Isometric perspective is strange to work with tbh. I am having fun with it though, might draw all my vehicle concepts this way in the future since it's only marginally harder than the flat profile views and I can draw pretty background environments if I want.

Also this is a fuckton of boat, it's meant to be like the aquatic version of a space opera protagonist's ship but that shit has to cost a fortune. It's bigger than our house lol, that didn't really set in when I was doing flat sketches. But privateer jobs pop up all over the pacific, need a big boat if you want to stay out there for months.

Some WIP train cars. The engine is the hardest one to work on because I don't know what I am doing lol, everything else is just a container so those make sense intuitively (although I haven't decided how the doors will look on the box car).

That's as far as my knowledge goes, I am sure there's more tricks but I haven't figured them out yet lol.

I will add though, like with most things, a reference is good to have. You can grab a flashlight and shine it at stuff from different angles to see where the brightest spots are, usually they'll be along corners or raised elements but it varies a lot depending on the material and the shape of the object.

The only one I can think of is Metropolis, one of the very first serious sci-fi movies and hugely influential on the genre as a whole. These days it's almost been fully recovered, but that's a fairly recent development, I think less than half of the original movie was available when I first became fascinated with it as a kid.

Film back then was like video games today, the publishers only saw it as a cash cow and not as an artistic medium in its own right so why bother preserving anything once the money stops piling up? That, combined with nitrate film being prone to spontaneous combustion, means that something like 75% of all silent films have been lost, even really big ones (we will probably never see a complete Charlie Chaplin filmography).

The simple answer is that highlights go on the opposite end to shadows, they're the parts that are getting hit with or reflecting the most light from your source. In the case of your drawing, the light source seems to be above and between the two characters (cool character designs btw!), so highlights would go on the upper and inner edges.

You mainly want to pick out important edges, especially ones that need a bit more contrast, and anything that sticks out, like noses or buttons or creases in fabric. Keep in mind that some materials respond differently to lighting, things like metals and skin are more reflective than rough fabrics and tend to have sharper/more intense highlights as a result.

I personally learned to do highlights from miniature painting, that skill transfers over surprisingly well, although I haven't incorporated them into much of my published art so far so I don't have a ton of expertise to share beyond that lol.

Yeah, I've strongly recommended against going to youtube for any topic for years now. I didn't even like video guides when the site was still new, text with still images is usually better and easier to follow so it always felt like that kind of thing was just farming views, and now the rise of "content" (nasty fucking newspeak) has caused that to get completely out of hand.

History and science are usually the worst offenders, even pop-history books and offline science journalism tend to be literally worse than nothing let alone the digital sewage versions. And I've seen some terrible writing advice along the same lines, so I am not surprised to hear that popular art tutorials are like that too.

I am sure it's going to stick around because most people don't actually want to learn, they just want easy lies beamed into their brains while they multitask and they don't care if they're being manipulated for engagement/advertising. It's nothing new though, frauds used to write books instead (and still do sometimes, look at the self-help section lmao), preying on the same subset of people who don't know better and think their problems will magically disappear if they discover the right secret trick.

I immediately block any channel that gives me even the faintest whiff of clickbait out of pure spite. If you say you have special knowledge, you're blocked. You have a slimy sponsor, blocked. You speak to me in the second person, blocked. You capitalize a damn word, blocked. None of you are free of sin.

dog

Very cute stuff! Love the shine on those sprites in particular, makes me want to try my own hand at bouncy animations lol.

Compositionally I think the first image looks fine, the yellow outline around the character separates them nicely from the background and that spiral does a good job at drawing the eyes in without being a distraction. I'd never say the amount of colour is a problem!

It definitely seems overly bright and washed out though on their skin, I can just barely tell there's some highlights but they really get lost and don't help much because the base colour is so bright.

A small thing I've found in my attempts to get better at contrast/values is that, assuming they're lit normally, the whites of people's eyes make a good benchmark for where the brightest part of a character should be before shading (i.e. highlights and glowing parts can still be brighter, but base tones probably shouldn't be). That goes for both clothes and, as in this case, very pale skin.

Here the eyes are pretty dim, they look like they're in a shadow, you could bump them up but you'd sacrifice your highlights (and the irises if they're meant to be lit up) so I'd bring everything else down a little instead. Something I'm learning myself is that strong highlights necessitate a bit of self-restraint in palette, they're meant to help things stand out so if everything already stands out then it won't do much lol.

