Various graphics for my friend Monte
Year: 2018+
Software: Paint Tool SAI, Aseprite
My friend Monte has given me cool prompts to work off of.
This page shows most of them.
First is his FF14 character in 2018:
Then a kind of wallpaper with a Dark Souls theme:
Then we wanted to go for a more atmospheric image.
Similar to one of those sombre rainy "lo-fi music" interior images.
But I didn't have any experience drawing such a thing.
I went with what seemed comfortable to me:
Being stuck in a cell for your eternal immortal life, with a bed, PC setup, good WiFi, a view, and some bread.
It's a theme I liked a lot throughout the Souls series - A character having been stuck somewhere, along in their thoughts, for potentially hundreds of years.
The lack of responsibilities and stresses seems like a nice thing.
You'd want a nice view though - Lautrec didn't have much of a view at all in his cell, and while Vengarl had a view, he could not move his vision. So both would have been awfully bland to live out.
I picked Irithyll for the view.
At first I tried to be all technical, using line tools for clean straight lines.
That was awfully boring and I hated the lack of life in it, so went freehand:
I think I did ok.
Some years later we decided things should be animated.
Well there was no way I had the ability to animate a freehand digital illustration,
so we went with pixel art.
The first one had me explore tiled animated backgrounds, and animating flames:
That turned out pretty ok, so I tried converting the cell as well:
It has less fidelity to it in exchange for animation, which I hope wasn't too bad.
The PC lights flicker too.
This one has a special feature where he's able to swap out what displays on the monitor with a custom image.
This animation is actually a HTML page, with the monitor being transparent, showing a CSS skewed image behind it.
This one is of his friend's FF14 character, done in 2022:
And the most recent, January 2023, is of the same FF14 character with a different appearance:
Process GIF for above image
I'm rarely happy with my drawings of humanoids, but I appreciate the opportunity to practice it.