samurshalem

BLOG: Patreon Changes

UPDATE: made an error here--I'm relaunching this Patreon at the beginning of September, not October.

Hey everyone! It's been a minute; longer than I intended. I've kept billing turned off since I last posted, and I'll keep it turned off for the remainder of this month and next. Hopefully the art dump helps. But I'm now here with a pretty big update about this Patreon!

SO, here's the short version: In September, I'm going to un-launch this Patreon and re-l...

ART: Carrie & Otterly Sketches

After a pretty long burnout period I've started to have some art inspiration again, so here's a couple of quick pieces...both sort of inspired by television.

One is Carrie, a painter cat. One of my guilty pleasures is Netflix's trashy reality show The Circle, and the most recent season had a really charming contestant, Yu Ling, who had some really wild and expressive makeup and fashion. She was sort of the inspiration for this character. I have ideas for a sister and a best friend for h...

BEHIND THE SCENES: Jacket

I tried to do a little visual reinforcement of the idea here--the jacket and the boots are tough armor against the world, so I gave them the only black outlines and left the characters with softer colored outlines.

I think if this was a longer-term piece I'd take that language even further and give the characters some soft shading, make the brushstrokes on the jacket and background harsher, maybe add more of a warm and cool contrast with the colors.

The boots took two full tries. ...

ART: Jacket

A little bonus to the Zelda series. I'm not done drawing the two of them together, but this felt like a nice interlude after doing three comics.

BEHIND THE SCENES: You Must Be This Drunk To Ride

So, FUN FACT, this is actually the first picture I sketched out, before the prior two drawings. Then I thought, hmm, I'd rather give it some lead-up, so the sketch sat around for quite a while before I made my way back to it.

I came back to it incredibly rusty, after taking a break from drawing, losing a bunch of my fonts and other stuff in a computer switch, having to replace a broken tablet pen, etc. It was a bit of a struggle to get it wrapped up, but it's done! I think it's pretty c...

ART: You Must Be This Drunk To Ride

At long last, a sequel to "Wingman" and "Q&A". Things are about to get sloppy and embarrassing.

ART: Old Stuff, Part 6

More old artwork!

First one is Alexis and S1m's character Luke, whomst he should draw more ;)

The rabbit & van drawing was a commissioned illustration for a fanfic that's since been deleted, but it was really fun to build up a large outdoor scene with a vehicle, something I don't usually get a chance to do.

Number 4's a piece I took down from main platforms for reasons I won't go int, but I figured it was worth posting here for posterity. I think it's a good piece!

BEHIND THE SCENES: Interloper

This one had a heck of a journey--I started it on one PC, had to switch to a new one, reinstall all my art stuff, fix tablet drivers, do a BIOS update to stop the NEW computer hard crashing all the time, etc. etc.

Finally updated from Photoshop CS6 to CC and I hate CC! Still might switch back, but I'm hoping I can just stick it out and get used to it. Or learn Clip Studio Paint. I dunno.

Anyway, glad to be back in the saddle!

ART: Interloper

Tired: trying to fuck your date without waking up your roommate

Wired: trying to fuck your roommate without waking up your date

(don't worry, she's used to it)

BLOG: Preview Sketches + Pausing Billing for July

Hey all! It's been a crazy month--I had COVID, then switched to a new PC and had to get all my art stuff set up on it--so I haven't finished up the two new pieces I'm intending to release this month. But they're still coming! Including a couple of sketch previews to tide y'all over in the meantime.

Also, this coming July is looking to be pretty busy for me and I don't want to bill you all for a dead month, so I'm pausing billing for now. I may still put out some drawings then, in which ...

BEHIND THE SCENES: Nick Redlines

Here's another old thing that might be of interest--6Vulpes I think wanted me to take a look at their Nick Wilde drawing and make some suggestions, and kindly let me post the results. This is ages ago, when I was really trying to reverse-engineer the shapes of Zootopia heads.

ART: Old Stuff, Part 5

Here's a new batch of old pieces in higher res.

The top one here, with Zander (Zhanbow's horse OC) is another one I'm proud of for art reasons--I'd initially done it was a black and white sketch during a 24-hour art stream. I posted it, decided I wasn't really happy with it, and went back and painted over it in full color. And I liked it way better! Which is rare for me as I'm pretty self-critical.

Unfortunately a few people felt like Moses's vibe in this one was sleazy or predato...

ART: Old Stuff, Part 4

Getting back to collecting my old high-res images! In my earlier days I was a little more careless about resolution, so some of these weren't drawn very high to begin with.

The Nick piece is still one of my favorites I've ever done, and one of my early explorations into being a little less process-oriented in my pictures. I think an easy trap to fall into as an artist is to develop an assembly-line way of working and never work outside of that specific process. So I started screwing wit...

BEHIND THE SCENES: Q&A

I have a two-panel comic sequel to "Wingman" sketched out, and this was meant to be a quick little piece to bridge the gap between them, but as usual I couldn't stop detailing the bed and floor so it wound up being a more elaborate picture.

I really do love designing outfits and living spaces for characters, seeing how many details of characterization I can cram into the way they live.

