January 2021

February 5th, 2021

5-ish days into February and I finally get around to writing this old thing! A strangely productive yet unproductive month, I doodled a lot, mostly.

So after a bit of messing around and a hard reset on my Clip Studio folder (thanku to both Cammy and dcb for helping me figure out the issue!) I finally managed to get my brushes onto my new set up. I got a new tablet for Christmas, which is pretty hype. Not much to say about this piece, other than it’s a little faux-traditional Bunny I doodled to test my trusty watercolour brush and a new pencil brush I found. Think it came out nicely textured.


Another faux-traditional drawing, this time of Caby, drawn for my current about page on my site, though I shrank that right down and made it all crunchy. So, have the full quality one! It’s a little wonky but eh, suits the aesthetic, I guess,,,


Sort of as practice on my new setup, sort of just inspired by the thick, coloured lineart and shiny eyes on display over on Mab’s Land, have a curious lil chibi Bunny! Not only is this bizarrely different from my usual fare, I also gave her head wings. And by golly I’m keeping em. Not as a constant thing, but they’re fun to doodle, so why not?


Soooo Cammy and I discussed this idea and got rather hype about it. I made up a lil species a couple months ago, very creatively named “Slerrets”, they’re like a mixture between ferrets and sea slugs, with wild colours and glowy footprints, as well as the bendiness and general sass of ferrets.

And while we were peeking through sites we liked the look of, we started missing running a site with a mascot. And, well, perhaps Somnolescent needs one… And slerrets? Slerrets seem like a good choice,,,

Introducing… Bulbo? I think? Name is a work in progress… Anywho, he’s cute! He’ll most likely be appearing on future group projects, such as moving Seamounts to its own site, and perhaps some other ideas in the works~ :3c


Whoof, getting there now…

SO, I’ve been playing a lot of Elder Scrolls recently, as my recent site update might’ve mentioned,,, And during my adventures through Morrowind, Cyrodiil and Skyrim, I ended up with a PC that I became quite attached to. Her name is Blivo Barabiri and she has a Toyhouse profile which you can peek at here.

And of course, I had to make a counterpart for her for Cammy~,,, He’s a bard and a bit of a housecat, spending most of his time in the safety of their cabin and the meadows that surround it, always there to welcome Blivo back home after an adventure~ >:3c

Note the player credits and watermark down at the bottom there, for utmost old web furry aesthetic. I’m easily amused,,,


And of course, I couldn’t make a January post without mentioning our anniversary! Two years of cabycammy and we’re stronger than ever >>:3c

This here drawing was the first full drawing I managed to finish completely on my new tablet, from sketch to colouring/shading. It took some getting used to but I’m very glad I did.

One of the things I drew for him this year, two forest spirits moving across a meadow towards the treeline, nothing but moonlight and their ethereal glow lighting the way,,, Pleased with how this turned out, was a bit of an experiment colouring the background mostly blue, but I think it turned out nicely, very sleepy and a bit cool, neat contrast with the glow bugs.

December 2020

January 7th, 2021

Last post for 2020! It’s a little late but I’ve been busy setting stuff up, I’ll probably post a bigger update elsewhere about all that, so let’s just get right into the art!

Starting off with a bit more Pinede, here’s a character concept I’m working on. She’s an albino red squirrel and she’s blind, but with a penchant for magic, she’s got crazy good hearing too. No name or backstory yet, and the town I’d like her to live in doesn’t yet exist.

She’s cute though,,,


A Penny! A simple doodle that I did to test out the new feature in Clip Studio, the timelapse function. You record your drawing process and it spits out a video for you to do whatever with it, very neat. Other than that, quite fond of the lineart on this, pleasingly messy. Penny’s always fun to draw,,,


Eloise! I hadn’t drawn her in a while,,,
So, basically, while I was going through old art to do some end of the year comparisons, I found some stuff in March where I used this one big, textured brush to draw. Now I still use it all the time for my backgrounds, but I hadn’t used it to line and colour lads since then. So that’s what I did!

This Eloise came out of that, and I think she looks super cute. I should really use this brush more, it takes some patience but it’s fun and I get good results.


Not Pinede but still a fantasy twist! Just something fun to amuse Cammy and I,,, A more anthro Cammy, ready for adventure and magic, with a cape, because capes are cool :3c


A wild mon appears and threatens you with a can of Tab! A spur of the moment version of this goofy meme that he sent in the groupchat. It suited him.


And last but certainly not least, a big, comfy group pic I did to celebrate the winter season with the lads. Cammy and Caby’s inn, situated in Caerpinwyd, where they and their friends from across the world of Pinede meet on a snowy winter night to share stories and enjoy a warm drink or two…

This version is shrunk down because the original is utterly massive and too big to fit just about everywhere. Either way, I’m pleased with it, I think I succeeded in making it look cosy,,,

November 2020

December 5th, 2020

Lookie me, late again,,,

Listen, I’ve a good reason this time, the end of last month and the start of this month has been very very busy, and very hectic, very heavy emotionally. So I haven’t really been in a suitable place for writing this sort of thing. Or really doing much of anything,,,

But! We’re here now, so I’ll get this done before it becomes even more late.

So a little while back, as you might remember if you’ve read my other posts, while thinking up characters to liven up our first Pinede town, Caerpinwyd, Cammy and I ended up with this little lady, Sapphire. She was originally a dark brown-ish grey, and that worked fine. But more recently I discovered that raccoons can have the erythristic mutation, and they’re so pretty like that, real reddish blonde fur, so I had to try out Sapphire with that sort of coat. And I’m very sure it’s staying, really helps her stand out.

