Another commission done for Pinkkittyrose by means if IgniteDreams, this time with the idea of a rough and though battle soldier so it could be used in DOOM-like game thumbnails on youtube.
Took 11 hours of production, thank you for your patronage!
So, long story short: I do recorded gameplay sessions with friends over at @askroahmmythril's youtube channel, and one of our friends felt bad that their discord icon showed on-camera at one point as it was taken from official art.
So I obligued and gave them an entire new drawing.
This is QP from QP Shooting, but we know her more from 100% Orange Juice, hence the entire thing being a reference to that.
I only really needed to do a rough pencil sketch, but I went the extra mile, so I hope it looks cute to ya'll.
So throwing this question in here since I asked the same thing to my friends a few days ago.
Outside of Metroid Prime, do we have 3D Metroidvanias?
Because the only thing that comes to mind is Banjo-Tooie as the closest comparation.
Curses. I just finished the Splatoon comic and my brain already worked up what I would like to do as the next comic.
Worse of it is that to do the joke the way I want to, I need to write text in japanese, preferably without having to rely on google translate.
A comission done for @heinousactszx. I was asked to draw new agent 3 (and smallfry) on the style of Paper Mario The Thousand Year Door.
Total Time: 2 hours, 45 Minutes.
This one was fun to make, I do love playing around with the Paper Mario style so I'll take the opportunities I can to do this.
And luckily, I had already figured out how an Inkling would look in such a style thanks to the Paper Mario poster I had done a long while back, so it was just a matter of doing the same for New Agent 3.
Thank you for your support!
Apologies for the delay, I got busy with something else yesterday.
Page 5 out of 6, you can read the rest here.
This is technically the last page of the story, with Page 6 being a bonus. And generally this was the punch-line I wanted to lead to from the start.
When I conceptualized this whole idea of peach being incredibly good at splatoon, I wondered what exactly would be the payoff of such an idea, what would be the end goal?
There's many ways I could have gone with the concept. Such as the mario characters partaking in turf wars themselves, peach dominating the squids (which could have been mean) or even just justifying why she's so good at turf wars (I do have an idea there, but it also lumps into another concept I would like to do something with later).
But ultimately, the idea that won out was the one depicted on the comic: Peach teaching an Inkling, and the punchline always being that if she taught one, then the rest would swarm her asking for lessons on all kinds of weapons (I didn't' show said weapons to just save on panel space, but its implied by how many they are as not all of them would suck with the charger specifically).
I do generally like the idea of the older members of the Smash cast looking out for the younger ones that aren't necessarely from their universes (I do have the headcanon that Samus is a hardcore Kirby fan and I've shown that in a few comic pages every now and then, there's also the minor inside joke my friends and I have that Ridley apparently keeps Pichu as a pet), so continuing on from that point I figured that someone caring, warm and loving like peach would contrast rather well with the scrappy, energetic and gremlin-energy-filled young Inklings. I may do more with the pair later as a result.
Anyway, thoughts on the page and the fun jokes I hid on the panels:
- I intentionally mixed and matched the UIs and elements from all 3 Splatoon games to make the whole situation ambiguous in WHEN the hell the comic takes place compared to Splatoon as a whole, since Inkling girl is supposed to be Agent 3 right from Splatoon 1, but only using elements from 1 would have been hard.
Off the first two panels alone you have the Splatoon 3 victory screen set with the map of Urchin Underpass (which only showed up in 1), followed up with the results of Splatoon 2 and showing the weapons from Splatoon 3 in it. It's basically a big mix-up of the different games and I'm aware of how none of it really matches together, but that's the fun of it, yes?
- Speaking of Urchin Underpass, I drew it to be as close to the map as I could while seen from a topside perspective. I probably could have made the full thing look like the perspective seen in the map results (its actually slightly slanted rather than full on topside) but that would have been too much effort for what would be covered up by effects and Judd/Lil'Judd.
- I actually tried looking and mathing out how Splatoon figures out the stats and tried to at least make them seem somewhat sensible, but I couldn't really find an explanation of how the math... well, maths out.
