I am too mentally ill to make comics. Usually, on the internet, being mentally ill is good for comics, if you are mentally ill in a relatable fashion and it manifests in such a way where you don’t care how shoddily you draw. It may even be the case that the WORSE you draw, the more liked you are. Or if you are ill to such an extent that you have no idea you are and are extremely prolific in that. I have an illness of indecision, inability, hyper-awareness of inability and regret. Nobody on earth has any need for that manner of illness.

After relettering, respacing the same dialog boxes and redrawing the same negligible details ad-implausium I finally sent off the comic book order a few days ago. I won’t see them for a month but I sure can’t change them now! Consequently it is imperative that I do not look at any of the page images that I sent before the books get printed and sent to me. Or even after that point, just to be safe.
Ironically, the main person whose off-hand remark about the first book, that I should consider using fonts, looked over one my next to last proof copy inside a dark restaurant and said it was much easier to read the dialog, which meant I had done enough that I could stop, but I did not stop! I am like the text grinch; my scrutiny over my handwriting’s legibility grew three sizes that day when it was criticized. However instead of becoming a hero to the town i became a total outcast since I needed to scorn all other activity and contact so I edit speech baubles for months. Of course Madison Connecticut town would prefer not to have me in it so that suits them.

the first version of this cover image appears as the inside back cover of the first book, which was printer in 2016. Up until the most recent proof of book 2, this part of the image looked JUST FINE to me. But the night I was preparing to send the final set of updated pages, suddenly it did not! The line of motion was inconsistent with the image around it, and the bug was not sourced at all. I thought I could draw it better than that, and I did, but it still was not good enough. I remembered I had some insect references I had used recently, so I used them again and got a yet better looking bug, but I decided those were not good enough because all my references showed bugs not in-flight. And were moths, anyway. It is already bad to use a standing bug as reference for a flying one, and using a moth as a reference for a fly is worse! Amateurish! I found a very good fly reference! But the angle was wrong. And was perhaps too detailed! It looked too aggressive, too fast, too big (this version was not preserved so it is not in the montage). The viewer should be able to see the wings, not the legs, much less six multi-jointed legs. But I couldn’t just NOT include the legs because then it looks like I don’t value accuracy. I made it smaller and blurrier, so there still ARE legs but only really visible if it is your destiny to make sure that I gave the fly legs. but at some point the details stop being distinguishable, since there are too many of them. The first bug looked gentle, which is funny, and the simpler design reads more easily, since it is a very small creature in a very small part of the image! I decided to try a proper flying moth reference but none of them looked like what I wanted. I went back to the fly, simplified it a bit, so I could make it let smaller. Being too realistic can harm the joke, anyway. But what even IS the joke?
The “joke” hinges on it being obvious that pog has no brain, and something flying out of there implies that the space is empty because i don’t know why but it does.
Suddenly I had to think about it, and I didn’t see any logical reason why a fly indicates an empty space, which means it must be based on a stereotype or a cliche which has become far removed from whatever base sense inspired it. I could not even remember where I first saw an example of a fly coming out something empty, but for some reason knew it was probably a wallet, so I looked that up, and while I gained no insight as to WHY, i learned that it was in fact supposed to be a MOTH coming out of wallets specifically. Since I have already moved the logicless stereotype from its roots, which are purely symbolic, changing the insect type also cannot be done! It would HAVE to be a moth! *I* had been misled because the cartoon in which I observed this, presumably Pink Panther –based on most the panther’s situations are instigated by him being a lout and him specifically therefore needing a host of ways to indicate a lack of money without speaking– of course didn’t care what the bug looked like and nobody else, the entire staff of the cartoon, the production company, the distributor, the networks which aired the cartoon decades later, cared either, and nobody watching it did, including me.

Well maybe it was a garfield comic. That much is irrelevant! What matters is that drawing a generic unsourced bug is a-ok when thousands, millions of people are going to see it. But when only me and maybe 14 other people are going to see it, such negligence is UNFORGIVABLE.

Now please try and imagine that with 40 images I will probably have this sort of stupid problem over and over on every one of them. I am a very sick person. I need to make a full print book order not because anybody else wants these books, only so that the production of the books no longer holds me irrationally captive.

