18+ Reaper76 zine I did with my buddy in 2017 - it used to be a convention exclusive and then we stopped going to conventions! It's password locked for Patrons only, so if you'd like to pick up a copy, the password is Reaper76

https://store.dftba.com/collections/johnny-wander/products/bad-breakup-boys-password-protected-18-only

OK that's all I got tonight!! Talk to you later~ ✨

The Empty God

Occasionally I like to take breaks and mess around with drawing Walking Gods characters! Thinking about them is like a personal hobby of mine. I poked at this over a few days after thinking about WORLDBUILDING too hard.

This is a bit of a thought experiment, but it's more or less Dhio! Mostly! You might remember him as the black dog in my recent "birthday" drawing haha

Elden Ring DLC is coming!!

--And it finally gave us the kick we needed to compile Percy's Elden Ring zine! 🎉🎉🎉Here's the front & back cover!! 🎉🎉🎉 (and the front cover without text!)

The Indesign document isn't fully polished yet, but at the very least I've finished all the extra art and interstitials it should need! 👯‍♂️

The intent at the moment is to release a pay-what-you-want PDF, and then maybe print a small run of books for SPX?? No promises on the physical copies, we'll see what happens!

I missed drawing the imps, they're so much fun lol

WE'RE MOVING!! (to a new online shop)

We're moving to a new online store later this year and have to pack up shop at the current place! We're having a big sale on a bunch of stuff including our autobio books, artbooks, prints, apparel, and the Maw Plush!!!

AND ALSO OUR PATRONS GET AN EXTRA 20% OFF CODE!! If you're picking anything up from our shop please use the code 2024MOVING at checkout, we made it just for you!

https://store.dftba.com/collections/johnny-wander

After the sale is over we're going to be closing down the store for a bit while we shlep everything to our new distributor, so if you wanted to pick up anything for the near future I definitely recommend doing it ASAP!

Gonna start streaming at 1:30 EST!

This is in 20 minutes! Let's hang out! I have NO lesson plans but I'll try my best to be informative! 💃

I'm going to stream this Thursday!

OK I'm setting this up in advance! I'll be streaming a little intro to Clip Studio this upcoming Thursday at 1:30PM EST (10:30AM PST)! It will be on my twitch channel at twitch.tv/aidosaur!

I will NOT have a lesson plan, we'll be working on vibes only! Please come with questions and I will do my best to answer them!

Hope to see you there!

(also a heads up: I don't keep vods of my streams to watch later, sorry! Some day I might figure out how to share them only to patrons but in the meantime I don't like the idea of keeping public logs. U___U )

happy birthday to meee

for my birthday I gifted myself a fun drawing of my OCs fighting to death 🥰

This North and Dhio! You may have seen them before, I've been drawing them for like 20 years lol

I think re-reading all of Dungeon Meshi in preparation for the anime and also watching the anime has been making me ruminate on the inherent narrative sensuality of violence and consumption! Also how much fun it is to draw shorthand for feathers

we're still playing bg3 (14)

THIS TITLE IS A LIE, we actually fizzled out in the middle of our second Baldurs Gate 3 playthrough pretty soon after we got to act 3 U___U Sorry Dark Urge Chiaki! We'll be reunited some day! I'm too enamored playing with Dragons Dogma Leeds right now!

ANYWAY this is a direct continuation of part 13, the one where Karlach empties her pockets. It's deceptive but this one took me way way too long to render!!! Rendering big areas of texture in a way that still looks "careless" is actually still challenging!

Unrelated, hey tomorrow's my birthday!!!!!! April 25th! 🐮🎂✨

GREATER SECRETS has a 25% off preorder on B&N!

Hi everyone, this is Ananth! Excited to share that my latest book with Tess Stone is coming out November 12th from Random House Graphic! And today B&N members can preorder it for 25% off with code PREORDER25!

Hardcover: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/greater-secrets-ananth-hirsh/1144883880?ean=9780593124857

Softcover: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/greater-secrets-ananth-hirsh/1144883880?ean=9780593124840

We are so excited to share this book with you! See you November 12th! ✌🏾

BARBAROUS Chapter 9 is under way!!!!

Ananth and I are both working on thumbnailing chapter 9 RIGHT NOW!!! This part has been becoming more and more fun as we pass files back and forth and mess with each other's layouts like dolls in a dollhouse. Ananth hasn't really drawn a whole lot since he was a kid but he DOES have a really exceptional eye for dynamic layouts and this has been a great way for him to flex those muscles in a way that's really clear and readable.

I've been promising for a while I'll do a stream on Clip Studio comics and models. Is there wider interest in that? It's been a bit harder to stream for me since I have to choose a time when Ananth isn't working on writing/editing work (we share a tiny office space), and I was out of town for a lot of last week (visiting friends to see the eclipse!!). But if a lot of people are interested I'll try to schedule something out ahead of time! Tell me if you're interested and what you're interested in learning about! I'll make a list!