In fact, I only until later noticed that Urchin Underpass has a limited number of points stated on one of the wikis, but I didn't notice until after the results panel was already finished, my bad on that one.
- As a fun fact, I kinda wanted to make the "when the hell does this take place" even more ambiguous by not even using the map from Splatoon 1. The original plan was to use the one from Mario Kart 8, which ultimately I couldn't do since the map is significantly smaller.
I also wanted to tell a mini story with the map itself, as there's details put into it that reflect my experiences with splatoon itself:
- Obviously Orange won by a landslide (lampshaded with "Protag Side" and "Red(?) Shirts" instead of the usual "Good Guys" / "Bad Guys" labelling on the results), but less obvious is that the mode being played is not actually Anarchy Battle, its Turf Wars.
Essentially, I kinda undermined the whole bit of the training montage by putting the scenario in the more chaotic Turf War where things can swing more wildly at the last second. Our gal is still dominating for sure, but its not a "suddenly you're god at ranked matches", its gonna take a long road to get there.
- Part of the lessons taught? Notice that orange side remembered to ink the base while blue didn't.
- Blue at least tried to fight back and its not all a complete domination since that would have been boring. I also made a note to show the last-second special usage by throwing an ink strike marking on the map.
- There's that one blue inkling that just decided to throw their hands up in the air and just rushed the enemy base alone to see what they could do.
- Blue's weapons actually match up with these two factoids as one is using an N-Zap (I believe a weapon that actually had the Inkstrike back in 1) and a Brush (which allows for rushing the enemy base to annoy the enemy).
- Originally in the result screen I thought of writting the player names that were dismissive of the other squid kids playing at the turf war ("Some Nerd" is the leftover of that idea) but I thought that would have been mean, so I instead just went with what would have sounded like names I could realistically see on Splatoon itself... and my friends hated me for pointing out that "WoomyInBio" is probably already circulating somewhere on the servers already.
- In case you're curious, the japanese player's name is literally just the japanese word for "Squid". As a friend put it...
- If you're puzzled at "Panasonic Blu-Ray", don't worry, that one was a random one I came up with since its just a meme I annoy my friends with. Helps that its on the blue team.
- To be clear, on the third panel the inkling is supposed to be gleeing about how good of a teacher Peach is, I was admittedly worried people could get the wrong idea if I did this with hearts as the effect (as I realized it could come off as shipping), so I instead used the star glow to downplay that.
- The city in the background is actually taken from NEO The World Ends With You (really good game, I recommend it a lot) as both as a bright space filler and a sneaky shout-out to another series I love a lot (you can generally tell its TWEWY's shibuya if the building has a 104 instead of a 109 sign on top).
- Peach's kitchen is not just a filler location, I based it off Paper Mario 64's kitchen, the one where she baked a cake for Gourmet Guy.
- Its a bit of a small thing but the Yoshi Loops box is actually a Mexican box and the tell is that on the upper right corner of the cereal you can see a black and white mark. Those are hexagons sticker that the mexican gov has regulated into food products that warn of things like excess sugar or calories on a product.
- Peach's thoughts of Mario and Bowser are drawn in the style of TerminalMontage and Hotel Mario respectively, very obvious one but I figured I may as well state it.
- I eventually realized that I could make a bit of comedy on the squid/octopus crowd by adding Callie in the mix as part of the sudden influx of eager students. Doubly cute since Callie is a Roller main and often times its Marie (an actual Charger main) who has to protect her, so Callie wants to pick up lessons on how to use a Charger as well.
- Among the crowd you can see a distressed Waluigi, but its not the only thing I hid in there, its very hard to make out but you can also find a Tako in the middle of the crowd.
So that's it for the major pages. For the next post I'll show overall fun things of the process as well as the sketch version of the final page.
Page 4 of 6, the rest can be seen here.
Honestly this is the part where I just get to have fun with the training montage and the reason of why I love Smash Bros like I do.
The gameplay IS fun even if I don't actually play online matches all that much (I'm not all that competitive, I play mostly solo or with friends exclusively), but to me Smash Bros is a toy box.
