I Couldn’t Think Of A Better Way To Communicate This So Its This . My Struggle

So um. Finally got to 200… listened to it on the way home last night… I have many thoughts but

… this is what happened right JSJJFJFJS

so i quite love Scar's Create Mod skin like a lot

skin by the talented @/ink-ghoul !! :D

okay tma bumper stickers

My hands... Cheats... Things...

How I draw hands?

Idk?

Hope this makes sense. I generally don't see myself as being very... Good at hands, BUT I'm gonna most some drawings with my thoughts on how I draw them.

Of course, since character art is my passion, I've been forced to draw hands for over a decade. SO most of my 'skill' with hands is just muscle memory, combined with reference, combined with practice practice practice. Which nobody wants to hear because it sucks. SO LET'S SEE IF I CAN HELP ANYONE CHEAT THEIR WAY TO BETTER HANDS!!! (Also I'm so sorry for the photo quality I hope you guys can see these clearly enough)

So the basic thing about hands for me is that the palm is one shape, the fingers are another and the thumb is there too. I showed the palm in red and you can see how the thumb adds to the shape of the hand, as does the side of the hand in the second drawing.

As you can see from the sad looking hand, the anatomy looks wonky if the thumb is too high. If you clearly make the distinction of 'Here's the palm. Here's where the fingers are and here's the thumb, who is separate, but important.' it'll look way more natural, even if you're not confident. Most of my skill is just the fact that I don't make the thumb ruin everything. Wonky fingers can be ignored, but if the thumb looks like a parasite rather than an appendage, everybody notices.

As I mentioned, fingers that are kind of just stumps of flesh can be ignored in some cases, but if your thumb ain't natural... It'll look weird. When the thumb is flexed (which is how I draw it 99% of the time) it has a distinct curve to it and isn't just straight.

BUT BE CAREFUL! When perfecting the foxy curves on that gorgeous thumb of yours, you may get too into it and make it about fifteen sizes too big. Compare it to the rest of the hand and adjust appropriately.

SPEAKING OF PROPORTIONS! Please... Measure the hands against the body. One thing I see a lot in 'bad hands' is that the artist works so hard on making the fingers look good and detailed... And they end up making the hands ridiculously small or way too large. If that's your style, that's cool, but... Sometime's it's obviously not a style choice. It's just oversight. Always make sure you know how big your hands need to be.

These are just some more sketches of mine, but I want to bring to attention something in the bottom hand, the forshortened one... The two middle fingers are almost fused together. This is an epic hack and will make your hand poses super natural looking. Just like it looks weird to draw each individual hair, if you draw each finger as its own unit, you're gonna get a wacky hand. Especially when posing and thumbnailing, grouping certain fingers together into one mass is a GREAT hack for clear, readable action which, in the end, is the goal of character art.

Tbh, the less detail and anatomy you can get away with, the better. If you can make something that is an anatomical disaster look expressive and pleasing to the human eye, then the best advice I can give you is to lean into that and embrace it. Art is abstraction at the end of the day and hands are not the hill anyone wants to die on.

When drawing the palm, remember to leave room for Jesus. You know how he was pierced in the middle of his hands? Make sure that part actually exists in your drawing. A lot of people sort of forget to draw the palm and make it very small or nonexistant. Just a gateway to the fingers. Your palms deserve better rep than that. Sure, the fingers are more popular, but the palm is like that one stable friend who owns the Netflix account. You think your ring finger is financially responsible? Hah. (What am I saying at this point? Have I cracked???)

And some tips for the road:

Look at references (sorry I needed to say this again)

Try copying hands from photos

Try copying hands from drawings (yeah, you're gonna learn a few awesome shortcuts from observing some non-irl hands)

Study your own hands. How do the shapes work? Draw that.

Forshortening sucks and will always suck, don't fear it. Fake it till you make it.

If you can hide the thumb or a finger behind the rest of the hand and it doesn't look like it's been chopped off... Do it. Take shortcuts if they won't damage the expression and readability.

Continuing that last one: If you can get away with not detailing hands, do it

A scribbled, low detail hand that carries a drawing's pose and purpose is a million times better than a hand that was shoved in a pocket because you don't know how to do that pose. If you're gonna destroy your awesome pose because the hand scares you, then why draw it anyway? You've already butchered the expression and composition. What's the point? All the hacks you could have used and you pick the 'spit on my own hard work' method?

Don't sacrifice composition, expression or clarity because you're afraid of a pose is all I'm saying

Try to remember your style and how many fingers your characters are supposed to have. This seems obvious, but I forget way too often.

Hands holding things... Suck. It'll be painful to draw. Look at reference, sketch it out, use your hacks... And pray.

But don't make an object smaller or oddly shaped because it's being held. If the hand looks wonky, that's fine, but if the IMMORTAL DRAGON SWORD wobbles at the handle IT IS OVER!

On that note: learn the proper hand positions for holding things like weapons and tools. Or at least make it semi-believable. That's a bit of a make-or-break thing right there.

Don't draw the hand without figuring out where the rest of the arm is going. Believe it or not, those two things are connected and if drawn without regard for one another, they look weird.

On that same note: Wrists are a thing that exist. Remember to draw them. I forget a lot, even in some of my examples here and it looks awkward. Especially in bent-wrist poses.

If anyone wants to add their own tips or sketches, PLEASE DO! I have no idea what I'm talking about! Most of this isn't from a real 'education', it's just stuff I picked up! So anyone else is perfectly qualified to give their two cents and I will thank them!

