Askbox prompts and Gie bebe~

/ Ayana / 1 Comment

So today, I posted smth on Tumblr (reposted from Tumblr, lol):

Askbox Doodle Requests

It’s been such a long time since I’ve done this, but how about some doodle prompts/requests? ^_^

I need to derust and let loose like before, so if you have any scribble/doodle request, let me know through my inbox. ❤

I know I’ve seemed very…distant and stoic for the past two years and especially last year, I’ve had so much shit happened irl and been bogged down by them ever since so my mental health suffered heavily.

I sorta recovered this year although I still get some depressive episodes just not as bad as before.

I just write and rant here because I keep a lot of my problems to myself irl and this blog has been my outlet for that. Not super personal but a place where I can just talk about stuff without much filter, haha. I’ve been quite demotivated with sharing a lot of my feelings on tumblr and twitter. Through the years, I’ve gotten less…discursive, performative (?) there due to burnout and anxiety.

I still haven’t changed my avatar on tumblr. it’s still a chibi Ryou that …looks really yellow. I mean wtf I really had such bad skin colour palettes back then, haha. But I like it until now. I’ve gotten so used to seeing that when I post stuff there that it feels off if I change my avatar, haha.

I miss the intimacy back then though. I mean I was a bit of a prick before admittedly and I guess I mellowed out the more I grew up.

(and became so goddamn self conscious which was detrimental. )

Anyway back to the topic, I think this would also be a good idea to let loose, experiment and derust with them being doodles/non-paid work unlike with commissions where I am very serious with the colouring, the anatomy, etc After all, the askbox request stuff I used to do back in the day was for the experimenting and it was fun, lol.

And,

so I could post more and look active, haha.

I’m working on comics and sadly, they take a long time to finish so that could help with not making me look like I died or became apathetic to my followers cuz I’m not those. ^^

So…ask away, anonymous or not~ 🙂

…..

Also, here’s my bebe from Blood+, Gie. <3333

He just appeared in one to two episodes but I love him so much, haha.

Have you ever gotten attached to a minor character? haha.

I love this white haired blorbo~ I can’t find any settei of him, sadly so I just made my own version of a reference doodle for him.

Self harm

/ Ayana / Leave a comment

Yo~

I’m going to upload another commission here tomorrow (.:later since it’s like almost 2 am as I’m typing this lol).

I’m currently on the WordPress app in my new phone. I deleted the app from my old phone months ago because I needed storage space (my old phone only had 32 GB) but now, I have more storage with my new one so I downloaded it this week and holy crap, apparently I can only get wp notifications when I download a different app (jetpack) , ugh. Whateven is wp thinking?

Well, at least I can still write and publish blog posts here. Having the mobile wp app can make me blog more things clearly and easily so it’s very convenient. ^^

Anyway, I had a heavy bout of depression since yesterday. It was this feeling of being worthless and unappreciated by people irl , typical personal angst stuff, haha. It sucks being taken for granted and getting my problems dismissed since I was a kid that I was forced to keep everything, all my problems to myself…

…And rant some of them here because people don’t bother to listen, lol.

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Pinterest inspo

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I was feeling super uninspired today so I thought I could use Pinterest for getting me out of that, lol.

It’s been a long time since I touched the app. 6 months I think? It used to be one of those sources of getting my ass working on art, haha.

I seem to have forgotten about it…

Must be because of RL stress and other non art related interests..

and lo, and behold, so much inspiration juices came flowing, haha.

It inspires me but at the same time, it demotivates me when I see all those really gorgeous artworks that are recommended there and I’m like “why are you all so good?” /sobs///.

Seriously, my art looks like total shite when next to them, haha. //bows head in shame//

‘Such a contradictory feeling but I shall remain humble and use them as motivation to improve my art! (While I silently weep)

And draw more!

Just have to put a time limit on the app though. I easily get carried away and scroll endlessly so I’m going to put it on a 30 minute screen time limit each day, heh. Every weekday, perhaps?

For those days of classic art studies on my sketchbook, (preferably on a Saturday and Sunday), , maybe I’ll ignore the limits for that.

My art has been… very stagnant so far unfortunately so I will have to utilize some styles and reference I pinned there. I need to experiment and try different ones to get my juices flowing ^^;;

On art studies and procrastinating

/ Ayana / Leave a comment

Hello.

I had a lot of epiphanies last week.

One of them was having a different technique to “art studies.”

It dawned on me that my approach to art studies was…Not to say that it was wrong but it was ineffectual long term. I felt like my old method of doing it for the past few years, as much as it helped me in some anatomy bits, like muscles, It didn’t really improve my art as much as I’d hope to.

Now ofc I’ll still do figure studies and art warmups but the classic method of art studies I did every weekend generally didn’t prove effective and made me procrastinate more rather than produce more.

Yeah quality over quantity but the method I was fixated with for years begets more perfectionism which leads me to procrastinate because of this compulsion to having to master something before applying. An example would be having to perfect a head before I can actually make an illustration that has the head.

Aside from it encouraging more procrastination, it ends up becoming very tedious. It’s really tiring having to do the same muscular anatomy studies all over again.

So, I changed my approach to a “Study as You Go.” method which was recommended by my partner in crime. It’s doing art studies while working on a piece instead of doing art studies as a separate category of drawings and I find it more effective in terms of productivity and increasing skill.

A good example would be….

The hagie comic from the latest post (black and white one).