I love these universes and Smash Bros has introduced me to many more over the years, to me its an introduction to various things I could learn and play with, and even more fun to me its concocting how these series gel together and how you could use their elements as playthings to craft a story or a cohesive universe.
I explored this before with another massive comic I made, honestly kind of one this is a sequel to. Its "The Strongest Fighter".
To me, I am not interested at all in "who would beat who", I prefer to think of "Okay, if these two were to meet, how WOULD it go down?" or "If so was in this situation, what would they do?", the joke of the Strongest Fighter comic is not to actually decide who is the strongest in terms of made-up power levels, but rather an exploration of how these characters view and talk about one of their own in a context disguised as a poorly thought-out question.
A lot of people tend to miss this, sadly, even if Shulk points out "Anyone can beat up Kirby" rather blatantly at the end.
So, going back to Page 4, its also similarly an exploration of the question "how do you go on about getting strong in this context?".
With splatoon, there's not much other than "pick up the weapon and sink or swim, we ain't an helicopter parent, you figure it out". But when you introduce the idea of a MENTOR (specially one out of universe like Peach is) how would you go on about teaching something so abstract as getting good aim?
Its not so much that Orange needs training in weaponry at all, I did make it a point to show that she was Super Fresh with everything BUT the Chargers back on Page 1, but that her aiming skills with the Charger are so off that:
- Speedy targets won't stay still (Joker just dodging out of the way)
- Her shots are blantantly obvious (Samus just leaning her head to the side)
- She's not using shooting at a range, so her aim is so off that she misses even in Super Flat World.
So the training montage is tackling these issues.
- Study up and learn how the weapon actually works, as I said her first mistake was skipping up Sheldon's explanation, so the first thing Peach does is explain the basics of the weapon to Orange (if you notice, the billboard does show things like leading the shot as exemplified with the Rabbid, using bombs to flush out your enemies and the importance of things like Ink Saver). Basic stuff, but you do hit the books to learn your tool.
- Learn in a safe envoirement that is somewhat predictable, and it is slow going (notice the timer of the Break the Targets), get used to shooting long-distance first and foremost, no matter how long it takes.
- Then you introduce the erraticness (AKA: the ducks) and practice off that, Orange hit exactly half and Peach mentions as much. The dog may laugh, but its a start.
- And finally, put it to the test. I specifically chose Sonic to be the target to be hit because he'd be the most erratic, fastest and would NOT allow himself to be hit that easily. Landing a headshot on Sonic has to be the hardest thing you could do.
I did mostly pick scenarios that would be funny, but I did want it to be a ramping up in getting good. Not just jumping from point A to point B and just skipping to "welp, you're a god at sniping now".
Anyway, the hidden jokes and references of this page:
- I used to be a teacher (programming, if you're curious), so the panel of Inkling Girl going to school is reminiscent of my experiences as a teacher and a student. hence why Inkling Girl's set-up on the school resambles what I know rather than the desks you find on Garreg Mach. Such as taking special attention to draw the ever present ruler, using a square notebook for math, the pencil sharpener and erasers being the ones we use down here on México and the bag being a knock-off rather than an official product. Its just sort of the norm you see around here.
- You may notice the random calendar on the Garreg Mach page on the top left. On the coloring process I decided to add to the joke of Inkling Girl going to school by imitating a Persona UI.
Originally the joke was to have it be styled after P5's, but the UI used wound up being Persona 3's instead. Not only is it topical thanks to Reload, but the reason I did it is that curiously -just as I was working on this panel- I hit this date on reload ( 8/10 ) and it just so happened that THIS is when you downright lose an entire week worth of days because Mitsuru decided to sign you up for summer classes without consulting you. Fitting for Inkling Girl sacrificing her own free time to learn and study.
- Small thing, but if you actually read Orange's notebooks you may notice she's dividing by zero.
- Just to show how much Inkling girl sucks at aiming, the break the targets timer is there to show how badly she's doing. Normally during Break the Targets you either get timed to your best time counting UP if you're doing it on the dedicated mode or counting DOWN from 2 minutes if you do it from Classic Mode. The timer instead reads 28:05.15, meaning that Peach had her do it at her own pace and its been nearly half an hour of just missing shots (since she's only been able to hit 1 target so far).
