Sketchblog: Yinyang Women & Adventure Time

I bought Terry Moore's How To Draw Women, and it arrived a couple of days ago. I read it cover to cover three times. He's the creator of the amazingly good Strangers In Paradise graphic novels and one of my favourite artists.

It's only part one, but it's good, and it's actually useful. And it's already affecting my drawing - this is a sketch I was doing to explore that. The face of the woman on the right is very Moore-ish. Sketched in ArtRage 2.6 because it is still better to sketch with, and tweaked slightly and will be painted in ArtRage Studio Pro.

The floating genie woman on the left was actually inspired by the flying vampire Marceline - floating people are actually amazing boons to artists as you can put them anywhere in any position.

 This is Marceline. I doodled her in the DeviantART Muro program (which is eh. I WANT MY PRESSURE SENSITIVITY). Sadly, there is very little of Adventure Time on YouTube, and even less of Marceline, who is by far my favourite character.

And in inverse order, the warm up fan art. This pairing has taken over the internet briefly since the next clip of the show leaked, showing Marceline singing to Princess Bubblegum in a very... lovelorn manner. The fantastically Awesome Tom Siddell of Gunnerkrigg Court painted them as his very first Tumblr Post, so how could I not follow suit?

I really like the lighting patterns on Bubblegum's skirt. Actually, all the legs are my favourite bits. I should probably tidy it up and finish it sometime...

...and the original sketch, which I drew this morning. I had no eraser on me, as you can probably tell. I like Marceline's face - must try and tweak the painted version so her expression shows properly.

Esmeralda x Belle: Canon Disney Femslash

I wandered into Snopes today, and discovered something very interesting. It turns out that as a little joke, the animators of The Hunchback of Notre Dame decided that there was no reason Belle couldn't visit Paris and have a cameo wandering across the screen reading (apart from the different time periods, but pfft to that. True love laughs in the face of mere physics and temporal reality!)

That's right - Belle, from Beauty and the Beast actually appears - twice - during the The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Once, as a distant figure, book in hand, during "Out There", and once in the crowd during "Topsy Turvy" (when Quasimodo gets crowned King of Fools). Yes, she was literally right there in the crowd, when Esmeralda was dancing on stage.

You want evidence? Sure thing. I hunted down a video and took some screenshots (a YouTube video, hence the quality. I'll find something better when I can...)

Let the Belle and Esmeralda femslash commence. Go on. Make me proud.

Meg Gets Her Own Femslash Page

I've been struggling with the huge number of videos that are currently on the Disney Femslash page for a while now, and the new ones that keep appearing are getting hard to keep up with. I'm pretty sure I found almost all of them that existed at the time, but there are now at least three times the number that were there when I first created it!

I'll keep the original giant page, but I might start winnowing down the videos a bit - I'm not sure yet. It's not impossible to load when you visit it (...yet, since I split it up with pagebreaks and moved all the lesbian books and films onto their own page), but editing it is getting very difficult. So I needed move the content off it into other pages. But how?

Splitting them off by pairing was too messy, and trying to make a 'part one, two, three' would require never-ending juggling or else no actual categorisation. But I think I've figured out a way, and of course, it's blindingly obvious.

Split them up by character.

So I started with Meg, and here it is.
I used my old (and crappy *cringes* ) painting of Meg and Esmeralda for the intro image, and I found an awesome mock-Greek font called Ancient Geek (cause she's Greek).

I like the result - it's a lot easier to load and read through than the main page. There'll be some repetition (on the other half of the pairing) but I think this is the best way to manage it, and I can use the main page as an index.


Edit: And because I'm on a roll, I finished one for Pocahontas too.
DOUBLE EDIT: And because I apparently hate myself and am trying to see how long I can last without sleep, here's Esmeralda's page.

Aaaaand because this blog post is becoming the index blog anyway, here's all of them so far:
Ariel
Belle
Esmeralda
Jasmine
Meg
Mulan
Odette
Pocahontas

FFTactics Fan Art: Sketchblog

Today's painting was of two characters I don't know - Princess Ovelia from FFTactics and her bodyguard, Agrias Oaks. In a compromising position, naturally, straight fan art is no fun. Uh. Pun not intended there, but appreciated :D Apparently an awesome game but can't be shipped to New Zealand, and even if it could it's in the wrong format.

I was able to choose any of the girls, and picked these two because 1) I could get a good idea of their roles, 2) there were a lot of reference pictures, 3) they actually interact and this picture is slightly believable in canon-context (how believable I don't know, not knowing the game, only the plotline).



I like the original sketch better in some respects (Ovelia's face) and the final painting better in others (Agrias' face!) - should have remembered to compare but too sleepy to risk editing now.

I have decided that I'm better sketching things like people, where you have to draw them right, with traditional pencil first, then scanning and painting - besides, it gives me something to do in my lunchbreak, now that it's not a dash for lunch/solitary leisure period of the day.

And I've learnt how to draw fan art - draw roughly similar characters for the sketch, then tweak and redraw and paint in ArtRage with reference pictures, adding all the 'fan' bits to the art.

And the problem with bright primary colours of red and blue and yellow, is picking a background colour is really hard. And anime hair is super annoying to translate into something resembling reality. And it was interesting to draw two such completely different women.

Anyway, here's a close-up (I like the eyes >.> ) - click to go to DeviantART for the full picture.

Top Five Most Popular Disney Femslash Images of the Month

Looking For Disney Femslash? Head on over to Fandom Femslash!

It's interesting keeping an eye on the traffic through my Squidoo lenses - and the one that's really taken off lately, in a scary way (Google is finally bringing it up in search results) is the Disney Femslash lens.

So I thought I'd just post up the most popular clickouts of the last month.

Unsurprisingly, the comics were waaaay up there with ~120 clicks each. X-Arielle is pretty much the definitive Disney femslash artist on DA and Nana-51 is right up there with her.

I'll just post them in order here - first two on the left are the original comics from Nana-51, in which Megara decides to try an online... sorry, a magic mirror dating service and calls up Ariel for ...well, some fun. The third is X-Arielle's rather fun response, in which Meg teases Melody (Ariel's daughter in the sequel)

The final two were much less popular with 69 and 52 respectively. They BOTH feature Snow White and the Evil Queen, interestingly.

Number four is a short manga comic about apples, wishes and tricks turning out to be treats...

...while Number five pairs up the Evil Queen with Snow White in chains at her feet, in a nicely contrasting sombre theme (compared to the generally very happy and Disney-bright fan art)



Looking For Disney Femslash? Head on over to Fandom Femslash!