The second image is really nice, I wouldn't change the framing on that one either. The posing doesn't seem like an issue, although I wouldn't have noticed what you were going for with their left leg, it looks like they're just sitting flat to me (but in a natural way).

If you have a mirror or a camera, you can totally use yourself as a proper reference! I do that a lot especially for anatomy.

Perspective-wise, it seems like their head and shoulders are in line with the background but everything else is sitting flatter against a more distant horizon. It's not really obvious especially with how they're turning to the left but I did notice it while typing this up.

Otherwise there's just a couple of minor things if I look really hard. Their thumb seems very long proportionally, it almost looks like an index finger as drawn. And their legs might be a little short but I am unsure, I do agree that there's something about the right foot/ankle which seems off but I can't tell what.

Very pretty overall, your style feels like digital watercolour.

Not sure how this will evolve yet. I kinda just started making shapes with the vague idea of some horrid gash in the earth lol, I don't think this structure makes sense as part of an underground mine (what's holding up the roof?) so I will probably turn it into something more mundane like a canal or a seawall. Or narrow it to be a smaller part of the image so I can fit some pillars in there. Or maybe just keep the rear wall and turn it into a terrace of some sort.

For some people, creativity is like a gas tank, it drains as you use it and has to be refilled periodically. So it might not be that you're drawing too much per se, just that you don't have enough fuel to sustain your current speed.

I second the suggestion of absorbing new things which you haven't seen before, perhaps something unrelated to your current interests so it clears your mind a bit. That works pretty consistently for me when I stumble onto something I really like whether it's a movie or a game or a segment of real world history I'd never read about before, although I struggle with scrounging up the energy to try new things in the first place because I am depressed lol.

It's 4:30 AM on a Monday and I have finished my main Pixel Day entry. Surprisingly, it's something I can rate E, lmao. Hopefully I don't forget to upload it when the time comes!

I'll be working towards more, I have absolutely no idea if I will finish any of those other ideas in time though, most are a little experimental so they might take a while to plan and finish. Either way, I am happy as long as I have at least one good piece to share, the others will hopefully come out at some point even if it's not in time for the celebration.

Here's a tiny preview from one of the secondary images.

"Floptical disk"

Look inside

Rigid magnetic storage platter

And another part of an image border for Wishing Well. I started sketching miner uniform ideas but they sucked so I decided I'd try again later, in the meantime I went back to working on the frame and came up with this pretty nice longwall shearer. Might try my hand at an isometric landscape detailing the setting a bit, haven't decided exactly what landscape I'd portray yet but I like the idea of trying a new style.

I guess it's just a difference in how people think, I find that breaking my notes apart so I can reference multiple pages is essential for a lot of my longer projects. Even without computers I like being able to compare different pages or books side by side on a desk, part of why I have a problem with browser tabs too lol.

Your notes are ultimately for your own benefit, so if the book-style approach works then you may as well stick with it.

I knew someone who wrote an actual lore book which focused on one of their cultures in extreme detail, formatted by topic like a textbook and everything. Although it wasn't really their notes, it was an exercise in fictional anthropology in its own right and had a lot of effort put in to make it presentable, but it would have been excellent reference material either way.

It depends on the scope of the project for me.

For smaller things like one-off stories, I don't really need or want to do a lot of preliminary worldbuilding beyond planning out the plot and characters, which means my notes are short enough to fit either in the story document itself or in a separate text file depending on what's convenient. If I have to do a lot of formatting, I am probably taking too many notes and not doing enough actual writing.

For bigger stuff like TTRPG campaigns/homebrews and my long-term worldbuilding projects, I use Obsidian to categorize all my work, with one vault for each setting. I like to treat it as a digital encyclopedia and format it as such because I find it helps me think more about a subject if I am writing formally, and counterintuitively that also seems to make me more productive than if I just do quick bulleted lists or whatever.

I try not to set up an organization scheme for my vaults in advance, as in the past that's given me some convoluted file structures which I'm still struggling to unfuck lol. I write the pages I want to write, and I only start grouping them together after I have multiple pages which share a common theme, that keeps things intuitive.

I've mostly been working on my ideas for Pixel Day this week. I initially wanted to do some retro shooter fan art, and there's still a lot of time left so I might get back around to that, but I have ended up focusing on something for Pinnacle instead. Which is still reasonably fitting since it has a light touch of cassette futurism.

