Sometimes I draw things! Mostly videogame fanart. Everything I've collected here is vector art. The older works were made using Adobe Illustrator. The newer ones were made using Affinity Designer. This isn't going to be in strictly chronological order, but I do tend to be more proud of the more recent stuff, so it's probably nearer the top than the bottom. All the images link to higher resolution copies of them. Just so you don't think I'm better at art than I actually am, most of these use some amount of tracing, either over mannequins or over game models.
I had to lead with one of my most played games ever. For those who don't know her, this is Madeline. She's not a mountain climber, but when the stress of life and struggles with her mental health get too much for her, she takes some time to go climb Celeste mountain. Climbing a mountain might be a good metaphor for struggling with mental health. If the mountain in question is magical, it won't be only a metaphor for long.
I really should make some more art out of this game at some point.
This is Arlo and Nora from the game My Time at Portia. It's kinda a 3D Stardew Valley set in a charming post-apocalypse, but instead of farming, you mostly build gadgets and undertake various construction projects to improve the town, like building bridges and an elevator, and a lighthouse, and another bridge, and another elevator, and then some cool wind turbines, and then another bridge and elevator, look, the game devs really like bridges and elevators. Anyway, then the game turns into a jrpg when you slowly uncover someone's dasterdly plot to take over the city and the whole world. Normal farming sim type stuff. I wrote that as a bit and then remembered JoJo Mart. So yeah, pretty typical farming sim stuff.
Arlo's a cool character. He's easy to like. He runs around and leads a small team of guards who protect the city from the aggressive mutant animals that roam the landscape. Many details of what happened in the world's past have been forgotten, but there was definitely a lot of radioactive fallout involved and the surviving humans lived underground for about two centuries before being able to go back to the surface. The panbats are pretty cute though.
Nora has some of the coolest character developement in the game. One of the running conflicts throughout the game is between the research center and the church. The scientists at the research center are trying to repair or recreate "old world" machines to make everyone's life better. The Church of Light is fearful that recreating old world machines will eventually lead to recreating the conditions for the "Day of Calamity" that ended the old world. Nora joined the church out of frustration that her family made their living manufacturing weapons. Her upbringing gave her more personal reasons to hate technology than most churchmembers have, but also gave her an understanding of old world technology that occasionally puts her in a position to be able to help the player if she can set her own biases aside.
This is Mi-an from the second installment in the My Time game series. The city's name is very creative. Someone looked around and decided to name the place after the only two things they could see. Life is hard out here in the desert and there are armed bandits. The Church of Light in these parts is more pragmatic and happily supports repairing any old world technology that can make food or water in the desert. That and enough weapons to keep the bandits at a distance.
Mi-an is another builder who moves to Sandrock around the same time as the player character. She is very cheerful and obeys the laws except when they prevent her and the player from investigating Sandrock's troubled past. She reads books and tends to her plants during any remaining free time.
There's an unfinished wide view of this scene, but in the end I cropped it because I felt it was becoming too busy and didn't want to finish the detail work on the wall and floor.
Mi-an attends to her plants before bed. The pajamas I'm showing here do not exist in the game, but seems like the kind of thing she'd like.
I put so much effort into the bed in the background. I didn't even cut corners on the part of the bed that's obscured behind Mi-an. I couldn't because I wasn't sure at that point exactly where it would be in the final composit. And then I put a blur filter over it. Sometimes making art is about obsessing over small details. Sometimes it's about throwing those details away. If it doesn't sometimes hurt, I'm not arting hard enough.
The fox is not named in the game, but is called the Ruin Seeker in the game’s manual. I loved this game, but it’s a big game with some very varied game elements, especially if you want to get to the true ending. Much of the exploration feels very Zelda-esque, but with some combat elements that seem more inspired by Dark Souls or Hollow Knight. It’s not as brutal as Dark Souls, but be prepared to retry bosses a lot or spend a long time scouring the map for every upgrade. The journey to the true ending is very rewarding, but the puzzles get less like Zelda and more like The Witness. That was great for me since I enjoy both, but TUNIC could easily try the patience of a gamer with a more narrow type they enjoy.