Anyway, I went back to the moth version. A miracle occurred so that I found it acceptable, as awkwardly posted as it was, with the matter of the motion trail still not resolved, so I saved the image, reduced it to the print size, collected it with the other pages I was uploading, into a 167 megabyte zip file, started uploading it, went to the bathroom. this was approximate 3:38am. I was misled, however. The tyrant was not satisfied, it just had changed its focus. I began to panic because I considered that I had, during this session, because I was zoomed in and having problems with everything, also absentmindedly applied a cartoon-derived stereotype to the left-inside of pog’s space (vertical lines) to imply it was metallic. Even though the inside of pog is NOT metallic and if I wanted it to look metallic I should not rely on hacky shortcuts anyway.

Even though it does not matter because this is an area smaller than the tip of a pencil. Without using the toilet I came back down, cancelled the upload, made a very minor alteration, exported the image again, checked that every other image was the right size, made a new zip file, and began uploading that again, and then I realized I had made the alterations WITHOUT reverting the image to its full size! Which means if I at this point decide to go back and change it again, as looking at this has made me sincerely, profoundly, want to, since I am now VERY conscious of the light colored streak on the right-inside of the space, I will have to first blow up the pertinent region and then draw over it to make sure it is a full fidelity image, even though is almost 0 zero chance across my lifetime or anyone else’s that there will be any need for a full resolution version of this picture, and then once I do that it may not necessarily have the desirable qualities of the pre-blown up and redrawn version.

And

and

and

nobody on earth will know that I did or did not do it!

An update for august 31:

Here is or should be a big slow-loading gif which shows a vague version of the state of one page at the time of each of the three example prints and the final print (which does not yet exist). All of them AFTER incessant pre-print redrawing, remember. The point is that after waiting several weeks, I looked at every part of every page, three times, saw something incredibly minor, after I thought I was done, and had to open it back up again. On only nine of the pages I restrained myself from making more changes, even though I wanted to! The point the point the point is that I lost my mind and have evidence. I did not regain my mind, I simply was too tired to meet its demands.
Observe that the upper and lower left frames were changed with each printing but other places changed fewer times. This means I was able to look straight at something, on paper, think it was acceptable (after having looked at it prior to then numerous times across years and thought it acceptable), then look straight at it again at a later point and find it inexcusable beyond all reason. This means there could have been fifth, and sixth, and seventh prints, and I could still find fresh problems, just on the dumb letters. Letters too close together, too close to the bauble edge, WORDS too close together, veering too much up or down, not aesthetically balanced within the bauble. At no point, after no period of time, can I look at what I made and be satisfied with it. Even when logically I know that the longterm benefit of spending more time on it, rather than on anything at all else, no longer exists. Not only am I too mentally ill to make comics, I am too mentally ill to read comics.

And in the lower right can be observed my attempt to amend a minor legibility error by rewriting the dialog in a new temporary image layer above the base layer, but forgetting to delete the letters on the base layer before merging the temporary layer into it, and then forgetting to look in that space again until after the book was printed, thereby creating a MAJOR legibility error that would be impossible to overlook! This means that for each subsequent print I needed to look at every space of every page to ensure I had not committed that error anyplace else, even though such investigation would increase the possibility of me finding and obsessing over yet more imaginary problems. And then I ended up doing that in at least four other places anyway.

Seeing this gif now, it bothers me that I made kumquat’s dialog green-tinted when kumquat is out of view, against a non-tinted room. This is confusing and makes it look like elpse is talking. I thought, for years, and then afterward, it is quite obvious from context and precedent who is speaking, but people always find a way to miss all my points, so they could well claim to be confused. But if they are confused by that then they couldn’t possibly understand anything else, so I leave this green. But I will go back to the first fear, and have to explain to myself why this fear is unjustified, repeatedly. I know this is not entertaining. I need to make this understood as clear as I can make it so that in the future I can refer back to it rather than attempting to explain it again!