That was actually an idea from two months ago that I finished this Monday. (It was in the Unfinished folder, haha.)

When I opened it in its wip state from two months ago, I was cringing at how bad my anatomy was, haha.

I know it’s typical of the WIP and the finished product to be this different but this was just from two months ago and I can’t believe that the way I drew the necks were…off.

Not to say that the version from this week is perfect, I can definitely see mistakes there, haha but I learned a whole lot more while doing the “Study as you go” method rather than the classic method I’ve been using since. It didn’t feel tedious and I was actually drawing something and being productive.

It felt good.

The classic art study method is useful in some areas ofc (for practice) and I’m not going to stop doing it.It’s beneficial in a few situations but for now, I think I’ll stick to the new one. The old one led to just more perfectionism anxiety and procrastination. ^^;;

YO!

/ Ayana / Leave a comment

‘Was pretty inactive last week. ‘Sorry about that. ORZ

Good news is, I managed to avoid doomscrolling on twitter, heh.

…..I forgot about my phone having a Screentime limit, bahahaha….

ahh..I’m such a dinosaur.

I didn’t even know it existed. I got so jaded with apple fucking everyone over I thought they’d be too greedy to put a screentime limit feature or something along the likes of that, lol. (I’m so cynical.)

According to the screen time app, I spent about 26 minutes on twitter last week so that’s a big change from two hours two weeks ago.

On a related note, there was this tweet I read from the Elon twat a while ago saying that you can’t be eligible in the for you section (probably the entire algorithm as a whole) if you are not verified starting from April 15. The same requirement is needed to vote in polls all because they can address ai bots swarming the site.

It was irksome to read this morning and quite a strange way of saying that they’re too incompetent to get rid of bots in their own site, lol.

At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if we need twitter blue to just access the basic features of twitter like posting a tweet, lol. (or like, there’s only a limit of tweets you can post every week or smth)

11 USD monthly! ‘Such a blatant cashgrab and a great way to kill the platform, Elon, tch.

Personally, I don’t think I’d pay that for a site that doesn’t allow me to curate my feed, and has ads and ..bigotry everywhere. And from my experience with the app since a few months ago, twitter has been crashing more than the usual.

smh.

Anyway, sorry for the rant, haha.

Here are some random doods:

Michel and Giselle from Fata Morgana <33333

and me ship, hehe. <33333

werewqtre

/ Ayana / Leave a comment

Currently warming up with some doodles of Ryou cosplaying as Phi from Zero Escape~

I barely draw this creampuff T__T. Sorry, Ryou.

This just came out of a chat when I saw Phi and she had the same colour scheme as Ryou and we thought Ryou would look good in Phi’s outfit, haha.

although I genderbent this one by adding pants cuz Phi wears a miniskirt.

Ah but I forgot to put the flower head accessory.

I’m still in the very first part of the Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward haha, so I don’t wanna be spoiled. Seems interesting so far although I didn’t get to enjoy it as much last week cuz I was too burnt out to even play the minigames. I wanted to enjoy it but my brain was too deep fried and tired.

Speaking of burnout, I didn’t get to do any art studies because I was burning the midnight oil for a week, ORZ. I had a deadline yesterday so I was drowning myself in instant coffee because I didn’t have time to brew and I didn’t have much time for fandom online stuff but I did open CSP and…

well, from the latest post, I got so pissed that they didn’t retract their shitty subscription service so I ranted about how much I hated the path they were starting to walk into. I know it’s the natural trajectory of this capitalist mode of production, so I expected the subscription based service , most stuff are heading that way, adobe did that shit, most 3d programs do that shit,

but I didn’t think they’d be that shameless, haha. Especially since it felt like a betrayal from like, six, seven years ago when I bought it, Maybe I took it too personally, CELSYS is a corporation so it’s pointless to even have any hope for them to care about their consumers, I get it, but I was being optimistic for once. Like they were able to backtrack that AI feature on their program after the huge uproar and negative feedback they got from the CSP artist community, I thought, well, this subscription plan they have for V2 received so much negative feedback, maybe they’d backtrack on it last minute..

they didn’t.

ah well…

Key to happiness is to have low expectations.

for everything, lol.

I’m joking (not really) but jfc, I hate feeling nihilistic and cynical because it’s not productive to the cause but eh, it’s difficult to not get discouraged with how things are right now, locally and worldwide.

Clip Studio Shite (rant)

/ Ayana / Leave a comment

UPDATE [15 MARCH 2023 / 10:58 am ]: I My brain was mush when I typed this lol, I initially mentioned about CSP upgrade that cost 40 USD would come with access to features that’ll last a year but it’s not. You can buy EX 2.0 upgrade but it won’t come with that access so you willl have to subscribe to th EX Update Pass to get them tch.

I’m very disappointed.

…and annoyed.

This is old news as I knew of CSP’s crappy subscription plan months ago when they announced it but I was hoping that they’d backtrack on it in the last minute given how there was a huge uproar in the artist community when the announcement came but alas, they did not. >_>

Gods, I despise capitalism with all my heart.

So I bought CSP EX years ago, the one time purchase/perpetual license which cost like almost 200 USD so it’s quite insulting that they’re offering their upgrade at a high price of 40 USD. They call it a discount but …I dunno what world they live in where 40 USD is a low price for license owners. They’re supposed to be a free upgrade for us license owners in the first place.

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