This is the Scavenger. This was a sketch I drew for the speedrunning community. The item the Ruin Seeker is holding is basically the hookshot from Zelda games. It’s possible to pull the Scavenger out of her arena and drop her into the void below, completely skipping the fight. But if you’re slightly off with your positioning, she can get pulled all the way across the gap and land on the path outside the arena. At that point, the run is dead. Try again. Be more careful next time.
I spent a lot of time playing the
Spyro as a character doesn’t have a backstory or any real character development (at least in the trilogy). What he does have is personality. He’s helpful, although sometimes with an undertone of exhasperation. He’s playful, especially when there are opportunities for mischief. He’s impatient, both with the other characters in the game and with the player if he’s left idle for too long.
The art and animation style on Spyro shifted in a subtle way in the remake. In the
My one concern with the art style in
The fairies around Spyro's world are tiny friends who help you out. But in a speedrun, sometimes they want to slow you down to explain how to play the game so we have to find creative ways of avoiding talking to them. Zoe also creates checkpoints in the later games. Sometimes the route requires taking extra time to go around Zoe so the player can death-warp to an earlier checkpoint in the level after clearing an area.
These were my first experiments with transperancy effects in vector art. It took a lot of layered effects to make it work like I wanted.
This is Devlin. He bakes cakes, but only in
Devlin got turned into crystal at the start of the first game of the trilogy. When Spyro frees him, he has a cake he baked for Spyro in thanks! That's nice! Er, he would have had to have had baked that cake…before getting turned into crystal. Don't think too much about that.
This was originally unshaded, but I went back years later and decided to try and add some shaded the quick and easy way, with an emboss effect. Don't look too closely or the effect breaks down. It's greatly lacking compared to the shading I was painstakingly putting into my other art by that point, but I couldn't ask for much more than that for just adding an effect and tweaking a few dials.
So, is Devlin in league with Gnasty Gnorc? He must have known he was about to get turned into crystal or why would he have baked the cake? Why didn't he warn any of the other dragons? Sorry, I said I wouldn't think too much about it.
I never played the Crash Bandicoot games as much as the Spyro games when I was a kid, but I've had friends who played it a lot more. There was a lot of cross-promotion between the series, despite being made by different studios and the speedrunning communities for the two games have a nearly 100% overlap in membership.
Coco is the kind of nerd who was carrying around a laptop before mobile devices were common, can fix any machine, and definitely would have read Wikipedia for fun if it had existed back then (or possibly helped create it). I'm certain her laptop is running Linux.
Hat Kid exudes some of the same sassy, chaotic energy that made Spyro a fun character. Throughout the game, Hat Kid unintentionally makes several friends while only trying to fix her spaceship so she can get home. As someone who is very introverted, I found the whole vibe very relatable. Hat Kid just needs some alone time and is willing to set healthy boundaries to get it.
Odyssey wasn't the first game I speedran, but it was the first time I participated in the community and made friends through speedrunning. It's mostly a very good speed game, although Nintendo was really pushing motion controls at the time and many actions in the game go faster if you shake the controller. That creates a health and safety problem for speedrunners since going fast inevitably involves shaking the controller for almost the entire duration of the run. That was eventually a major contributing factor in me moving on from the game.
By this point in videogame history (2017), Nintendo had figured out that people really like playing dressup in their videogames, so Mario has many outfits that can be aquired in various ways. I was planning on drawing several of them, but the classic look was the only one I finished
Mario isn't the only character who gets a wide range of outfits. I also set out to draw as many of Peach's outfits as I could manage.
These are some of my earliest attempts at digital drawing. I didn't have any tutorial or anything I was following. I was just experimenting with the software trying to see what I could do and what looked good. I wasn't trying to figure out shading yet. Shading is a wonderful tool, but I do also like the flat style and occasionally still used it long after learning to do shading.