2D (OC) Mira's Art Practice Log

[MetaMira]

I do not know, but many people use it... I'd link you to a thread, but you do not have the Game Developer badge to view it, you should create a ticket and request one.

Well look at that, now I have a fancy badge! Thanks for reminding me about getting that sorted out; I had seen people with them but didn't know if you had to apply or if the badge-fairy just bestowed it upon you at some point.

 

[Winterfire]

Well look at that, now I have a fancy badge! Thanks for reminding me about getting that sorted out; I had seen people with them but didn't know if you had to apply or if the badge-fairy just bestowed it upon you at some point.

Even more useful is the access to the developer forum, so you can now read various interesting topics, such as the advantages of having an itch.io. There are many other useful tips too.

 

[MetaMira]

For today's entry I have the finished version of my mini comic "Vibe Check"! This started off as some practice art for the Firebrand, and I found out it's a lot of fun to add some dialogue and a rough narrative. If people like this sort of thing I'll be doing more of it in the future!

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I ended up drawing a cumshot version, which I've uploaded to Patreon as a thank you to everyone supporting me there. If you want to see our cute Firebrand choked out and knocked up

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!

 

[MetaMira]

I've started work on v0.5 of A Very Full House, with the planned headline feature being full quality art for the remaining male NPC, The Jock. Just like my other character designs I've started by doing a rough draft drawing:

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I'm happy with how this has turned out, so next up I'll be doing the full quality lineart/flats/shading, then dragging it all into Live2D to rig it up. The Jock's letterman jacket (an American sports ball thing) means I need to commit to a cannonical school name - I'll need to figure out something suitably porn-y without being ridiculous.

In other news, I've been working on a practice project to experiment with some Live2D animation techniques which I'm hoping to show off in a couple of days. If you're a fan of Yark the goblin (or goblin shortstacks in general) you'll want to see what I'm cooking up!

 

[MetaMira]

I've got some exciting practice art to show off today! In anticipation of future sex art for A Very Full House I wanted to get some more practice with animation in Live2D. Everyone's favourite goblin cleric, Yark, was pressed into service (in more ways than one) for this short animation!

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One of the major technical things I wanted to figure out was how I could add emphasis text - "gag", "plap", "twitch", that sort of thing - on top of an existing model. The technique I used works well enough for non-interactive animations, but I don't think it would work for A Very Full House. I'll need to do some more experimentation before I commit to adding anything like that to my existing animations.

In other A Very Full House news I've finished drawing all of the art for the Jock! Next up I need to bring it all into Live2D, rig him up, and export him into Ren'py. Expect a finished view of that to be my next practice log!

Oh, and if you enjoyed the animation make sure to leave a like or retweet or upvote or whatever so I know it's worth the extra time/effort to make and share!

EDIT: Oh neat, I can embed .mp4's directly! Well that saves me some fiddling!

 

[MetaMira]

I'm all finished drawing, rigging, and importing the Jock into Ren'py! Here's a preview of his art, which you'll be able to see in game in v0.5.

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Next up I'll be doing a bunch of writing! My patrons voted for some events focused on the girls, so that's what I'll be adding in. I've also been cooking up a new feature that I'm keeping a secret until release. As a little teaser: it's highly modable and related to something you see a lot of in game!

 

[MetaMira]

No art update tonight; I'm doing a whole bunch of writing and trying to get ready for the release of v0.5 of A Very Full House. Hope to have that out in a few days!

 

[MetaMira]

No art OR A Very Full House update today; I have a little more writing to do and then I want to do a bunch of bug hunting to make sure this is a nice stable release. We're solidly on track for a release in 2 days though, so expect that to happen!

(Also, I've been doing some concept sketching for a second part of the "vibe check" comic series. It's got some fun poses in it which were a lot of fun to draw. Expect to see something about that in the near-ish future)

 

[MetaMira]

Woo, v0.5 of A Very Full House is out! Normally I'd do a full writeup here, but bug hunting has kept me up later than intended and I really want to get some sleep. So instead I'll just point you over to the

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, which has the changelog and the download links and all that jazz!

Ideally my next bit post will be some more practice art! It may also be about bug fixing. It'll probably be about bug fixing.

 

[MetaMira]

I'm sort of double dipping on my practice art post today, but for good reason! I took some time and put down the MCILF workout art I previewed a few posts ago. I'm planning to have this be part 1 of a 2 part mini-comic that's a direct follow up to "Vibe Check".