- Also, the timer number may be random, but its actually Splatoon 1's release date. I love to hide significant numbers like that on my works. I forgot to mention it but Peach's player ID back on page 3 was also a release date.
- And to add on to the cute factor, the platform they're standing on in Break the Targets is actually taken directly from Peach's stage. So she's lending her own target test for the practice.
- Fun fact: on the Duck Hunt panel you can see the UI discussing how many ducks have been hit by Inkling Girl. Not easily apparent though is the blue bar below the ducks.
THAT is the minimum requirement. In the original Duck Hunt the UI for the duck tally would shift over to the left and be compared to that blue bar, if you didn't shoot enough ducks to go beyond where the bar was pointing at the game would end.
Essentially, Peach is asking for a bare minimum of 4 ducks to be hit, which Inkling Girl technically did as she managed 5, but she's still frustrated due to the dog's mockery.
- Irregardless of how the montage was gonna go on the planning phase, I always wanted to have Sonic be the last test for Inkling's improvement because -once more- I like to think more in-character when writting down these scenarios.
Sonic is the fastest thing alive, he's capable of dodging whatever bullet or explosive eggman tends to throw at him (capable, not reliable, it depends on player input if he does so or not). So he'd be perfect for target practice, specially for something like Sniping.
Sonic's pride would NOT agree with being shot in the face, admittedly, but he could be talked into it if asked as both a challenge and a request. Peach wouldn't put anyone in danger and it is really just ink, so if its for the sake of helping others, Peach could reliably ask Sonic to do it and he'd at least take solace in helping someone else. Though he'd likely taunt and make it as hard as possible due to his ego.
To show that it was amicable and that Sonic agreed to it I had the two bits of Peach handling a tower and Sonic giving a thumbs up, to show that he was in on the plan.
- I could have drawn Green Hill Zone again (in fact, the planning phase did had it AS Green Hill), but I instead opted to go with Seaside Hill as the background (kind of a mistake on my part since Ocean Palace is OBTUSE on its architecture), mostly because I wanted some scenery variety with Sonic, its not always gonna be on Green Hill Zone, you know.
- The Loading screen that Inkling is having on her head while she realizes she passed the final test is from Sonic 06, which I shouldn't have to tell you that its infamous for its loading.
I originally wanted it to be Splatoon's loading icons, but those would have required animation since they're not visually understandable otherwise. So I just went with the Sonic theme and made it match.
- The UI used for the last two panels are the stage clear screens for Splatoon 2 and Splatoon 1 respectively. Also, I didn't just copy-paste the assets from Splatoon 3 into the comic, every time you see the weapon icons like that its one of my recreation of those assets.
Page 3 of 6. You can read the rest here.
- This was the emotional page of the whole thing since its the lowest point of despair the Inkling girl hits, I put a whole lot of effort in making her as sad as I could while also making Peach the most welcoming that I could muster.
- The usage of colors was very important for this page, methinks. For one: I can and have drawn things with both colored outlines and even without outlines and all (I mostly do the later for backgrounds, since I find that having the black outlines help the characters stand out in front of them no matter how much detail I put into the background), but for the whole comic I deliberatedly chose to make the outlining process to be entirely black. This is because I wanted the panels featuring peach's warm smile feature the colored outlines to make her even warmer than usual.
- The trick of coloring also extended to the backgrounds. If you notice at her lowest point the backgrounds are dark and they become more and more lighter the closer it is to revealing Peach into the story, at which point it uses bright and warm coloring. The usage of blues did help set a feeling of relief at the tail end too.
- I didn't initially plan on having the zapfish inside of the light bulb, it was just a thing that came to me when I was coloring the panel.
- The implication of the cellphone is that Orange saw her profile through the SplatNet app on NSO, as a nod to how this whole comic was inspired to begin with. I did faithfully recreate the app as much as I could (its not editted, its redrawn) but there's slight differences: for one you wouldn't be able to see her rank (it shows as a badge on the name plate, so it would be too small) and I didn't bother adding the weapon stats or the game mode shown on anarchy battles to leave it ambiguous (normally you'd see the type of battle, such as splat zones or clam blitz).
