10 Year Celebration/Did You Miss Me?

My past self would've never expected these five to stick around as long as they have. If you asked me back then, I would've expected a different group of characters to stick around while the quintet would've been less prevalent. Time is a funny thing, as the ones I thought would stick slowly slipped away and their story was abandoned while the quintet stuck around and has grown considerably.

I love how Mythos's presence is felt even when the characters aren't facing her. The text about her being forgotten was directed more towards myself than the audience, as I've wanted to draw her in the last five years but I've had mixed feelings about her design and none of the ideas I had made the cut. When new characters I designed gained traction, she slipped into the background as the others received more art dedicated to them. I even felt guilty writing her lore because I knew how dirty I did her. This won't happen again, she's as essential to the narrative as the quintet and she should be treated as such.

If you follow me on BlueSky, you’ll know that I’ve posted art in January and February that had significance to my digital footprint, but weren’t worthy of an entry on my gallery. My website has also undergone some improvements around late January/early February, as I’m in the midst of a rebrand. In between my BlueSky only pieces and the final two page images for my website, I wanted the SPACE Quintet all in one place after finishing their character sheets. The last time they were all in one place was at the end of 2020, and they’ve changed a lot since then.

Before I discuss the process behind the piece, here’s some Arrowarchive lore: My first drawings of the quintet were from 2015, back when I was in middle school. To put that into perspective, I’ve graduated middle school, high school, and completed my bachelor’s degree during their lifetime. Many characters of mine have come and gone, some retooled, redesigned, and repurposed while others gather dust in the shelf of creative languishment, but the quintet’s staying power endured many trials and followed me through alongside multiple real-life milestones. This goes to show how special they are to me, since I aspire to animate them and share their stories with the world. I wanted to make something to celebrate the impact they’ve had on my life for the past decade, but in the process, I forgot someone very important, the reason why they know each other in the first place…

…The main antagonist, the goddess of fear incarnate, Mythos. She’s been around as long as they have, if slightly less, but mentions of her are rare and drawings of her are even rarer. She only has one entry dedicated to her and that was from July of 2020! Knowing this, I wanted not only to do the quintet justice, but atone for the injustice of Mythos’s scarcity and absence for almost five years.

If you know me, you’ll know that I love dualities and duality motifs, so you probably saw this from a mile away. Unlike my other duality pieces, however, this wasn’t always the plan; Mythos’s teaser and the quintet’s celebration were originally sketched as separate pieces, but videos of a game called Gartic Phone changed my tone. Most videos I watched had skilled artists and animators treating it as less of a game and more of a program that was capable of supporting impressive art and animation in spite of its limitations. I watched not only the highlight reels, but the stream archives to study their work ethic and efficiency. During this study, one observation I made was their use of onion skin. It’s an animation technique incorporated into the game, but the artists used onion skin to have a constant point of reference (ex. their heads) while changing poses, expressions, backgrounds, etc. to give each piece its own identity in a short stretch of time.

This study was very eye-opening for me and was what convinced me to combine my ideas. I wanted to see if I could keep character poses the same while using expressions, shading, and body language to effectively convey whiplash and tone differences. The experiment was successful and I’m very proud of how it turned out, but this piece wasn’t without its issues and I feel as if I experienced more technical difficulties than usual working on this piece.

It took three attempts to get the shading right for the second image, Clip Studio Paint crashed at least three times on my iPad, and I almost couldn’t save the finished file because a texture effect got corrupted after creating one of the two images and the asset had to be removed in order to finish the first image. My iPad is aging so issues are to be expected, but I hope this doesn’t set a precedent for upcoming pieces on my iPad prior to upgrading my setup in a few months. Thankfully, not much was lost whenever these issues came up and I was able to quickly pick up where I left off.

As a whole, my biggest point of pride with this piece is how full of life everyone has become since the last time I’ve drawn them together. They look more like close friends or a found family in the present and their personalities are shining through. Mythos also feels more threatening and omnipotent than she did five years ago, which makes me all the more excited to redesign her, hype her up, and go to town on worldbuilding. It’s one step closer towards making my dreams a reality.

With this piece done, I haven’t figured out what my next project will be. I want to start something fun and something I won’t have to post right away before jumping headfirst into Mythos’s redesign and another teaser for her or the final page images for my website, but I also don’t want to get too far ahead of myself and risk losing a ton of progress once my new art setup is ready. I want to minimize losses before that day approaches…

…And to anyone wondering what that graphic is in the bottom right, this is the first time I’ve included it in a SPACE-themed piece and it won’t be the last. I’ll explain its purpose someday, just not today.

April 11th, 2025