Chillin' Vibes
I remember drawing the front page image for my website back in 2021. Back then, my website was in its infancy, so Twitter was my go-to for posting art, viewing art, and chatting with other artists. Unfortunately, the platform has become a shell of itself in recent years, devolving into a hellscape of toxicity that's damaging the foundations artists like myself are built upon. I left Twitter without a trace about ten months ago, and since then, the smaller art platforms and communities I've joined made me feel so welcome that I'm never going back. If my previous front page image was an afterthought, celebrating a milestone for a platform I no longer associate myself with, then this piece celebrates my graduation into a healthier mindset, not only as an artist, but as a person, reflecting my growth over the past three years while serving as a love letter for the characters I care about. Finishing this piece was liberating because it felt like a step in the right direction for me; rather than serving as a reminder of the past, it serves as a proclamation of my renewed faith in human artistry and a promise to keep improving my art in the future.
If you thought my first paragraph was sappy, then I don't blame you. Reflecting on the history behind my website's front page images and everything I've been through in the past three to four years made me emotional, so I needed time to process everything and word it properly without blowing everything out of proportion. I want to start diving into the technicalities of this piece, the furniture in particular; I have a very poor track record with furniture because I was never satisfied with how it turned out after I finishing the piece. From perspective to design to texturing to shading and detail, something about the furniture I drew always felt off to me, no matter how many furniture and room studies I did. I wasn't inspired to give furniture another shot until mid-April, where I watched the newest episode of a video podcast series called The Hunicast. The series goes on hiatus frequently in recent years, but the amount of guests per episode is inversely proportional to the amount of episodes released per year, so much so that the original format for the series struggled to list every guest onscreen. April's episode, titled "Huni Bust Up," introduced a new PNGTubing setup for the podcast, where the three hosts of the show had their characters sitting on a couch together in a room decorated with items tied to the series' most memorable jokes and iconic moments, with their guests being represented in a window beside the couch through their profile pictures. The design of the new layout gave the juxtaposition of being invited to a friend's house, giving off a relaxed aura despite the chaotic nature of the podcast. The layout introduced in the episode was my muse as I was working on the piece, and I'd recommend the series to anyone who is interested in animation, writing, voice acting, and to any curious minds about behind-the-scenes in media production. With that said, the series is rated 18+, so viewer discretion is advised.
Designing the background was an interesting process. From the beginning, I knew I'd be including a bookshelf and a doorway in the piece, I just had to figure out where to put them, and, regarding the bookshelf, what to put in it. My first option for the bookcase was the obvious one: books! Whenever I've drawn the main four, I stage the scene so the complementary colored characters aren't right next to each other, but I made an exception here, as the colors of the books are arranged by the order everyone debuted in: Aqua (2015), Nimbus (2019), then Lylatt and Cithera (2021). I was chuckling as I wrote the titles for the books, as they're so corny but I'm so proud of them. Their titles are "Designing the Web," "Proportional Proportions," "Perspective on Perspectives," and "To Shade or not to Shade." They're art and programming books I added to represent myself, with the other item themed after me in this piece being the pair of headphones. I owned a black and blue and black headset before I had to replace it, but it's a theme for me to listen to music or podcasts whenever I'm drawing because it helps me think and I hate drawing in silence, and to prove my point, I'm listening to music while writing this. I guess that sums me up pretty well.
Everything in the piece aside from the headphones and the books is themes around the main four; Aqua has her Ocean Rising poster on the wall and a microphone on the bookshelf, Lylatt has a heavily-obscured poster for an organization in her universe called the TCLG and partially obscured space shuttle referencing her, and Cithera has a Price Laboratories poster and a bottle of persimmon juice representing her, so where does that leave Nimbus? Nimbus has a crystal spire on the bookshelf representing her, but rather than having a poster representing her, the blue ribbon is what's representing her instead. The reason for this is because I submitted this piece to an art show around late 2021/early 2022, and it won best in show for digital art! I've submitted other pieces of mine to art shows since then, but none of them have reached the top three. It was only fitting for me to celebrate Nimbus's achievement rather than design a poster for her, especially since her world is the least human-like of the four.
Before I discuss the characters, I want to mention some other details that may go unnoticed; If you watch the "Huni Bust Up" video linked above, you'll notice that both wallpapers are teal and both couches incorporate pink into their color palettes. Believe it or not, that was a coincidence; I didn't color the walls and couch until after I colored the cast, and I tried using blues, purples, pinks, oranges, yellows, and more, but all of them clashed in one way or another with a character's color palette. After assessing my options, green and teal clashed with the characters the least, and I chose teal because it would mesh better with the palettes of the surrounding furniture. Once I chose teal wallpaper, I decided to go for somewhat of a pastel palette with the couch and carpet, keeping the carpet a yellowish hue whilst deciding on a color for the couch. After some testing, pink received the best feedback from my peers, although they'd recommend it being a few shades darker, hence its current color. Lylatt and Nimbus have some pink on them, but it doesn't conflict with their palettes at all. I considered using red and green for the couch, but the former blended with the background too well while the latter took emphasis away from the characters. Safe to say, the pink sofa was here to stay. I didn't want to go for beige, brown, and whites because I found them to be too plain for the characters they were meant to emphasize. With characters like mine, it's better to compliment their palettes than it is to subdue them.
Finally, onto the characters themselves. This piece is special because it is one of my first digital pieces where I used a shape-based model for drawing the characters rather than a line-based model. Initially, I used a line-based model so I had a better understanding of everyone's proprotions, but doing so meant frequently rescaling the canvas for the piece, redrawing the limbs several times, and risking the character looking stiff when they were finished. The shape-based model made me feel more "loose" when drawing the characters, giving me more freedom when drawing their bodies, allowing me to play around with posture, and not caring as much about the proportions being "perfect." It was almost liberating sketching everyone this way, since it meant I was more efficient drawing them. For a piece like this, efficiency was important because of everything I wanted to accomplish, and even then, that took a while because I wanted to make the characters as uniquely expressive as I could.
Prior to this, I made loose character sheets for the personalities of the main four; Nimbus is the least familiar with human-like cultures, so she comes off as the most innocent and naive. Aqua is the most openly social of the four, even if she struggles reading social cues. Lylatt's not the most emotionally stable, but she's pretty lax unless her buttons are pushed. Meanwhile, Cithera is easily the snarkiest member of the group and shows the most attitude. I knew I was going to draw Cithera with a soda can, but I didn't know what; I considered giving her Baja Blast, but I wasn't fond of how the can's design clashed with her palette. Ultimately, I decided to wing it by referencing energy drinks from Monster and Rockstar in tandem with Baja Blast to create a soda can that meshed with her palette pretty well. Additionally, when I mentioned how Nimbus is perceived as naive, I'm not joking; that's not a stuffed animal she's squeezing, it's a character in her universe named Prismoth she brought with her and holding tightly, unknowingly squishing it as she cuddles it. Prismoth will be fine, of course, but they may stay clear of her grip for a while, as her strength is not one to be underestimated.
This is easily one of the longest gallery entries I've ever written, guess that goes to show how much effort went into the piece. This image really makes me feel like I'm drawing for myself now and that this is a celebration of what I'm capable of. There will be plenty of new drawings ahead, especially once my schedule is all figured out. Expect one of the drawings from later this year to be related to Prismoth, as that idea is currently in the books. Otherwise, my next piece of art will be a tossup. I hope my commentary was insightful, and if you got this far, thank you so much for reading, but also kudos to you for being patient enough for allowing me to run my yapper for so long. My next entries won't be this long, I guarantee it!