- One thing I wanted to do with the comic was to challenge myself to see if I could tell the tale with as little text as possible (I limited myself to UI jokes), so I hope that Orange yelling "101" does get across that she wants lessons on the charger. That was the hardest thing to convey.
- If you're curious about the arrows around Peach when she gets glomped on the 101 panel, that's the marker the inklings leave to the point they're super jumping to.
- I honestly love drawing in the Paper Mario style, even though I normally don't get much a chance to. So calling peach a saint through the depiction of the Overthere was fun to do.
Also, she's got Parakoopa wings on.
See, the hilarious bit is that the numbers of the NSO video tell a story on their own as me and my friends found out, its not just randomly generated garbage just to fill the page.
Peach is an utter BEAST considering her rank and K/D, which is oddly in line with her and firearms given the Rabbids games had her carry the biggest boom weapon until Bowser came along.
Mario is competitively decent, but not enough to compete with Peach, much like his status everywhere else, he's very much just avarage.
Toad got bullied A LOT, and apparently given his low paint count he went mostly trying to get into fights he could not win.
Luigi spent most of the match painting rather than fighting (explaining his unusually high special ratio), its very likely that his one kill was accidental.
Bowser Jr. is just full-on aggro and the most effective fighter, as you'd expect from him given isle delfino and all, though he couldn't lay a finger on Peach, most of his kills would be on Toad.
Boo expectedly picked a weapon that is on the tricky side since it seems he's dodging left and right a lot, and much like Jr. he's bullying Toad.
Bowser is carrying a heavy weapon and not getting many kills in spite of his rank, curiously, he picked a weapon with an Ink Armor, so his priority is on protecting his side rather than being aggro.
Notably though, he's got the most deaths, and... well, its very likely that he got picked off by Peach CONSTANTLY, either because he was throwing or specifically going for her. It kinda also plays into the interaction between chargers and splatlings since the charger can just pick you off regardless of how fast you fire since splatlings are slow lumbering mostly-sitting-ducks targets.
And goomba is just here trying to help, I have absolutely no idea of how he's even playing without hands, but at least he's trying his best.
Continuing onward, page 2 of 6, the rest of which you can see here.
Honestly this page was a lot of fun, I love recreating areas in gaming a lot, so this was a lot of fun with the whole playing around with multiple universes in smash to give the idea that the Inkling girl just can't hit a shot.
Of note:
- I like to think that Inkling Girl's first mistake was skipping Sheldon's explanation. Like, I get it, but his bios do give you a hint of how the thing is supposed to work. Just because you're familiar with a thing it doesn't mean you should skip the manual.
- I could have straight up taken a picture of Mementos, but I instead re-drew the whole bit (if anything I just reused a re-draw of the main mementos map which I have done in a previous drawing project). I honestly do not skip steps, if I can recreate a thing for the shot, I'll go out of my way to do it. It makes things look more seamless and in-line with the drawings as a whole if I do everything from scratch, though I'm not above re-using previous drawing assets if I can get away with it (since the mementos map never really changes, I can just reuse that isolated re-draw I have).
If you want it for whatever reason, here it is.
- Oh, by the by, I kinda based Joker's render off his appearence in Tactica since that had been recently released by the time I was doing the drawing. I do like the tactica renders so I may base the persona characters off that to simplify them a bit style-wise.
- I know WarioWare being used for Samus is a bit of an odd choice, but I figured I could just do a simpler area rather than going with either Norfair (all that lava would get in the way of the ORANGE paint), Brinstar (same, but Yellow) or Frigate Orpheon (I didn't really need the parasite queen in the background). Adding Pikachu in was a later idea just to highlight how much she's missing the shot.
- Dedede and a Pikmin laying down was funny enough already, but here's a bit of hilarity I thought about (and I know that explaining the joke ruins it, but you know, this is supposed to be a commentary): this is flat zone, it's entirely 2D, the inkling girl somehow missed the shot even when you only needed to aim left or right.