The winner of the outfit poll is...

CALBRAITH! By 2% over Winter!!! Thank you so much to the 108 people who voted! It felt fitting to draw Alexander in Alexander McQueen! I hope Winter gets her time in the sun, but I was really happy that those two were the top contenders. I'll try to pick more unusual menswear in the future for these polls! (Also I'm open to suggestions! I have a folder going!)

To be honest, when I came across this outfit I'd just picked up a CSP 'plaid' brush set recently and was excited for a chance to play with it.

Drawing this has taught me that Calbraith looks really good in aviators and maybe he should wear aviators in the comic. Important lessons learned.

HAPPY APRIL FOOLS LOL

WOW I completely wound up doing this one by the seat of my pants, we came up with this idea THIS MORNING after realizing what today was, and then I was stuck out of the house for several hours LOL

ANYWAY HELLO, welcome to our new 100% serious incarnation of BARBAROUS!!! I grew up in the furry art internet so this was a treat for me, I need more opportunities to draw furries in my daily life!

In the end, I couldn't bring myself to draw Human Leeds so I just drew a sloppy regular Leeds and bumped up his saturation to make a mash of "human skin tones???" in the mosaic lol

This may be spoilers, but don't expect Leeds to ever be human! This isn't that kind of story!!!!!

OK EVERYONE PLEASE ENJOY YOUR DAY! Happy April Fools! ✨

POLL: WHO SHOULD WEAR THIS!

I was looking at some old Alexander McQueen runway pics and I wanted to draw something with BIG SHAPES and CLASHING PATTERNS!!!!

Here's the last winner! ✨ (So Hyewon and Cameron are exempt from this round)

And the important alternate version :)

oh no we started playing dragons dogma 2

OH NO finally a game where Ananth and I get to play as Percy with Leeds in tow!!!!! (player character Percy with helper npc Leeds)

We've barely started the game, but it's been really fun to run around with a gigantic handsome Leeds Catman. I'm really exceptionally bad at combat in this game but it's been really fun to hang back as an archer and let Leeds (fighter class) go and kill a bunch of things to protect me. :) The dream realized :) :)

Chapter 8 / Page 23 breakdowns

Yay, this was such a fun straight-forward shoujo page! Lots of tall panels with an emphasis on expression and nice amounts of negative space for introspective dialogue. No backgrounds, just bokeh (supplied by Hyewon). 

It was really fun to do Percy's slow descent into "maybe I AM evil?" Who knows, maybe there will be more of that in the future :) :)

As with the rest of this scene, this one was thumbnailed by Ananth. You can see that expression in panel 3 where the two of us had a conversation at my cintiq where I was like "what if Hyewon has an expression that emotionally leads into the next page," so that was thumbnailed by me haha

Everything's a collaboration! 👯‍♂️

Happy (belated) Year of the Dragon!

Why did it take so long for me to finish this illustration, it's already March?

To my credit, dragons should be celebrated every day.

Thank you again to the folks who came and hung out while I inked this! I'm kind of relieved I didn't do any coloring on stream because for some reason I did like 4 color passes on this that I kept trashing so I get to keep my pride as a confident colorist who knows what I'm doing lol.

I just downloaded a free pack of geometric patterns for Clip Studio and I dumped it in the BG for funsies and wound up really loving it... it gives the illustration a bit of a "hard-cover math text book" kind of feel. I added the '明けましておめでとう' (happy new year) just because the grid also looks like a worksheet pattern?? Does it work at all??? Is my Japanese handwriting atrocious?? The answers are all out of my hands ~ ~ ~ ✨

we're still playing bg3 (13)

Thank you to everyone who came to the stream yesterday!!! I'll try to do them more frequently, it was super fun!

During the stream I was reminded that I actually have a few more of these Baldur's Gate 3 comics that I haven't shared yet! So here we goooo

One of my favorite things about running around with Karlach is that by the end of the game she can carry about 1,000 lbs of ~whatever garbage you've picked up off the ground~, in our case, a tremendous number of explosives. 

What will we use them for! Tune in to find out! >:) >:)

~ ~

As a side-note, I've been thinking about cooling on sharing art publicly online for a bit until there's a version of Glaze/Nightshade that's actually compatible with my computer. It seems like they both have Mac OS13 versions available with older OS versions planned (like my OS lol). So we'll see how things shake out! That won't affect sharing images over here so no worries about that 👍

It's a leap day! I'm gonna stream!

It's finally time, I'm gonna ink that Year of the Dragon illustration!!! I'm gonna jump on Twitch around 4:45 PM EST, just after Rook gets fed because he's yowling at me a lot right now. 🙂💦

See you soon!

I started playing Harvest Moon 64!!

