GALLERY

This was one of my first times playing around with CMYK color palettes and Tone Curve in FireAlpaca. The original drawing was made on my phone in a Samsung notes app...I unfortunately don't remember which version, but it's slightly different than the notes app that I have now.

I absolutely love how the textures came out here; it looks fuzzy as if it's made of felt. The roses on her skin also flicker in and out, which calls to mind the way Anthy's secrets lie in between the lines of most of the story until things start to escalate in the third round of duels. Anthy's glasses are opaque and her head is obscured by geometric patterns. In combination with the glitching, I hope it gives off a sort of haunting feeling.

Honestly I didn't enjoy the new Wataru miniseries all that much. The animation wasn't anything special, nor was the narrative. Nonetheless, it was a fun thing to hype for and nice to see the series regain relevance. Especially because I had only finished Wataru 2 not too long ago. The entire series is very dear to me.

With this piece, I hoped to convey a sense of dreaminess. The whimsy of waking up in a grand palace from another world, at your bedside your soulmate best friend and his mother the queen, both heavenly, royal beings. The somewhat golden sheen produced emphasizes the decoration of the palace, while the pixel art reduces it to something more simple and nostalgic.

If I were to assign it a song, it'd be 'Wisdom of The World' (Queen Mary's Palace) from Mother.

I made this soon after I finished Mother 3 for the first time. I absolutely bawled at the words 'You must be so exhausted' during the final fight.

I played the game during quarantine of spring of 2020. My sleep schedule was fucked and I was holing up in my room pretty hard. The less time I spend around my family, the more anxious I tend to get around them--particularly about doing 'proactive' things. I get afraid of them complimenting me, specifically in a way that would make me feel condescended upon, even if it's unintentional...think like, parenting techniques suited for a preteen being used on a late teen. Whether or not that's actually happening, or would happen, it's how I was instinctually interpreting things.

I really wanted to go out an move my body more and exercise (this desire compounded by the fact that I was on a swim team and was expected to stay in shape--I was skipping the zoom drylands), but I couldn't muster the courage to bear with the aforementioned discomfort. At one point in the middle of the night, while playing Mother 3, I thought about how tenacious Lucas was and what he would do if he were in my situation. I was able to find a sort of compromise. For at least a week, I would sneak out before dawn downstairs to my apartment complex's yard of sorts. (It used to look a lot nicer, years ago, but that's a story for another time.) Using bootleg airpods to listen to Mother 3 music, I'd do 1000 jumpropes "straight". As in, I'd trip the rope and mess up my streaks a lot. Usually the sun would start to rise by the time I finished, and I'd get to enjoy the peace of dawn. I love that time of the day. The uniqueness of the situation and the ambience from the Mother 3 music created a really special memory for me.

Lucas's yellow contrasts well with the purplish-blue background. His expression brings to mind the tragedy of the Mother 3 narrative. The wavering chromatic abberation has sensation of something fractured. Somewhat held in between his upturned hands are hearts. Can't quite remember which order of techniques I used to do it, but they look almost seared into his person.

Love, the core of the story and the force with which Lucas ends the world; hopefully for the better.

The original drawing was made most likely around 2018, on the app Paper (previously Paper53). I've always been a fan of the serenity of Killua's expression here. I tried to build on that by pixelizing it and running it through PHOTOMOSH (the online site I use for almost all my edits). Afterwards, I attempted to make it transparent...It didn't come out very cleanly, but I think that's part of the charm.

The colors here were not the colors of the original piece; they were edited at the same time as I pixelized it. The colors are honestly my favorite part. The soft greens and light grays, which match each other in tone so nicely, are complemented by the subtle dark reds of the lineart.

Bokura wa Mahou Shounen was a series introduced to me by the now-seemingly-defunct Hachimitsu Scans. They've scanlated a lot of things pertaining to crossdressing and gender. This series in particular caught my eye with its cute and much more cartoony artstyle. It's a style that tends to trigger alarms for shotacon for me though, so I was a bit cautious going in. It was a lot more enjoyable than I expected! There were some parts that I had to side-eye, but I nonetheless became really attached to the story. There's a scene in chapter 6 that means a lot to me.

Once again I'm using a combination of a blank expression, pixelization, and glitching to give rise to a specific kind of haunting feeling. I've tried to describe it in the previous entries, and I'm likely to again in the following ones, but it's hard to put this feeling in words. Is this me trying to express my gender dysphoria? Odagiri Kaito fell in love with his cuteness and bears it proudly, but his personality very clearly falls into the cliched "young boy hero". There is hardly any dissonance in the way he mixes the two gender. Very clearly "a boy in a girl's body costume", and isn't alienating about it the way lots of transgender stories can be.

I felt like it was important to use bright, saturated colors given the nature of both Kaito and the story.

These were a series of phone doodles I made briefly after finding, playing on loop, and effectively squeezing dry this song.

For fun, I tried divvying up my personality up among the 3 members of Jupiter. It's quite honestly just me talking to myself.

I've never seen any iteration of Idolm@ster; if it matters, I'm aware that their personalities are pretty different from the way they're presented here.

Sorry if my handwriting is hard to read.