- I like Minecraft a lot, but when DRAWING the universe its a bit dull if everything is just cubes. So while I totally can do that I just choose to make a stylized version that is semi-cubey for most everything. Though Alex I prefer to go full proportions.
- Alex being more human proportioned does bring some challenges since I do want her to look like a country bumpkin of sorts, so this comic helped me finalize how I would do it. Honestly its kind of based on how artist Peargor does it. Though I'm gonna go with a longer braid and some freckles.
- I do largely prefer Alex over Steve though, so you'll likely see her whenever I involve minecraft on my drawings. If I were to draw steve though? I'd likely make him buff. I tend to think of Alex as the builder/farmer (which is my playstyle) whereas Steve is the adventurer (how my friends play the game).
- I didn't actually borrow any textures from Minecraft, they were self made. Which is kind of why they're kind of shit.
- Honestly drawing the regular Charger was a bit of a thing. The Splatoon weaponry can be very complex in its detailing so for the first few panels it was kind of traced. Over time I just did it on my own for later panels.
Tracing isn't a bad practice, just as long as you don't pass an entirely traced work as your own. Trace responsibly kids, it helps learn how to do a thing.
To help with a bit of visibility and getting attention to it, I'll be posting the sketch and development process of the previously posted comic throught the day. I hope that's not an inconvenience.
Page 1 (out of 6) was probably the hardest one to get started on, since its the one that has to set-up the table for the entire comic idea. That and it was a bit daunting since I needed to draw weaponry.
While the comic is very leaning towards Splatoon more than anything else, I also wanted it to be an opportunity to play around with Splatoon as an universe interacting with the universes involved in Smash Bros (which gets played with on Page 2 and Page 4 the most), hence why the set-up being that Inkling Girl (or Orange, if you prefer) is showcasing her skill in a smash match rather than a turf war or anarchy battle.
After all, the Inkling moveset in Smash itself does play around with most of the major weapon archetypes of Splatoon, but it excludes the Charger-type, meaning I had the opportunity to explore that she sucks with the weapon (as most players in Splatoon tend to do), paired with the idea that Peach is confirmed to be an absolute monster with the Chargers it led to the student-teacher interaction later on in the pages.
Personally, I'm... OK with chargers, at least. But I will be lying if I said I'm any modicum of great at it, since I tend to favor the Brush (which is why my version of Inkling Girl tends to be shown using the Brush most of all, helps that its easy to draw).
A comic about Squids, Princesses and the concept of Getting Good.
A silly little comic to showcase my abilities and help promote my commissions and stuff.
In case you're wondering, this entire concept steems from a throwaway joke in an NSO overview video by nintendo, which confirmed Peach to be Rank X with a Charger and a RIDICULOUS K/D ratio.
With skills like those, she should be teaching that to the youngin's.
...I've had this entire concept cooking since the release of a video. I have plenty of ideas backlogged, even from years ago.
Please share around this post, this was a lot of hard work! :D
A commission made for ChaosBuster12 on twitter, featuring two original characters and Lord Brevon from Freedom Planet on the piece.
Total Time of 12 Hours.
Thanks for the patronage!
A Friend of mine has been having a bad situation lately, to not elaborate on what is going on.
So I decided to make him a gift involving two of his favorite things: The Amazing Digital Circus and Zootopia
Hope things get better for him.
C0mm done for roygenbas on twitter. No. 2 of this series made.
Thumbnail art done for PinkKittyRose on Twitch/Youtube.
Total Time of 5 hours. Thank you for your patronage!
commission piece for roygenbas/Ignitedreams on Twitter, made in behalf for PinkKittyRose. Thumbnail art for youtube videos/streams, one of multiple we'll be making for Pink.
Thank you for your patronage!
So, what if Smash Run, but a Vampire Survivors/Holocure?
Honestly this was just an idea made for the sake of drawing as much cool stuff as I could. It is in no way meant to be, like. Balanced or anything.
Have fun identifying as much as you can on this mess :D
I also work commissions, by the way, you can read about that here but I'm open to be contacted just about everywhere.