Still doodling random shit in the meantime too. Here's some mining signage inspired by the semiotic standard from Alien, meant to capture a vibe for RP (same setting as the industrial tools from a few weeks ago). The company does not assume literacy...

And a logo/border in progress. I think I'll use this setting as an opportunity to practice landscapes, maybe try something isometric, as we haven't decided what we're going for plot-wise or character-wise (or even if we're going to use the world lol) so I don't have anything specific to illustrate yet.

Steampunk guns. I will (hopefully) get back to steampunk shit next month, I did briefly consider doing a full difference engine portrait as one of my Pixel Day pieces but then other ideas caught me instead lol. Might still end up doing that later though.

I struggle with this too, at least the angle thing, although I have never been entirely sure if it's a big problem as long as I am still mixing up my visuals through other means.

I've been trying to break out of a "if I don't do something new with every drawing I have failed" mindset lately and I think part of that will mean drawing more of the simple flat/quarter/profile view images, because it's better to draw something than nothing and having good muscle memory in that area is hardly a bad thing as long as you aren't stagnating. We mostly experience the world from those angles anyway, so I am not sure people looking at your art will notice the problem as long as you differentiate your pieces with different subjects and compositions and such.

In any event, I try to experiment with posing when I have the energy for it, in this case maybe drawing some characters from above/below or in a horizontal pose (e.g. lying down on a bed) would be helpful. Just anything that lets you practice anatomy from a different angle or with more dynamic posing, whether that be nude studies, fight scenes, or illustrations of people's messy bedrooms while they're asleep.

I guess I'll be the odd one out and say that yes, the photography community seems far worse, it's part of why I never got into that hobby ages ago. Of course, I am an outsider and I'm mainly going off my experiences being around photography rather than engaging with it myself, but if that's the vibe I get from the outside, yikes.

But yeah a ton of the photographers I've met have either been been snobbish assholes or victims of snobbish assholes, the latter group including some people in my own family. Professional photographers especially have been awful, they seem to look down on anyone not willing to dump thousands of dollars on gear even when they themselves aren't very well-off (as well as shit like the stupid film-digital debate that was previously alluded to here), it always struck me as a weird cult-like delusion. The nicer ones have tended to be amateurs or people who were using photos as a means to an end (e.g. showing off miniatures, plants, legos) rather than their main hobby, and I distinctly remember one of my friends in that category complaining about how much shit they caught when looking for advice or sharing their photos.

With artists (including stuff like miniature painting and modelling too, not just drawing/painting), snobbishness and gatekeeping seem very sporadic, it's just random assholes being assholes. And even a lot of the artists I've encountered who were actually terrible people on the inside have been chill about their hobby. I swear in some communities there's straight up a truce when it comes to art, I've been in spaces where everyone legitimately seems to enjoy every drawing posted regardless of skill level but then you go to general chat and everyone fucking hates eachother or is having constant meltdowns for totally unrelated shit lmao.

Plus most of the shit-slinging I see doesn't come from the mouths of other artists anyway, it comes from cunty self-centered viewers - next time you see a completely unwarranted toxic review on NG, check the account, they'll likely either have 0 uploads of their own or they'll be a musician. The exception to that being if you visit one of the internet's septic tanks (e.g. reddit, twitter), the artists in those pits are terrible as a rule, but that's like sticking your hand into a fire and complaining that it hurts, every hobby is awful on those sites.

It's worth noting that artists have terribly thin skin in my experience, especially the young ones, so of course they're going to tell you that the criticism they get is worse lol. Not to mention that artists (myself included) are very often miserable and depressed, we tend to only remember the bad encounters. But realistically I don't think there's a consistent problem of artists hating on eachother, at worst you'll find a lot of people who are blunt with their feedback but there is a huge gap between that and the actual malice prevalent in other hobbies.

Good advice so far on thematic names. Personally I just go for natural ones based on the character's origins, as I find that the meaningful name route makes it really easy to get stuck in the weeds because there's so much you could do to find a good name that way.

For the naturalistic method, you're basically asking yourself where the character and/or their parents came from. Someone from Japan in the 1890s is going to have a different name from someone in the Soviet Union in the 1930s or from Iraq in the 2000s, and a Polish immigrant to the US today might have a different name to one who came 60 years ago since we don't tend to anglicize names so much these days. If you go back far enough you'll start running into epithets and such, as modern-style surnames are a somewhat recent thing in many parts of the world.