Not me forgetting I have a tumblr. Anyway here are some squishmallows I made a couple months back. Also I’m working on an Etsy and hoping to have it up Monday and these will be there if interested. Also I have an Instagram now that I’m more active on plus will post progress of stuff I’m working on more frequently.

i’m a comedian

never let ur friends misinterpret something u say about jonathan sims

archivist be upon ye

Slay the Princess Concept Art

We shared a bunch of concept art on Twitter today. Sharing it here, too, where you can find it all in one post. Post contains spoilers, so proceed with caution (or just play the game already if you haven't 😉)

Going to start with the first piece of concept art Abby drew for the game.

In the earliest stages of development, we toyed around with the concept of there being multiple "end game" forms of the Princess.

The initial outline, rather than being tied together by an overarching metanarrative, structured a full playthrough as a 5-6 chapter long, self-contained journey down a single route, determined by your decisions in chapter 1. Here's an alternative late-game form:

The idea of deviating end-game forms didn't lost for very long, though. As we explored the game's themes more deeply, it made the most sense for there to be a singular "true" form.

If your reality is shaped by subjectivity and perception, then the "truth" has to be what's left when that subjectivity is swept away. the Shifting Mound's final design feels like that initial truth for the Princess, though there's also another truth if you push back against her and press on into the final cabin.

We really liked this "void" design, and I played around with the idea of it being an intermediary to the final form. The "void" Princess would be what you saw upon encountering the final Princess without understanding your own truth, but once you had that understanding, you would see her as the Shifting Mound, as depicted in the game.

That gave way to the intermediary design of the SM being a sea of disembodied limbs, and we also took parts of both designs and incorporated them into the protagonist (particularly the wings.) You can see the eyes and feathers for this void form in the ending card of the original trailer below:

You can see extremely early concept art for the spectre (top), nightmare (top-right), stranger (left), beast (bottom) and ??? (right) as well!

The eyes became a motif in the Nightmare route (Paranoid's manifestation of the fear of being watched), but I also like to think of them as a part of The Long Quiet's truth. You are space and emptiness, but you're also that which observes those things, and it's your perceptions that give the Shifting Mound shape.

Anyways, on the note of the original original concepts for the game, the Princess was initially going to remain human for several loops before taking on more monstrous forms. Some concepts of that are below. Had to get Abby to tone down some of the more horrifically cartoonish designs because they creeped me out and I didn't want to romance them in a video game.

We had to hold our cards close to our chest in the non-metanarrative early drafts, which is part of why, even in the first demo, the cabin doesn't really change much in chapter 2. More room to subtly play with the concept of transformation over time.

There were a lot of reasons we moved in a different direction for the full release. The branching was unmanageably large to write, and the game felt like a slog to write.

Using an overarching narrative as a framing mechanism in the final version gave us a lot more freedom to explore wildly divergent ideas within routes while still driving the player towards the originally planned finale.

Anyways, now we've got some concept art for individual princesses. There's a lot more than this lying around somewhere, but it's all in sketchbooks, and we'll probably wait until we make an art book to show it off.

First is the tower, who really didn't change much at all. (She got a little thicker, I guess. All of the Princesses did)

Not a lot to say about her, other than the fact that we knew we wanted a set piece where she gets so big that the trees and cabin orbit around her.

The stranger went through many many redesigns over the course of development. Here, she was a "princess skin" filled with a hive of sentient bugs. The script wasn't working for me, though, so instead she became a peak behind the curtains without the necessary context to know her.

A lot of people ask how these earlier drafts of the Stranger route would have played out, and the answer is I can't tell you, because I couldn't figure out something worth writing.

The writing process for individual routes didn't really start with outlines or plot beats. Rather, the routes started from a theme and a relationship dynamic, and I organically found their outcomes by exploring actions within those themes, and then seeing if those passed Abby's editor brain.

Neither of us found actions we wanted to explore with those versions of the Stranger, at least actions that weren't a beat-by-beat retelling of chapter 1, which contained way too much variation to put on a single chapter 2 route.

If each princess examines a relationship formed by perception and first impressions, the Stranger examines one that's fundamentally unknowable. One where you've seen too much, too quickly.

An insect hive-mind pretending to be a person seemed like a good starting point, but it was too difficult to write any interactions that didn't immediately feel knowable, if still strange. So the final version of the Stranger was designed in such a way where her unknowability makes interacting with her on a human level fundamentally impossible, and you don't get to have a real conversation with her unless you satisfy extremely specific criteria.

Anyways next up is the razor's final form. We decided she needed more swords.

Hearts became an accidental motif very quickly in the development process, too. (The fact that it is only strikes to the heart that fell her in the demo was accidental, but it felt poetic so we extended it to the rest of the game.)

So on top of adding more swords, we made her heart visible. This is something we did with the fury as well, as a way of showing their emotional (and physical) vulnerability.

Here's an early version of the Adversary and what would eventually become the Eye of the Needle, back when she was still called the Fury. Originally her hair was going to be fire (as seen on the right), but it didn't feel right in its execution.

She's hit the gym since this concept art. Good for her :)

And we're going to end with the Beast, who at this point was called the Adversary. I think this was before the Witch was added? The Beast was originally designed to be a Questing Beast who lurked in the shadows, where you'd only see glimpses of her, and where each glimpse would make her appear to be a different animal. This was too difficult to execute, though we gave her a more chimera-like appearance in the final game.

This design was from when we still has the Voice of the Obsessed, and the route was going to be a more feral mirror of what eventually became the Adversary, but it felt too thematically similar while being less interesting, so we moved in the direction of making the Beast about consumption as a form of love.

Anyways, that's all we've got for you right now. Hope this was fun!