Hedgehog Day

 

Hi, I'm just posting now and will edit later to explain but take these drawings please.

Edit: Kay, I came up with the first idea months ago when my sister and I started getting obsessed with Sonic and found out about the Hedgehog Day marketing ploy where they basically said "screw Groundhog Day, buy Sonic 3 and Knuckles, kids." Funny thing is, in Ireland, they observe hedgehogs to see if winter is over because they don't have groundhogs... and I have an Irish OC so I came up with this idea. The last panel was gonna be very different originally but I thought it was gonna be weird that I just cut to them being in front of an arcade or video game store so I changed it while sketching it. The second picture with my favorite fictional hedgehogs was an idea I came up with just a few weeks ago. Thought it would be fun to draw them all free falling in the sky and it was fun drawing these guys all together. This is the best I've drawn Sonic, Shadow, and Amy, and my first time drawing Silver. Unfortunately, with my wanting to finish this in time to post while it was still February 1st (Irish Hedgehog Day/First Day of Spring), I didn't realize Groundhog Day was Knuckles' 30th anniversary 😩 I had to find out while on Instagram after playing some Sonic Frontiers last night. So I'm going to post the drawing I did today in a separate post. See you there.

In Loving Memory of a Wonderful Companion

 

        Hello. I am posting here for the first time ever in 2023. In fact, last post I made was in February of last year. Yeah. I still love drawing and doodling, I just have less time for it now and with how I've been feeling these past few months, I haven't been up for completing any sort of doodles. I have finally completed one though, but that's because of its current significance to me. As of today, it has been one calendar month since my dog of over 11 years, Cindy, passed. She was a rather healthy dog until her 12th birthday in February. Then she gave us a health scare and I had my mom take her to the emergency vet where they originally said she had some sort of blood cancer. We gave her an herbal medicine prescribed by the vet and she improved well enough that in a regular vet visit set up in April, they said her blood test results were perfect. She gave us another health scare in late June/early July (I forget which month, this year has been a blur with the past few months being the most chaotic and the worst my mental health has been in a long time) and again, she seemed to recover until October when she suddenly went blind. After that, it was a rapid decline and my depression that had started during the summer worsened. She kept showing sparks of life and a will to live so for a good while I was against putting her down... until her last week of life where I realized it was for the best. She beat me to the punch though, taking her last breath while I was not home. My grandma's dog was in the room with her so she wasn't alone when she died. I'm crying right now as I type this but I had to make art of her so I had started just a few days after she died... and didn't touch it again until yesterday after work and finished it today so here she is:

I made two versions because I realized while playing with opacity to see the picture I was using as reference (well, more like I traced it but it's my picture of my dog, I did nothing wrong here officer) that I liked the look of it. She was an absolute sweetheart towards people, loved other dogs too to the point of crying at any dog she saw out and about shortly after her original companion Daisy died. She also loved killing lizards and rats, among other things but that's not important right now. I was hoping she would make it to 15 or at least her next birthday but as of now she is the longest lived dog I've had and she died of old age/natural causes, which is much better than the two dogs I had die before her. I am glad I had her in my life and hope to have a similar bond with my newer dog. Fun fact, Cindy was a Labrador-German Shorthaired Pointer mix, Daisy was a Chihuahua-Dachshund mix, and my latest dog Sophie is a Labrador mix too but with a shepherd breed. At first we thought German Shepherd but she seems to be Belgian Malinois instead, which is fine but they're more energetic and uh, I haven't been so energetic lately. But we should be fine. She's a very nice girl and quite responsive to me. Would be nice if my grandma's dog got along with her the way she got along with Cindy but she's a little brat coward and Sophie is bigger than Cindy was with the bad tendency to bark at dogs she wants to play with... and she has a loud bark. So yeah. I'm also posting here first because apparently I no longer have the instagram app on my laptop? Oh, and last year I switched from Android to iPhone so I'm not sure how to go about getting the picture on my phone in order to post. Well anyway, hoping the next year will work out a little better for me. Till next doodle, toodles.

Hey, you miss me?

 

      HELLO!!! I am sorry I disappeared like that but I am back with some art, which I had not been working on for months so here, catch: 

Yes, it is the same character with three different backgrounds. This is what happens when I stop drawing for over four months, I turn indecisive on how to finish stuff up. Why haven't I been drawing/posting drawings? Good question. My best guess is that this neverending pandemic *squints at antivaxxers and mask protesters* that is robbing me of whatever youth and sanity I have left has helped in making sure I don't feel motivated to draw cuz why bother when you and whatever you produce usually gets ignored? A person can only take so much before they snap or something and my depression hasn't improved, I just am in depressed moods for not as long as I used to be (if that makes any sense). So yeah, when you start to question if your own existence is even worth it, your creative juices suffer (or at least mine do). I really should get a therapist but I also don't have health insurance at all because I am a broke American that is too old to mooch off of my parents' insurance anymore. It's absolutely wonderful here. 

So anyway, this was a draft from months ago and I decided to keep working on it again last month alongside another piece that I am also recording a speedpaint for and clearly I chose to finish this one cuz there was less pressure. Hope to finish some more art and would it be too much to ask for something positive to happen in my life? That would be damn nice. Till next doodle, toodles.