OH the windows and other details on the buildings are misaligned, the design on the billboard is indistinct, there is a little black speck just under the right side structure’s roof, the eyebrows float off the panther’s head and that hat is WAY TOO SMALL! How did this cartoon get made?

hastily detailed and colored editions of yet more hastily drawn sketches of dork creatures who will probably not be seen again!
And I did this because I am too out of my mind to prepare proper text entries and I am writing those pretty much for myself at this point anyway, my tastes and criticisms having almost no foundation in reality or contemporary society, or even outdated society that is so in a socially acceptable manner. Yet nonetheless I crave superficial internet attention because my next exhibition for real people is still two months away from now. Being ready for that means not spending ages making stupid stuff that I cannot show there! I must be able to make stupid stuff very quickly.
The greyish colors are a consequence of me drawing directly over a crummily-lit and blurry camera-phone photograph of the pertinent sketchbook page. I used to have a good, proper digital camera, but I need to replace it five months ago. The grey seemed at first like it was working. Of course part of slacking off well is creating the appearance of working. My life is an exemplary example of that.

nemitz strikes it rich with a metal detector. it must be assumed that the metal detector is borrowed or stolen. and also that nemitz will be quite glad to dig that thing up and will offer to split the prize with anybody who helps.
A picture that I liked as a sketch, but could not fill in with enough details that I liked it finished. This contrasts with what usually happens, when I ruin the picture by trying to insert so many details that I overwhelm both the image and myself, though a point could be made about the incredibly large distraction on the lower left. That makes the tiny little distraction on the lower middle right seem too small, and not providing adequate counter-balance. But the nonsense objects I would generally fill space with, such as pine cones and pumpkins are already featured, and at a yet smaller size, on the vending machine’s buttons. Worse still, neither of the allusions inherent in the external objects is organic to me. I played the video game Dig Dug early in my life, but too early in fact to remember what the primary monsters looked like and I never came back to it until now. I had to look up both that thing’s appearance and even how the game works. Additionally, I do not think the Atari 2600 game “E.T. The Last Dinosaur” is any worse or dumber than the average bad atari 2600 game. I inherited a 2600 unit and a collection of game cartridges, including Dig Dug, from my cousins when they obtained a Nintendo Ehhh System. They probably had about the average assortment of games, including Adventure, Missile Command, Mario Bros and whatnot. There were a few that I could not make sense of but that could be attributed to my lack of age and experience at the time. When I got to emulating the 2600 system, however, the complete collection of roms included loads of terrible, obscure games that even as a moderately old person I could hardly figure out. Those likely comprise a majority of what was available for the 2600. ET only differs in that its cartridge was produced in great quantities. But I never had one!
Although I distinctly recall, in the game Pitfall, the character would be destroyed regardless of what point it attempted to jump across the alligators, and people still swear that was a “classic.” And I never found joy enough in emulating 2600 to do it more than once in ten years, and consequently the emulators I have for it don’t even work anymore, and I don’t feel like getting them to work just to provide another illustration for this website update.
I believe it is fair to blame nemitz for all of these things.

This is an exaggerated garbage idea that would be funny if i drew it like garbage instead of spending hours trying to draw it above my level, even though it still isn’t drawn particularly well.

additionally, the earliest saved sketch i have of it still is not funny, because I cannot draw badly in a way that looks functionally deliberate.
Such is the bimshwel existence.
The guy with sunglasses is not part of my initial pitch to myself, and that might also be a problem. If the idea works at all, that guy is not a part of it and explaining this makes it even less funny, but the rubbish I was writing that led me to think of this as a way of illustrating instead of spelling out, now plainly needs to be written anyway since this picture didn’t work so when I write that I will have no choice but to explain it. If necessary, I may even explain the previous sentence.

I wondered if I could work six unrelated sketchbook creatures into one coherent finishedish digital piece. I could not!

I did not attempt this previously since in most past years I used such large sketchbooks, 11×14 inches, that attempting to use EVERYTHING was infeasible and I did not attempt it. Now I use sad little ones and still barely have time enough to fill them, much less draw well in them.

here is the actual bad camera picture i used of the sketchbook page to draw over for the digital version. Notice first of all that the lighting on display is so bad that I cannot increase the contrast without whiting out the one on the upper right nor reduce the brightness without blacking out the lower left item. Even isolated without the other ones, I had to GUESS at the nature of my initial last-November intent with that one. In fact, months after taking this picture I had to dig out the pertinent book and find this page because I could not tell what that thing was supposed to be. And still afterward could not!
Even worse: I had to MIRROR one of the creatures! What scandal and horror. Consequently I like this better than most other drawings I put on the internet in the past year.