Q&A

At long last, the sequel to "Wingman." Things are still pretty tame, but there's at least one more followup image coming, so don't worry ;)

Zelda here belongs to Fuel and doesn't have a whole ton of established lore except that she likes beer, punk music, and games. Eagle-eyed patrons will notice I've further developed her by giving her asthma and some other interests.

BEHIND THE SCENES: Scar

I'm actually not SUPER happy with this picture--I liked the idea, but the pose looks more to me like an awkward portrait than the characters casually standing (which was more what I had in mind). I also forgot my own rule for pictures which is that "characters standing" is rarely a compelling subject, lol

With that being said, I tried to make up for it in the coloring process and push myself to make Moses look super spooky to at least give it some interesting vibes.

Scar

There were some lore ideas behind this one--in this world (which is kind of in a superposition of Zootopia fanon and its own thing at this point) this kind of bite is super illegal and would put the perpetrator in jail even if the victim isn't interested in pressing charges.

In this case it was a consensual thing that left a mark and now they have to lie unconvincingly about it.

It's like a friendship bracelet but with violence

BEHIND THE SCENES: Poolside

So, the genesis of this drawing was that I had an idea for a Diane + Wolf drawing, but I decided I wanted to do something simpler and easier to get used to drawing in the Bad Guys' style before I went for an elaborate piece.

Then I somehow turned the "simple" drawing into one of the hardest things I've ever tried. New art style, lots of props, tons of rendering, lighting experiments, whatever. I'm pretty happy with it regardless.

I've seen people unhappy that Diane's gotten so muc...

ART: Poolside

Of course she brought her work on vacation.

I saw Dreamworks' The Bad Guys a couple of weeks ago, and it was a great time. The Dreamworks sense of humor doesn't generally land with me, but everything else--the animation, the art direction, the characters' chemistry with each other--was pretty killer. I've probably got some more Bad Guys drawings in me (if you saw my last behind the scenes post you'll probably not be surprised).

In any case, Diane!

BEHIND THE SCENES: Bad Guys 3D

I'm still kicking! Thought I'd share some of the stuff that's in the hopper right now.

One, some 3D sketches--I'm wanting to try to get my eventual Bad Guys artwork as on-model as I can so I spent a bunch of time collecting reference and making some rough Wolf & Diane mannequins, plus trying to figure out as much of her house as I can.

Plus, some sketches!

BEHIND THE SCENES: Book Club

I'd had this pose in mind for a while--came to find it works best with a smaller character in front, so bnuyy it is!

This was a pretty straightforward one to do--after the Pajama Challenge pic I needed something a little more chill to work on.

ART: Book Club

Moses is really into literature.

Featuring EngineTrap's character Elote!

BEHIND THE SCENES: Pajama Challenge

Okay, this one took me ages to get done, both because I've had a lot going on for the past few weekends and also the format--the double picture thing leads to me tabbing back and forth a ton and trying to make sure they're not diverging in detail/color/etc too much. My process is usually pretty chaotic and messy so I have to be a lot more careful.

Still, I thought this was a funny idea worth trying out. Hope yall like!

ART: Pajama Challenge

She's really late to this meme.

f. a friend's character, Melody! She likes long walks in the park and longer sits on the park bench.

ART: Old Stuff, Part 3

More high-res versions of old stuff! A couple special things in here--a birthday pic for a friend that I forgot to ever post publicly, and a WIP version of the ahegao shirt.

Also, full disclosure on this one--the beach volleyball pic is the web version. I went to grab the original and it seems to just be gone from my folder (apart from a SUPER rough sketch). No idea what happened to it. But since the public web version is already quite high res, I figured I'd include it in here with tha...

ART: Yoga v2

Sorry for the double post here--I'd been looking back at this Loona piece and not feeling happy with it, so I went back and made some drawing revisions.

Enjoy the new version!

BEHIND THE SCENES: Wingman

New cartoon! I'm usually most proud of my comicky pieces with a bit of dialogue, so I'm trying to get back to those.

I'm a huge fan of Fuel's characters, especially Zelda who's kind of...scruffy. Originally the last panel was going to have no dialogue but I figured "Zelda isn't conventionally pretty" wasn't a very good punchline, so Taylor's being extra supportive instead.

I have some ideas for followup pictures (including one WIP) so I'm looking forward to getting those done!

ART: Wingman

Coyotes are very shy animals.

Featuring Fuel's OCs Taylor (who you might remember from a certain volleyball picture) and Zelda! I'm working on a sequel or two to this pic, so stay tuned ;)

ART: Old Stuff, Part 2

More high-res old pics! Please note that on a couple of these, the colors are slightly different from the original releases. In the past I often would mess with the colors after I'd sized down the images for the web. I've tried to re-do the post effects to match the original colors but they're not quite the same.

Regardless, enjoy! I'll keep digging for more of these.

BEHIND THE SCENES: Yoga

This was a fun one! As you can see I was very inspired by a photo on this one. Baggy shirts are always a look.

I messed around with the color a bunch on this one, but I really ended up liking her white fur blending with the image borders. She's so pretty.