The same goes for fictional settings albeit a bit more abstractly, you'll probably be looking at the cultural inspirations for the place they came from since there wouldn't actually be, say, French people in a fantasy setting lol. And you have more leeway to make up a name if you want, I do that sometimes if I want to evoke a language's phonetic feel.

In any case, you can look through relevant lists of names to find a combo you think sounds good. Often I'll look through lists of people instead, especially if a character is from a certain time period because names go in and out of fashion and lists don't tend to show that (or they only show the most popular ones).

You could go deeper into it if you want, digging into why their parents named them the way they did or going back a few generations to set up some family history, but I rarely bother.

I lurk in art threads, I'm sure others do too! Unfortunately I know nothing about 3D modeling lol, so instead I'll just say that I love your caricatured drawing style, it oozes personality like nothing else I've seen.

Long post because I am sleep deprived and like to ramble.

Tbh, like with a lot of writing issues, when I see disabled characters handled poorly it's usually because the author doesn't know what they're doing or has a shitty mindset, which makes it hard for me to talk about in a focused manner because the former is a broad skill issue and the latter tends to be willful ignorance.

Overall I'd say, as with anything in writing, nothing is entirely off-limits if you do it right but the disabled need to be treated as actual people and not reduced to just a medical diagnosis, and a lot of authors simply have a crippling inability to do characterization or even research to fill the gaps in their knowledge. Seriously, it's like some people have never encountered another human being before, lmao.

There's definitely a right way to heal a character mid-story, after all a disability is literally debilitating by definition so of course most people would want it cured, but like anything else it has to actually be a purposeful part of the narrative and not just thrown in there, otherwise what's the point? Same goes for crippling characters during the course of the story itself. It doesn't have to be a narrative centerpiece, but at least handle it with some tact and an understanding of what real people tend to do in similar situations.

The nature of any treatment is going to vary by setting, of course, and there's nothing wrong with using fictional means like magic or sci-fi tech in that manner. If anything, it's jarring to avoid those when they make sense - treatments 100 years ago were different from treatments today, and some crippling conditions like tuberculosis basically don't exist anymore, so why would a setting with its own rules and additions not have its own different problems and options for healthcare? If the story feels cheap as a result, that's a problem with the writing or the setting, not necessarily the methods.

One thing that pisses me off is when I see a character go through something debilitating (e.g. years of torture, losing both eyes) but it gets clumsily handwaved and forgotten in the next few scenes as if the author was too afraid to shake up the status quo. Not every injury needs to be deeply traumatic, and shock value is a legitimate thing when used right (severe agony can easily punctuate a climax or serve as a parallel for a character's emotional state), but there's a certain kind of author who refuses to take their own words seriously, kinda like when they undo character deaths or use shitty contrivances to force a happy ending.

Another thing I hate is the idea of disabilities being turned around into direct benefits. Like, no, this shit sucks, that's almost always marginalizing as shit. Being disabled isn't a fucking checklist where you see what medical conditions someone has been labeled with, it's an individualized assessment of whether their ability to live life is impaired, so just slapping a nonsensical label on someone doesn't count unless it's backed up with serious work to show the effects too. If a debilitating condition has made a character more abled with no side effects, that's kinda insulting.

Think of autism: the diagnosis of autism isn't a disability, the diagnosis is an artificial medical construct which we use as a tool to guide people towards support. Some people are disabled as a result of autism, including the many who go undiagnosed (because diagnoses aren't reality, they're tools) or unsupported (because the world hates anyone who doesn't turn a profit), but some people (mainly affluent white men) get by relatively fine or even excel from the condition, and a hell of a lot more autistic folks would get by just fine if society didn't go so far out of its way to persecute us. When I look for representation, I look for experiences, not labels, as labels are near-universally a bullshit smokescreen standing between us and the truth.

That goes doubly when their superpowers or whatever are meant to be something they earned through hard work, because that's basically propaganda, at least in a world like ours. The reality is that you'd work 10x harder to do an able-bodied person's task with your crutches and then get reprimanded for not working 15x harder instead and burn out or get fired. Those rare success stories are highlighted and exaggerated so that society doesn't have to feel bad engaging in its usual ableist victim-blaming, because surely if one person can do it then the rest are all lazy, right?

As an example of how to do it right, think of the real world stories of athletes or special forces with prosthetic limbs. It's still a disability, they are going to face unique challenges in life as a result of missing some flesh, but they still do crazier shit with a leg missing than most people could normally. The important thing is, that's not a disability being a boon, it's quite the opposite: they're going above and beyond to compensate for their condition.