A highly not-yet-finished picture called “hats coming to visit.” there is an accompanying music piece… or rather i made some stupid minimally remarkable music, absentmindedly named it that, and then constructed a picture of a literal interpretation of those words. It is easier to post unfinished drawings and not feel bound to them than it is with unfinished music. The only reason the music is unfinished is because that dumb comic book is also destroying what little life i have unfinished and if I turn on the music program that will be an all day matter, potentially. Which apparently I do not want to risk, when there are so many totally meaningless tasks I can be doing for other people that are not satisfying the slightest bit and will take many days or weeks to finish.
I have a heap of resentment for people that I don’t consider to be “real artists” who post loads of drawings with minimal thought, effort or restraint on to the internet. By perhaps not chance, several of them play musical instruments or engage in digital audio tomfoolery. Sometimes I wonder if I am a hypocrite, for being a visual artist and occasionally pretending to be a musician. But I’m not because I assure you I spend loads longer on my noises than they do on their scribbles. You can’t be a popular music artist just by having an ugly squirrel/raccoon/dog thing for a mascot.
No actually probably you can; if you buy the expensive version of fl studio there are enough default filters that sound exactly like trash off the radio with minimal user input that an actual squirrel could probably design a hit track but I am obviously not doing that because those are all marked “demo” (and rather difficult to purge from and wholly unwelcome in my USABLE instrument list) in my version so it isn’t the same.

I do not mind there being demo versions of fancy music effects; I object to them not being able to be removed from a version of the program that is NOT a demo.
Try to imagine a middle finger in my face that cannot be removed from the vicinity of my face, that I paid $160 for, dangling a sign that says “gimme another hundred!” If you successfully imagined that, you may have a future in software development.

This is also the one year anniversary of my father’s demise, and the ten month anniversary of my not finishing the second post I wrote about that. although that isn’t really significant for an unposted piece around here until it reaches the ten year mark. In any event I think he would be glad to know I am just as unaccomplished and unfocused in my pursuits and just as inclined to blame people who did not cause my problems as when he was alive, were he alive, because that would mean he proved the impermanence of death, a matter sought after and never attained through the entire known existence of humanity, if not all life as we understand it. Of course THEN I would be disappointing by comparison to THAT, but everybody else would be, also, and my shortcomings would be less acute.

Look, there! He is imploring us to look there at a windmill. How could he do that if he were dead? The crushed ant corpse that I evidently neglected to notice was stuck to the photograph until a year after scanning it, THAT is what a dead being looks like.

The First Steps Toward Worship

featuring Adol “Born Again” Christin. There is no way that Adol’s deliveries can be over.

The lizard of two evils

in the disrespect that it looks very stupid and is also animated.

The dumbest thing is that the lizard thinks it has to change its pose to a broader stance with its arms crossed, like that will impress people, which is NOT the case. What that absurd moron fails to recognize is that nobody on earth or elsewhere is impressed. Not elpse. Not even the dope! nemitz, maybe, but i think we should all aim for better than that. It also seems unaware that its head is disproportionate to its body until it falls down since the square boundaries are difficult to optimize for an upright-standing figure. Or even a degenerate bow-legged dork like this one.

i absolutely did not need to make this. I considered that i had not animated anything recently, and also that my most-appreciated overall artwork have been low resolution pixel icons.

And apart from one that made before I knew what I was doing, they all feature other people’s characters. Some of which I do not like at all. Not necessarily any of those, though not necessarily not NOT any of those. And those that I dislike inspire other people with equally bland or worse requests to come to me instead of ones I could potentially find a mutually beneficial situation with. Which is not to say that i APPROVE of either of the morons that I am showing today, but i disapprove of them in a way that amuses me. Nor do I mean to suggest that I think drawing dumb garbage like this and then waiting is going to solve any problem, but I was starting to think that anything by me with wiggling creature toes being used as even a remote representation of myself, as I had done with the second icon here, was creating problems.