Tropical Vibes + some extra goodies

      Hello. I am alive and I hope you are too or else you can't enjoy these presents that I am offering to make up for the lack on content these past few months:

Voila! I hadn't worked on any digital drawings in a long time and it felt so good to work on this one and actually finish too. Hadn't drawn this character in a long time (*whispers* I'm so sorry, Desi) so I felt like I should especially since this was a character I debuted last year during Hispanic heritage month so yeah, let's celebrate this character existing in my head for a whole year. They are Hispanic by way of Cuba and Colombia so that's what the hat flowers represent because they are supposed to be the national flowers for those countries. The fedora and neckerchief lean more towards Cuban fashion but I mean, I had to google Colombian cuisine because my family is Cuban and not given to doing much exploration outside of their own culture so the only Colombian food I knew of was arepas. Anyway, I had fun drawing this and I love how it looks. I have a couple of bonus paper doodles that were done earlier but my phone doesn't seem to agree with my laptop? Or is it the other way around? So it's difficult to back up pictures from my phone without the cloud and I don't feel like using the cloud, I don't trust that someone can't hack it, so I'll stick to my plug-in method thank you. 

 Um, they got posted backwards but last week, it was a Sunday and I felt inspired to draw that cute happy little baby because I hadn't drawn him in a while and I miss babies. I haven't been able to interact with one since the pandemic started but no one wants to help me make one either. Then the second picture is because I started watching the OG Pokémon anime (dub) in August and I love Team Rocket so much, they and Pikachu carry the show for me so I wanted to draw an OC dressed as Jessie from Team Rocket but I... just drew Jessie. I gotta draw James, he's my favorite. In case you're wondering, I am over 140 episodes in because turns out I had only ever seen part of the first season before my mom decided that the concept of Pocket Monsters was demonic and not fit for me to watch. She let me watch Digimon and I even watched cartoons and an anime starring witches so I think if my mom really wanted me to not watch demonic stuff, she wouldn't have let me watch cartoon witches either. Don't know when I'll doodle and post again so until then, toodles.

Fall Chernobyl (an OC of mine, not the destroyed Ukrainian town)

      Hello, I am the idiot that intended to post this in April finally and instead I pulled this stupid move of leaving it in my drafts and forgetting about it again. 

Do I really need to explain a speedpaint? Maybe, but I don't feel like it... except that I do regret that bright pumpkin color I used for the background. Other than that, might not have really changed anything else. I have noticed that my style has changed some since these chibis so hopefully I'll make some new chibis to show you what I mean. Till next doodle (or post... whatever) toodles.

P.S. I am fully vaccinated now and I hope that we can get more people around the world vaccinated soon so that this disease can stop being a problem.

Belated Earth Day Isoke

      Hello! I drew something for Earth Day/a contest so here you go:

I drew one of my OCs here for this occasion. For anybody that doesn't recognize her or happen to have stumbled across this post with no context, this is specifically my OC Isoke. A long, long time ago, I created this character but her name was Isis back then. Fast forward a few years ago when this character along with her cohorts had already been conscientiously shelved because I simply wasn't coming up with ideas for them and the terrorist group ISIS becomes prominent. I said "guess I have to rename a character." And then I did. And honestly, Isoke is a much better name for her because as much as Isis as a name is of African origin and a pretty sounding name, the history of whitewashing ancient Egyptian civilization has made the name Isis sound more like a "white girl name" when it shouldn't be. Not hating on anybody that has chosen the name Isis for their child/themselves but I gave Isoke a Nigerian background instead of a "being descended from Egyptian royalty" backstory and wanted to distance her from extremists. And I saw Isoke in a baby name book and liked it so there. Her cohorts have been getting renamed too, I'm just missing one and then I have to move on to the last name stage. 

Ok, now about the drawing. I wanted a softer look to this piece so it is experimental in that I barely added lineart and some features were painted in with the watercolor brush in MediBang. There was going to be a background with a cherry tree and other assorted flora but I didn't like how it was turning out and deleted it. I like how simple this piece looks, 10/10 would do again. I'm nearly done editing the speedpaint for this to add to my YouTube but this time, I changed what program I used to screen record (went back to the one I used to use because it does not awkwardly condense videos longer than five minutes) and this program allows me to "pause" recording and I have to edit that out so I'm watching all the videos beforehand to know where I have to edit. It's gonna be a long speedpaint unfortunately because I take longer on larger drawings and I don't thumbnail ahead of time like the trained professionals do so any time you watch one of my speeedpaints (if you do), you're also watching me make decisions on the fly. 

Well, I have another speedpaint project I would like to do sitting on the back burner, I am still working [very slowly] on that comic of mine, and I have in my drafts two speedpaints that were already posted to my YouTube so yeah. I might post one of those tomorrow but until next doodle, toodles.

Comic Preview!!!

 

      Hello! It is time for me to make my announcement that I kept teasing for months now... I've been working on a webtoon and here is a little preview:

I accidentally came up with this OC last summer and next thing I knew, I was writing out a story and in November I started with the actually making a comic. I still have a lot of work ahead of me partly because my depression has not been making it easy for me (when does it?) and for that reason I ask you be patient if you are interested and also that absolutely nobody go and steal this and post it somewhere as their work. I've been considering creating a patreon and posting there as I go finishing portions until I am ready to post to webtoon but idk, I'm hesitant to. I should probably start a twitter too but I don't feel like getting into more social media, I already find it tedious to check my own personal Instagram account so yeah. And with that, I bid you adieu until the next time I return.