Personally, I like to focus on the psychological and societal side when the subject comes up in my works. Even if a character can compensate through technological means, they might still feel bad about having lost a part of themselves, especially if the world is against them, which it usually is. Especially since I am so fond of body horror lol.

A few questions I often think about: If bionic replacement parts are readily available, how accessible are they to the needy? Are they accompanied by therapy and training to reduce the trauma of having lost a limb, or are they forcibly installed with minimal support to turn people who society deems useless into functional machines? And who pays for it? Can you even be disabled in a given fictional society or will they just call you a lazy parasite like irl?

It would be nice to see more characters with invisible disabilities, those rooted in mental illness or chronic conditions, unfortunately I don't think society is ready for that. Flowers for Algernon came out almost 70 years ago but you could change the setting to a modern one and it would all still work.

Too tired and restless to get anything done today, maybe later I will feel better. For now, here's an accumulator.

Here's another one taken straight from the pentateuchal Tower of Babbage (or something idk, I don't study etiology, I just calculate polynomials using the Turing-complete programming language known as Microsoft PowerPoint).

Mostly doodling image border ideas for a new steampunk world while I seek my next bit of inspiration. The computers seem too big but these gears will probably make it in to the final design, albeit likely more compact/overlapping. Not sure what they'll connect to yet.

I have a few overall goals but mostly no idea how I will work towards some of them, as aside from #1 and partly #4 they're kinda tied to my mental health which isn't something I can control.

1. Continue working at all the usual stuff. Anatomy, perspective, colours, backgrounds, posing, composition, those are my big issues. Posing is tied to the next goal in an annoying way, otherwise this is basically an automatic win because of course I'm going to get better at those from working lol.
2. Be less indecisive. So many of my ideas die because I can't decide what I want to do with them or how to execute those goals, mainly when I am thinking about posing but occasionally it's a composition or costume design thing.
3. More art. Last year I uploaded 17 finished pieces, I'd like to do a lot more than that in 2026 and I am already off to a good start since I am not starting this year having to clean up after a tragedy lol. My limiting factor is usually that I lose the drive to pick up a new idea after I've finished the previous one.
4. I want to work on new material, whether that's fan art, new worldbuilding/writing projects, or completely unique pieces not dedicated to anything in particular. I've been drawing the same settings for years and the one I come back to the most isn't even the one I want to work on, so I'd like to take back control and stop drawing cyberpunk military girls for five seconds, lmao. (I am drawing one right now, someone arrest me)
5. More NSFW art. Mood swings always kick my ass to where I can't stay motivated on sexual content for multiple days consecutively.

And these are more like stretch goals, I won't really be disappointed if I never get to them as long as I manage to get something else done.

1. I'd like to try low-poly 3D art because it's cute and would open the door for some other projects revolving around game mods.
2. I want to work on animated pixel art. A whole character animation is probably too much for me because that's like doing 10 drawings in one, but a simple animated landscape scene to learn the tools is totally achievable, I just haven't found an environment that really inspires me to finish drawing it in the first place lol. Or maybe I could start putting little animated details in all my character portraits.

Lol yeah I tend to write a bit with my uploads. Great work keeping all the little (and big) details, she's super cute in your style!

Bitches be like "as above, so below" as if they didn't just watch the dark sun emerge beneath the skin of the Work. Wanted to put some of these cool tendril things in a background but they don't really fit in, I may yet find a way though.

I forgot I was working on the retro computer thing, here's an initial mockup. I am not sure what I want it to look like yet, I like the aesthetic of this asymmetric style but it feels a little dated for a mid/late 80s computer. I have a whole magazine ad partly set up to go with it but, as is my usual way, I haven't decided on its composition and posing lol.

And here I thought my first upload of 2026 would be for Pixel Day, lmao. Thanks for giving me such strong inspiration, for some reason when I come up with my own excuses to draw big boobs it doesn't work as well...

This is Valerie Slavik, protagonist to a military/cyber thriller I am slowly working on. Weird character choice especially since she looks pretty mundane everywhere but her back, I think the sleazy corporate vibes just struck me as appropriate for her cyberpunk world lol, and I put a tiny bit of sci-fi flair in her uniform to match that.

Excited for Pixel Day, this will be my first one! Not sure exactly what I'll do yet, I've been thinking some fan art for my favourite old shooters would be a good way to pay tribute to the style's origins.