I could not tell you WHY there even is a problem that exists which is caused by that. I have lived a strange and unrealistic life, and that has its consequences.

If only life could be such a fantasy! It would surely be my final, were i to believe in it.

As a child (despite the maturity level I exhibit I am in fact quite older than that) i loved looking at pictures of castles and thinking about them, and for most of my life it bothered me that i could never draw them however hard i tried. now I realize I can, so long as I keep them implausible. I made this “quickly” in the past two hours so I would have something to upload this week. Practicality and scale were not major concerns.

I am not totally sure what this is, but it is the most sincere drawing I have put on the internet in some months. It needs some more creatures, but I could add creatures all night, and I am already committed to adding unnecessary details forever to a more pressing project.

I checked and could not find any drawings, official or otherwise, of the two kids who let the Secret of Mana hero just fall down the waterfall, then run off and tell nobody, and are ANGRY when he survives. With friends like that, I am not surprised he starts slaughtering little yellow legless rabbit-things the first chance he gets.
I made this a bigger job than it needed to be, for something so stupid, and I screwed up much of it, but it is good practice, I have to hope. I am not terribly fond of it but I don’t have the energy to create and post something better, and the last brief entry I posted due to a lack of energy apparently didn’t work at all so this is here to distract from that. I meant to get into detail about what I screwed up in this picture, why I drew it to begin with and also show the basest sketch of it but somehow the topic turned into other Mana series games, namely Sword of Mana, which always leads to angry run-on sentences and precisely the sort of thing I am incapable of writing at the moment in a way that is the slightest bit amusing, so I will cross that bridge when I come to it and hopefully not be disappointed by the adventure that ensues once I fall off of it.

a drawing i started absentmindedly while my niece Violet was climbing on me, which limits the range of things I can work on, since Violet may want to bang on buttons or scribble something pink at any moment. This was never at risk of becoming WORSE.
I like to think the lower right one knows what it did to deserve that, but I have been so absentminded lately, I possibly forgot to inform it.
But why must NEMITZ be there, approving? the world does NOT need nemitz approval! Nemitz is also disproportionately larger than the other figures. Classical art analysis would indicate this to mean that nemitz is the most important person in the scene, and I absolutely assure you that is NOT the case, even in a case where nobody is important. In fact, especially so.

This is hardly a great illustration; it is extremely regressive, composition-wise, with all the figures on the same two dimensional plane

but the comic book matter is yet ongoing, continuing to consume much of my not-necessarily-wasted time, and the commissions I do (more than I exhibit here) remain somewhat homogeneous, and so I feel a need to show this thing that asserts I am not the person I look like I am if I only post commissions. People reached the exact same wrong conclusions about me in the past when I only made personally-directed stand-alone “art”work like this, as now when I rarely do, but now I have more of those people reaching. Which is “good” since it means more money and marginally more influence for me, provided I do not express any opinion on anything, which I accomplish by avoiding learning about anything that was made recently unless I have a connection to it which predates social media, such as star wars, or I learn about it off the internet, such as who Aunt Bee hated. I also have to avoid talking about my avoidance and what led to it because I start writing more or less the same manifesto that I have posted here repeatedly since whenever people started using tumblr, and I do not have the energy to make it funny to me anymore. I don’t think it much deserves the help, either!

I assure you this comment is just as weird when not removed from its original context

I drew this on a whim back in October. It felt unfinished but I posted it anyway o the deviant art website because I am obsessive compulsive and “need”ed to upload something that day and had nothing else prepared.
Which is ludicrous because I am taking just as many pictures of just as much dumb stuff, if not more so, than 13 years ago when I probably updated this most often. But cataloging it seems less and less possible, and less worth the trouble since nobody reads anything that isn’t text captioned in a video anyway, even if the video is just still images. As if reading is hard unless you can only see ten words at a time, and then you can spend 6 minutes on one paragraph. That picture has no words at all which theoretically makes it easier to read. These words are not the image’s and they resent the implication that they do not belong to themselves.

Three 100×100 pixel icons for Sherymon.