Nintendo finally put HM64 onto the Switch for anyone who has a Nintendo Online membership! (it's in the N64 library) I've been really surprised over how much I've been enjoying it! (note: I've been using an off-brand N64 controller for switch which I really recommend)

I wanted to try and emulate the proportions and marker style of the original character designs. I'm not sure how successful I was but this was very fun! Here's what the original character designs look like:

I feel like there was a time when I tried really hard to emulate this sort of coloring style (highly rendered faux marker style with intense catchlights) when I was younger but I'm not really interested in using it anymore! IMO it makes renders look very toyetic and plastic-y, which isn't what I'm personally trying to achieve most of the time. This was really fun to play with, I want to learn how to branch out and mimic other styles and see what there is to learn.

I doubt a lot of people have played/have strong memories of this game but for the sake of thinking this out completely:

• Mystery character @ far left: Popuri analogue; uses her cheeriness for evil.
• Percy: Karen analogue; mean and makes you deal with her baggage before you can date. If you don't marry her, she'll hook up with her coworker.
• Penny: Ann analogue; boisterous sunny weirdo who wants to talk to you about her niche interests.
• Cecilia: Elli analogue; very femme and a bit serious-minded. If you don't marry her she'll hook up with someone way older than her and be really boring about it.

BTW the first ~mystery~ character is from a project Ananth and I have been kicking around for a little bit! Hopefully she'll be able to make her debut properly later!

HAPPY VALENTINES 2024!

Hi everyone, Happy Valentines Day from BARBAROUS!!! 💖💕✨

I had to put a hold on both doing the Year of the Dragon AND the livestream just because of the structure of the week so far - unfortunately having two people working full-time in one room means I can't do any sort of livestreaming when either of us has any sort of meetings lol. I'd like to get back to it though! SOON!!!!!

Take care and eat something delicious!

HAPPY YEAR OF THE DRAGON!!

WOOHOO, an excuse to draw my characters as dragons???? That's just a regular day, but it's nice to have it formalized. :)

Unfortunately I got completely waylaid by a slightly-on-fire freelance project and I wasn't able to finish this. I'd like to do it on stream if I can, it's been a minute!! Maybe next week?

In the meantime, have a beautiful weekend! 🐉💖

Chapter 8 / Page 22 breakdowns

YAY, it's the WE SHOULD KILL HIM page!! (this one was thumbnailed by Ananth! Thank you Ananth!)

This is supposed to be the turn in chapter 8 where it's like, "RIP Cameron, your ex girlfriend has stolen your girlfriend." Hyewon has learned about social impropriety and can't be normal about it. She's angelic but like, the kind of angel with swords.

All the colors from the previous scene have been turned up even further. It's properly evening now, everything is neon purple and green, no one is sober. I really enjoyed working like this! I feel like slowly turning up the non-literal colors really got the audience on the same page before even reading what's going on.

One thing Ananth and I really enjoy doing is adding little nods that New Yorkers might pick up on... in the previous outside environmental shot, you get to see some restaurant signs in Korean, and now we get to see the Empire State Building. If you've spent a lot of time in Manhattan Koreatown, you will probably pick up that the girls are hanging out around Herald Square. 🌃 tadaa

Percy & Leeds outfit turnaround

This is for a little side-project but I thought the lineart was cute enough that I should give it a color! I'm usually not a fan of greens but I think the lime green top really compliments the purple-representing-brown I like to use for Percy's hair. HMM...

Anyway i love making paper dolls whee yay yay

we're still playing bg3 (12)

OH NO I'm back posting these now that it's the new year!!! Hello!!!

The Wavemother Robe wound up being my favorite piece of armor in Baldur's Gate lol. Not because it's especially useful in a fight, but because it's a slinky evening dress that does tick healing when a character stands in water. So if you have a minute or two to throw a bottle of water on the ground and hang out admiring your characters' legs, everyone can get a full heal without using any spells or potions. Win for everyone!!!!! Win for me!!!!

(this is the armor in game btw)

The winner is .... Hyewon!

With a whopping 34%, the winner of the new outfit poll is HYEWON!!! Percy and Cameron tied in a two-way second place at 17%. Thank you to everyone who voted for Leeds, he still came in a respectable third place at 15%. Good hustle, everyone. 🏆

I was super happy to see a full 100 people voted in this poll!!! Thank you!!!

I'm going to be honest, I was personally pulling for Cameron! He was in first place for the first day or so of the poll and I had high hopes! I compromised by doing a couple's outfit with Hyewon and Cameron, forgive me. They can be your angle or yuor devil.

I also included an alternate version of the illustration so you don't have to look at Cameron, please enjoy that one too. 🌿

POLL: who should wear this!

It's that time again!!!! I'm going to pick an outfit and everyone gets to choose who wears it! I wanna draw a bodysuit!!!!!!!

Here's the winners of the previous outfit polls if you're new!