Can't wait for Low Poly Day either, I love the early 3D game look. I've been wanting to try Quake mapping so if I get really into that then I might end up with some custom enemy models to show off, otherwise I'll just be watching.

Tbh 2025 was probably the best year I've ever had artistically.

For starters, consistency, I finished at least one full piece in almost every month despite all manner of mental health setbacks and physical illnesses and other distractions, and even between those I did some sketches which never made sense to refine further but were still pretty cool.

In the past I've only been able work when I get a big hypomanic episode, otherwise I'm creatively dead. It means something special that I actually managed to push through the whole year this time and even picked myself back up after some really bad moments (August onwards has been shit and I am still not over it).

On top of that, every piece of mine was noticeably better than the last. Early in the year I was focused on perspective, then composition, then colours, and a bit of posing/anatomy in between, and I'm still working on all of those but I can see a pretty substantial difference in my works now vs my works a year ago.

In 2026 I hope to work faster and draw more, however even getting 17 upload-worthy pieces in a year took so much out of me that I doubt it'll happen lol, unfortunately I'll probably be forced to do less for the sake of my health. Either way, I plan to branch out more in both subject and style, hopefully some new material gets the pixels flowing. I'll probably do a bit of fan art and maybe a few new worldbuilding/writing projects, plus some more experimental shit I haven't quite worked out in my head yet because I am still stuck in an emotional hangover from December.

If I can't sleep my life away, I will just have to keep sketching. I would never wear a skirt but nothing else looks right with this design.

Wanted to draw Xen after my last playthrough of Black Mesa. I haven't actually decided what I am going for composition-wise so this is kinda just a vibe sketch, I like how it looks though.

Hoping to have something special for pixel day so I am trying to get back to work before it comes up. I still have some annoying shit to do over the next few days and my sleep has been awful but hopefully I can decompress once the new year starts.

This mainly applies to military characters, but I really like when people actually give them some boring standardized gear and not a mess of wholly unique armour/uniforms, because the latter usually feels like it's trying to brute force an identity at the expense of the rest of the story and setting. Cool gadgets aren't a substitute for characterization, the person inside is the actual character and they should still stand out even if everyone is wearing the exact same thing.

Look at the clones from Star Wars, or pretty much any named character in Warhammer 40,000, and you can see this in action. Same basic armour as their peers most of the time but through body language/posing, speech patterns, mundane physical characteristics (height, etc), minor equipment differences, and a few personal adornments, it's not too hard to tell them apart when the designers want you to.

Even in the case of something like a lone mercenary without a mandatory uniform, it's fun to draw parts of their gear from existing designs if the setting has any. That can tie the world together a bit and imply some of their history by suggesting where they got their shit.

I also think helmets are super underrated, a good helmet design can be like a second face for a character. It's actually infuriating when protagonists who should be wearing helmets take them off for the entire story, so I appreciate the folks who put in some effort to do it correctly and make characters identifiable with their critical life-preserving gear on.

Here's some of my Star Wars OCs' helmets as examples. Some are standard issue, some are derived from existing designs, some are unique.

I couldn't sleep so I started a fictionalized self portrait, it was going to be more sci-fi but I couldn't decide what to do exactly. Women will literally experience the weakness of their flesh one time and immediately decide they'd rather be a malevolent artificial intelligence inhabiting the empty frame of a human being.

Some powder-operated tools I have been doodling to explore an aesthetic for a future roleplay setting. We might end up going in a different direction by the time we start writing but it was nice to do something less retrofuturistic for once, I like this modern industrial sci-fi look.

And some actual guns to match, I like the rectangularity of the SMG.

This is ancient, early 2024, but I feel like sharing because it's cute and I remember being proud of the colours. Say hello, tortured lamprey in a jar who we're milking for the valuable drugs you produce when you suffocate.

Tbh I don't feel it would work as a full-length novel, you'd need so much filler which would dilute its emotional impact because there's only so many ways to show "and then awful things happened again" before it becomes pointless torture porn lol. Novels have to be subtler or else they risk becoming tiresome to read, especially with psychological horror, and I feel like the story works as well as it does specifically because it's kinda overwhelming.

Hopefully I am able to push myself to get more shit done in the future, because I do want to properly develop my own god machines along those lines, less in-your-face and more nuanced with how they manipulate their mortal subjects. I'd be improving a lot faster and getting much closer to executing those ideas if I was putting out more art lol, but that's hard.

And thank you! Pixel art is fun, and it's actually super easy to get into if you have some basic art skills.