One more for beepy isopod plushcub.
Anything else I am doing right now is boring and not worth mentioning. I know because I just typed it all out and it sure was! I am not going to post something long and negative again unless it is negative in an interesting way or I forget that I said this. Of course I believe I have said that before and forgotten it.

even Superman sometimes forgets that there are thousands of other garishly-dressing idiots with super powers on his version of Earth and also the simultaneously existing alternate versions of earth that also have alternate versions of him on them. And also to put on a shirt, or to NOT wear glasses and a goshdarn belt buckle identifying his alternate identity when forcibly evicting trees from his property.

Following from that old thing, here is the sort of material people have been asking me for lately. You may be better off not reading the text!

mitz opportunity
Somewhere in 2015 I had to make a 80×80 pixel icon to accompany my comic strip’s link on some outdated web-comic list that nobody has looked at in years. To justify the icon’s existence and permit it to be used on almost any other website, I subsequently increased the icon to 100×100 pixels. Later I added a useless animation to it for approximately no reason. And later I made the ears wiggle in an insufferable manner. Who does that mitz think it is?
I drew the initial 6 frames in paint shop pro version 6 circa 1999, as separate images. It worked for this but felt inefficient.

boxed botUnfortunately it inspired wimpod, whose creature also turned into one of these.
I tried to make edits in photoshop after I had already assembled it, and that is a terrible program to edit gifs in because there is no way to look at the next frame and also activate the next frame for editing without moving the mouse and clicking on two different things every time. Rubbish!
I hear that the newest photoshop has a less stupid animation mode. However, it is also subscription only, which means you pay for it until you die and never really own your copy of the software, and adope can arbitrarily cut you off from it whenever and for whatever reason it feels like. It probably won’t but it could.


aki-breaky bugsome months later this came along, for AtlasImperial of another suspicious character, a moth-oid named Aki. This required independent moving parts so I tried using my recently installed Clip Studio, which has a powerful animation mode. Unfortunately, it has absolutely no animation specific keyboard shortcuts and will only paste as new layers, but cannot merge layers at ALL in animation mode because [no reason], and it is very stupid and inconvenient for maintaining crucial consistency; for example, though the feet move, there will often be a foot part that is supposed to be the same between multiple frames, but if I change it in one place, I cannot copy the changed part and update other frames with it, which means I must meticulously redraw the edit several times, which requires manually mouse clicking the previous frame to check and then manually mouse clicking back to where I was and then moving the cursor to the part I was drawing at since there is no single button command for switching the active frame. Also! Clip Stupido cannot save transparent gifs, even though it handles transparency and in fact refuses to NOT erase into transparent on single layer images that are supposed to have a solid background color. I assure you what I just said makes makes sense and is very annoying. I had to implement the transparency in photoshop, to all 48 frames, which was a total nightmare. And then I had to do that a few more times when I changed something else. There are 48 frames even though the most complex part, the moving foot, only has 8 frames, since other things move out of synch with it. 48 was the lowest number at which it matched up with the other movements.

I’ve Fallen and Icon Get Up
Nonethless I did these, for Trevor-Fox and also Tachisalopex. They are plainly quite busy so I will try not to say too much.

pip my ride

for Pippy Batstocking. I got the impression that this is just as much attention to the feet as was called for. I thought: I have this clip stupido figured out, I will do the next thing people ask for in that also. I made sure all the moving parts linked up. It was not as bad but it was still a bad idea!

infern verminFor roshiyu: a rat wizard person plays around with a little blue fireball FOREVER.
As soon as I learned the details of the task I realized I needed better software to be able to pull it off, and found aseprite shortly thereafter. I gave up on making this work as transparent. Aseprite handles it better, but eh website, furra finity, cuts of user avatars at the intuitive size of 55 kilobytes, and this would blatantly go over, since gifs are stupid. Thankfully I discovered that I like colors better anyway.

murid murderer
For mightyrat, also in aseprite. Showing a friendly creature named Twitch the Plague Rat, jumping and then toe-exhibiting, all while clutching a mysterious, presumably lethal beverage in such a way that suggests it may be tossed at somebody whose company is not desirable.