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I also drew the lineart for part 2, but I can't show it off because it's split up into a bunch of layers which don't look right until they're coloured. "Why did you have to split it up into layers?" I hear you ask? Because I'm going to animate it, of course! I'm putting time into these animated practice projects in preparation for adding more animated content to A Very Full House - and because they're just fun to make!

So expect to see more about that in the next couple of posts! I'm also going to be putting up a patron poll soon to see which girl, the Cheerleader or the Firebrand, get's their full quality art added to A Very Full House next!

 

[MetaMira]

It's been a productive couple of days, but my attention has ended up split over a whole bunch of different projects. So each of those is now solidly in-progress, instead of having one finished thing to show off. One important thing that I've been working on is the concept sketch for "The Cheerleader" - the next NPC to be receiving high quality art in A Very Full House

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I wasn't sure if I wanted "small" boobs (ie. boobs that she could actually put her arms in front of), or large boobs, so I put it to a

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. To my surprise small boobs have won (sitting at 80% of the vote, at the moment), and I've moved on to final lineart! I'm hoping to have that finished in the next couple of days!

As a tiny bonus: I'm working on some placeholder at for a side character in v0.6. I'll give you a sneak peek, but only at the top layer of clothing!

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Have fun theorizing what her deal might be!

 

[MetaMira]

And in just a few short days we've gone from concept sketch to finished art! Here's a peek at The Cheerleader!

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My original concept sketch had her in normal socks, but I realized that some thigh high socks would A) look great paired with her "just underwear" look, B) add a reference point as her skirt gets shorter, and C) swap perfectly for some fishnets or stockings much later in her corruption journey.

Next up is to pull this into Live2D and rig it up! That normally takes about a day, and then I'm going to spend some extra time doing some new animations for her. I want her to have an energetic, bouncy idle animation, which is probably going to require some experimentation and extra time to get looking juuust right. If I nail it she should have a dynamic, "hyper" energy that the other characters don't have.

 

[MetaMira]

Right on time I'm back with an animated Cheerleader!

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I've got a bunch of minor tasks to tidy up now: some clothing code updates, some expression definitions, laying out the image atlas. Once those are done I'll see about adding some other new content to the game. I've got a secondary character I definitely want to introduce, and I'll be putting up a patron poll to help me pick out something else to add; check out

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to see what that ends up being!

 

[Knight6797]

Just out of own interest, I love your artworks and am trying to be a digital artist myself. Which program do you use for doing digital art?

 

[MetaMira]

Just out of own interest, I love your artworks and am trying to be a digital artist myself. Which program do you use for doing digital art?

I'm using

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, which is an open source version of Photoshop. I'm primarily using it because I believe in supporting open source projects; Photoshop is a more polished and functional program for 99% of people. In theory there's also the difference in cost, but Photoshop is the most pirated piece of software for a good reason.

Hope that helps, feel free to ask any other questions you have!

 

[Knight6797]

I'm using

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, which is an open source version of Photoshop. I'm primarily using it because I believe in supporting open source projects; Photoshop is a more polished and functional program for 99% of people. In theory there's also the difference in cost, but Photoshop is the most pirated piece of software for a good reason.

Hope that helps, feel free to ask any other questions you have!

That is actually very nice, I thought about getting a drawing software so open source just directly fits for me (especially since I'm a beginner, I will probably not be using any advanced settings anyway). Other than that, just out of interest, how do you seek references and apply them to the artworks you draw regularly? I mainly use pinterest to get poses I want but it's hard to use my own artstyle if it makes sense, rather just drawing directly what I see. That's probably the most interesting thing for me since your artstyle is unique in alot of ways.

 

[MetaMira]

That is actually very nice, I thought about getting a drawing software so open source just directly fits for me (especially since I'm a beginner, I will probably not be using any advanced settings anyway). Other than that, just out of interest, how do you seek references and apply them to the artworks you draw regularly? I mainly use pinterest to get poses I want but it's hard to use my own artstyle if it makes sense, rather just drawing directly what I see. That's probably the most interesting thing for me since your artstyle is unique in alot of ways.

For basic proportions and posing I've been using

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, which has a nicely morphable mannequin to work with. Poses I don't really have any specific source of inspiration, although I do try and sketch down any fun ideas when they pop into my head so I can refine them later.

