~You have to join the REALLY secret service
Gotten into a bit of a website mood, haha. I've mostly been poking at things here and there, adding links and cleaning up bits of the NPLU. I did draw a header image for the essay I wrote which was kind of fun!
Since a lot of the broken links I fixed back then were to really bad old fanart, it got me thinking a bit about it, and I wondered if trying to replicate that look would be a fun challenge. And it was! I went and looked up some of the oldest shots I had of Radic, back before I knew how to draw humans so I just made him a cat furry lol. I don't have very many of him, it was hard to get art scanned or colored back then! One of the VERY earliest was with him hugging Kitsune where he's wearing some half-remembered version of Ash's jacket which I quickly ditched. Radic and Red always looked vaguely Ash-like since the default trainer in Red/Blue looked Ash-like. Or rather, Ash looked like him. YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN. Anyway.
His hat changed color! Very strange. I was a little surprised to see line eyes, I was sure I was in my bigger anime eye phase at this point, but I guess not. I must have cycled into it from here, then looped eventually back around to dot eyes. The journeys we go on...
Anyway, I had to study these old shots to try and undertand exactly what my younger self was doing, which was a really interesting exercise. The feet bent back a lot almost into an S shape (you can't see this in the colored shots, it was in some old pencil sketches of Radic and crew that I'm too lazy to go look up) without very clear knees a lot of the times. I drew my standard circle/line/stick figure construction for him and then realized it was making it look too stable so I erased it and just did it freehand lol. It was a bit like stacking cups... just stacking a shirt on top of pants without any real consideration of the shape underneath it. And of course I did the dodge/burn shading with a mouse in Photoshop, haha. I also saved it at JPG quality level 3 for authenticity, I think I saved all my old images at that to try and save space.
I cranked the levels all the way up on the line art and hit it with sharpen a few times to get the crunchy look a lot of my old shots had. I think I mimicked it almost perfectly! It's kind of surreal to see actually, it really does look like something I would have drawn back then. An odd feeling to draw both of these things right next to each other, haha. Amusingly I'm not as satisfied with how current Radic looks lol, but I do like how Callima came out. My beautiful crabshroom... I forgot how much fun Parasects are to draw, haha. I had a lot of shots of Parasect compared to Radic, I used to draw them very triangular.
I also made some new linking buttons you can see on the NPLU front page, most of which are just cropped existing art but I did slap together a few different things for this button.
My old lady trainer from Infinite Fusion sob, I'm so sad I lost my save for that. The Parasect's from Mystery Dungeon though because I didn't want to resprite a Parasect just for a link button lol. The background was taken from Cinnabar Island in FireRed/LeafGreen since that's what Infinite Fusion was based off of.
I also set up an RSS feed for all my sites in general! Which should hopefully be more convenient than having to come here every time or having to go to each site individually to see what's been changed. Sometimes I do little small edits or changes I don't feel like writing a whole entry about here since it feels a bit spammy, so this might be a cleaner and faster option for some! Also not on LJ/DW if that matters! They're just going to be brief "added links here/fixed stuff here/added an image" kind of blurbs, nothing super substantial but just to let you know something's changed easily. I coded the rss myself with this tutorial!
Does anyone out there use an RSS feed reader? You can use ghosts to subscribe to them which is handy, I know that much, haha. If you do use one let me know! I'm curious now.
The RSS icon should be on most of the subsites that have a chance of being updated for the most part... I left Any Regrets alone since I think it's reeeeeallly unlikely I'll come back to it any time soon, and I just lazed out on the MGS one, I should just sit down and add it but eh. Ehhh. Shoot, I should add it to the ghost sites too...
Oh, I was also looking for other Pokemon sites to add to the NPLU's button list and I came across two that were almost as old as the NPLU itself! One of them looks really slick and nice and the other one looks just as dated as the NPLU, haha. I love it, such fun contrasts.
dw post
Since a lot of the broken links I fixed back then were to really bad old fanart, it got me thinking a bit about it, and I wondered if trying to replicate that look would be a fun challenge. And it was! I went and looked up some of the oldest shots I had of Radic, back before I knew how to draw humans so I just made him a cat furry lol. I don't have very many of him, it was hard to get art scanned or colored back then! One of the VERY earliest was with him hugging Kitsune where he's wearing some half-remembered version of Ash's jacket which I quickly ditched. Radic and Red always looked vaguely Ash-like since the default trainer in Red/Blue looked Ash-like. Or rather, Ash looked like him. YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN. Anyway.
His hat changed color! Very strange. I was a little surprised to see line eyes, I was sure I was in my bigger anime eye phase at this point, but I guess not. I must have cycled into it from here, then looped eventually back around to dot eyes. The journeys we go on...
Anyway, I had to study these old shots to try and undertand exactly what my younger self was doing, which was a really interesting exercise. The feet bent back a lot almost into an S shape (you can't see this in the colored shots, it was in some old pencil sketches of Radic and crew that I'm too lazy to go look up) without very clear knees a lot of the times. I drew my standard circle/line/stick figure construction for him and then realized it was making it look too stable so I erased it and just did it freehand lol. It was a bit like stacking cups... just stacking a shirt on top of pants without any real consideration of the shape underneath it. And of course I did the dodge/burn shading with a mouse in Photoshop, haha. I also saved it at JPG quality level 3 for authenticity, I think I saved all my old images at that to try and save space.
I cranked the levels all the way up on the line art and hit it with sharpen a few times to get the crunchy look a lot of my old shots had. I think I mimicked it almost perfectly! It's kind of surreal to see actually, it really does look like something I would have drawn back then. An odd feeling to draw both of these things right next to each other, haha. Amusingly I'm not as satisfied with how current Radic looks lol, but I do like how Callima came out. My beautiful crabshroom... I forgot how much fun Parasects are to draw, haha. I had a lot of shots of Parasect compared to Radic, I used to draw them very triangular.
I also made some new linking buttons you can see on the NPLU front page, most of which are just cropped existing art but I did slap together a few different things for this button.
My old lady trainer from Infinite Fusion sob, I'm so sad I lost my save for that. The Parasect's from Mystery Dungeon though because I didn't want to resprite a Parasect just for a link button lol. The background was taken from Cinnabar Island in FireRed/LeafGreen since that's what Infinite Fusion was based off of.
I also set up an RSS feed for all my sites in general! Which should hopefully be more convenient than having to come here every time or having to go to each site individually to see what's been changed. Sometimes I do little small edits or changes I don't feel like writing a whole entry about here since it feels a bit spammy, so this might be a cleaner and faster option for some! Also not on LJ/DW if that matters! They're just going to be brief "added links here/fixed stuff here/added an image" kind of blurbs, nothing super substantial but just to let you know something's changed easily. I coded the rss myself with this tutorial!
Does anyone out there use an RSS feed reader? You can use ghosts to subscribe to them which is handy, I know that much, haha. If you do use one let me know! I'm curious now.
The RSS icon should be on most of the subsites that have a chance of being updated for the most part... I left Any Regrets alone since I think it's reeeeeallly unlikely I'll come back to it any time soon, and I just lazed out on the MGS one, I should just sit down and add it but eh. Ehhh. Shoot, I should add it to the ghost sites too...
Oh, I was also looking for other Pokemon sites to add to the NPLU's button list and I came across two that were almost as old as the NPLU itself! One of them looks really slick and nice and the other one looks just as dated as the NPLU, haha. I love it, such fun contrasts.
dw post