the fox in our stars
A fox person with magical powers meditates in a space-sort of location.
I have a lot to say about this one, and so I shan’t.

microsurgeonFor plaguerattus, a rat person that is rat-sized despite wearing clothing and having human characteristics, and consequently uses a ex-acto knife as a weapon, and also lives a life of such peril as to require a weapon, which apparently sees a great deal of usage. Or maybe this is from back when I had one and stored it in my bag without putting a cap on it, because I think they just didn’t MAKE caps for the things then, and I reached into the bag expecting to grab something else, and for months afterward had intense anxiety about reaching into ANY bag for ANY reason, even after an airline worker ordered me to dispose of it. Don’t tell anybody that my authentic staff-spinning reference material was Cheetara from Thundercats.


the good, the bad, and the bowtieA rather large pixel animation commission for Lizzy MajP Ampharos. A stupid yellow lizard thing which I must confess looked mildly less punchable than this before I got a hold of it. That thing is FAR prouder of itself than it has any right to be, even without the bowtie. And there could easily BE no bowtie since I forgot to draw it tied in place. Yet it lingers.
Why larger, I do not know. I was able to keep this under control a bit better than the non-animated large pixel drawings, but those were still twice the size of this one. I was not asked to include a background, and I should not have included one that inadvertently mimicked the shape and color of the ears. There are enough inexcusable ears on this page without me implying more of them.


rodentia brush yer hair?
for Akvo, in which a rat person endures a hairrowing ordeal. People do love their rat folk. I do not know why people want ME to draw their rat folk, but I like those better than bears or otters.
This suddenly looks under-animated to me; the pieces do not have an extra settling frame after the abrupt turns, but the amount of things TO animate here is higher than usual, and I tend to give more than I need to, so I must have felt haggard up if I did not.
The fur trim on the jacket and the pink hair especially were difficult to get looking right, and I had to paste them into Clip Stupido to work on, and then paste back into aseprite. Clippo’s animation mode is terrible but its drawing mode is great. Aseprite’s animation mode is great and its drawing is terrible. It does not use pressure sensitivity in tablet pens and is inexplicably slow and lagful even though I tend to work on pictures that are lower in color depth and one-fiftieth the resolution that I work on in other software. Is there a program that accommodates bitmap drawing AND animation well? Probably, and it most of a certainly does something else more important disgracefully for no reason, like it will have passwords instead of saving, or you can only use shades of beige or you have to guess a magical gnome’s name in order to access the full version.

deflotter
For Jazz Otter, of a rather exhausted air-filled creature. I doubt I could sleep so peacefully knowing that there were scissors in the world.
Twitter seemed to like this, which makes sense: nothing is happening, I did not draw it especially well nor especially enjoy doing do. I did like making the movements, though there were not many, and in fact I had to un-do some of the excessive movements that I added. But it is all good for something: several relatively influential people that I think are complete garbage but who my situation render inescapable, who would never ever directly acknowledge me in a coherent medium where they could tell that it was me who had made these things, have “like”d or retwutted some of them, so even though I still feel like a drimpy sub-human pudding being that will never reach a substantial audience with the work that is meaningful to me, I can at least feel like I “beat” some irritating forklogans in an incredibly petty and stupid way that is exactly what we both deserve.

Second-Hand Dork And finally this one last week-ish, for kingodin, of Jordan Deere, a one-eyed creature with the unfortunate addictive habit of brandishing bow ties. I get the impression Kingodin has seen some of my other icon animations.
I think it has more and better movement than most of the others, though it has no shading. Truthfully, getting the lines solid and smoothed out is most of the work. However, most of the recognition, apparently, is in the shading (as well as most of what I charge, like an idiot, like a usual). Or perhaps people object to cigar-smoking. Or perhaps they object to inaccurately-drawn cigar-smoking: I realized after I made this that real cigar smoke goes everywhere and takes its time leaving, quite the opposite. People should be GLAD I sent it off so fast. Although smoke can look elegant. Perhaps people wish the rest of it looked as elegant as the smoke!

So what have I learned through all this? That I can always learn nothing in a new way. My shoe is off, my foot is cold, I have a bird I like to hold. My hat is old, my teeth are gold, and now my story is all told.