I'd say the biggest step to having your art feel "unique" is to get in the habit of constructing your characters from scratch, even if you're using a pose image as a reference. I'll use Design Doll to get my proportions roughly right and to figure out a few key landmarks (usually the collar bone, hips, and feet contact points), then hide that image and work entirely from primitives from there (there are plenty of great youtube videos on how to do that,

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).

Colouring and shading is it's own beast, and one that I'm still figuring out. For A Very Full House characters I've got a specific order of operations to it (lay down soft shadows, then soft highlights, then edge light all around and sharp highlights on rounded surfaces. Extra shiny objects might get a pure white highlight added as well.) to help me keep them all feeling stylistically the same. There are a whole bunch of different styles out there; I'd suggest looking at ones you like and trying to figure out what "recipe" they might be using to achieve it: do they use hard light/shadow transitions, or do they blur them? Do they keep their lineart visible? What sorts of colours are they using? Experiment with that a lot (and be prepared for a lot of it to look bad) and you'll start to figure out how to make things look like you want them to look!

Anyways, I might have given you more than you were looking for Good luck out there, make cool things!

 

[Knight6797]

For basic proportions and posing I've been using

You must be registered to see the links

, which has a nicely morphable mannequin to work with. Poses I don't really have any specific source of inspiration, although I do try and sketch down any fun ideas when they pop into my head so I can refine them later.

I'd say the biggest step to having your art feel "unique" is to get in the habit of constructing your characters from scratch, even if you're using a pose image as a reference. I'll use Design Doll to get my proportions roughly right and to figure out a few key landmarks (usually the collar bone, hips, and feet contact points), then hide that image and work entirely from primitives from there (there are plenty of great youtube videos on how to do that,

You must be registered to see the links

).

Colouring and shading is it's own beast, and one that I'm still figuring out. For A Very Full House characters I've got a specific order of operations to it (lay down soft shadows, then soft highlights, then edge light all around and sharp highlights on rounded surfaces. Extra shiny objects might get a pure white highlight added as well.) to help me keep them all feeling stylistically the same. There are a whole bunch of different styles out there; I'd suggest looking at ones you like and trying to figure out what "recipe" they might be using to achieve it: do they use hard light/shadow transitions, or do they blur them? Do they keep their lineart visible? What sorts of colours are they using? Experiment with that a lot (and be prepared for a lot of it to look bad) and you'll start to figure out how to make things look like you want them to look!

Anyways, I might have given you more than you were looking for Good luck out there, make cool things!

Thank you so much for the in-depth replies! I will try to wrap my head around these things, thank you for your guidance. I've lurked in ur posts since the beginning so the journey was really interesting to see, gives me some insight into the every day study/creation life of an artist. Keep making amazing stuff!

 

[MetaMira]

No art to share today; I did a bunch of writing and a lot of not-quite-finished-yet art, so next time I should have plenty to show off. I was also able to get the Cheerleader added in game and working (including in saved games, which took some extra effort!). Now I'm working on some final content additions for v0.6, which my patrons are

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. It looks like an extra outfit variation for the Cheerleader is going to be the winner, but I'm going to sprinkle in some extra events as well just because.

Back in a few days with some actual art! Also, I'm aiming for some time around the 14th to release v0.6, so stay tuned for that!

 

[MetaMira]

I've been busy with code the last few days, so instead of any sort of practice art you get a screenshot!

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Now visually this isn't the most interesting screenshot of all time, but there's still a lot of interesting stuff going on, so let's walk through it!

First, we have the first appearance of a new side character, codename: "Busty". I teased her outfit a few days ago, but now you've got a look at her slightly more polished placeholder art. I'm writing a couple of events for her that will show up in v0.6 as well, so look forward to that!

Second, there are more than two characters on the screen! This was where most of my coding work went: digging into the code, adding multi-character support, and then tidying it all up so it's easy to use. It all #JustWorks, so scenes with multiple NPCs should be a breeze in the future. While I was poking around in that part of the code I also fixed up some of the logic for how the "talk focus" effect is applied. It should be a little more consistent now, particularly at the start of an interaction.

And third - although this screenshot doesn't make it very obvious - all of this is running on a save I originally started in v0.2! I was worried keeping old saves running was going to be difficult, but so far it hasn't been an issue.

On the art front, I'm currently working on Cheerleader's cutdown outfit (as per patron request from a recent vote) and it's looking good! I'll have some previews of that to show off in a couple of days!