Oh, and the little doodle in the corner is a style more inspired by the raccoons I saw while perusing the Yerf archives. Also quite like that, I do.


More Pinede! And another redesign, actually. So back in the day, about 2013-14, I had a little world I played with called Gors, and the two man characters I focused on were named Dai and Oke. Dai being an elf with black hair and green eyes, and Oke being some sort of winged creature reminiscent of an owl. Gors went nowhere as most young teenagerhood projects do, and Dai and Oke sat in the back of my mind for a couple years.

But more recently, Cammy and I started work on the second town concept for Pinede, a sort of desert town on the coast named Murad, and a big facet of Murad is its university. While we rambled about a bunch of neat ideas, I started thinking of Dai again, and decided he could be a lad living and working in the University. I eventually settled on a species for him, a serval, because their long, thin limbs and big ears reminded me of him. And as a weak bastard for unique colour mutations, and also just to match his old hair colour, he’s a melanistic serval.

He’s dressed in the loose, lightly coloured clothing common in Murad, and spends most of his time during the day either in the shade of the University, or down in the underground streets where furbearers reside. During the night he enjoys watching the stars up on the University roof or out in the desert~

Oh, and Oke is here too, as a little elf owl, Dai’s shoulder pet. He was mute in the original story, so it doesn’t really hinder him like this, he’s still a bundle of personality! I hope to continue developing them like this,,,


More Pinede! This time part of an art trade I did with another resident doodler, Borb, where I drew her Pinede sona, or Narratorsona. She’s a black-footed cat, or at least looks like one… Her brightly coloured scarf and the sparkle in her eye indicate that she might be a little more than that~

This style is more similar to what I have in mind for my Pinede art, more texture, warm colours and a general traditional look, be it pencil or ink or watercolour. It suits the time period quite nicely, I’d say.

If you want to see her side of the art trade, you can find that here;

Fintan! So damn good

Aaaand another Borb thing, this time a birthday gift, because she had her birthday this month and I felt I should make a little something,,,

A simple, floaty lil drawing of three of her main characters, her sona Polaris, a closed species refugee named Surprise, and a fox bab named Sam! I’ve linked to their toyhou.se profiles because that feels useful.

Pleased with how this came out, it’s a bit more like what I used to draw a lot of, so it was nice going back to that. Minimal shading, bright colours, thick lines, good lads >:3c


Ooooh lookit this, a new Somnol banner,,, One that I made quickly because Cammy realised we had no festive banners and the javascript for the front page was about to switch into the December banners, of which there were like two and none of them were festive.

So here you guys go, a drunk seb falling asleep in his chair while Penny ponders evil schemes she may commit… Though she’s not quite sure, it is Christmas after all,,, Father Christmas may disapprove…

Semi-redraw of a very old and bad painting that’s about two years old, which I’ll post here too. I’d say I’ve improved a little, at least with that Christmas tree,,,,


Uhhhh I’ve run out of actual drawings so here, have a little dude. Wyn with giant, adorable eyes I doodled to post during a conversation about big eyes, or something. About fitting big eyes on the head in a comfortable way? Anyway, he’s cute so here ya gooooo-

October 2020

November 5th, 2020

First proper Art Gallery post on this version of the subsite, and it is about five days late… No matter, I drew… a few things this month so let’s get on with it.


I had a slow time at the start of this month, and as such, most of everything on here’s gonna be Halloween related. Little tidbits that I made while brainstorming. First off, a sketch of Marshmallow’s Halloween costume this year. My main aim with him is just “cute animal, preferably with a holiday-relation”, so this year he was an Easter lamb! His outfits are also always onesies with hoodies because that also suits him.


And here’s Torrone Morbido and Sweet Po respectively! Sweet Po is a purple wizard lad with a magic staff for authenticity, because I like to give him more classic, traditional Halloween staples. Torrone Morbido was dressed as Herbert West from Re-Animator, though no one in Somnolescent seemed to recognise the reference,,, My aim with his costumes is pretty simple, he dresses as spooky or edgy pop culture icons. If you saw my Halloween page this year, you’ll notice that I ended up using the sketch of Torrone for his final drawing.


Before I knew what I wanted to do with this year’s Halloween special, I drew two Candy Corns, pondering just having a drawing a day of him, before eventually landing on my proper idea. One of those drawings made its way into the page as a lil nudge to the amusing call I had with the lads while I drew this, but this one’s just been in my files ever since. Might as well give it a home here, cute little dude.


Something not as Halloween-y now, this was done as part of an art trade with a person on Twitter, and I ended up being quite pleased with it. I took an embarrassingly long time to colour and shade it because I was having a rough time concentrating at the time, but I got it done! Oh, and have their side of the bargain too because it came out adorable. Here’s credit too because I gotta,,,


My October art folder is so tiny that this and the last entry are gonna be ones I’ve posted elsewhere, but still like and wanna talk about. First is this, which were mine and Cammy’s Discord avatars for much of October! Cammy’s a spooky vampire and I’m a wizard with a crystallum staff. I wanted to make it as festive as possible, so I used plenty of dark orange, both in the background and in the tones. I’m pleased with how it turned out, they were super cute avatars,,,


Again, I have posted this one everywhere but I love it and I’m still proud of it. I suddenly got the urge to draw a piece with a proper background, and took it because I’d draw next to nothing overall otherwise. I sketched it out, lined the figure and then loosely painted the rest of it until it looked right. The background painting style is somewhat inspired by G1 My Little Pony frames I’d been staring at. I really miss that soft, painterly style you used to get in the backgrounds of many shows, but G1 MLP had some especially lovely ones. The boy is of course Cammy, being a damned hippie~

Animating is hard

October 19th, 2020

So, every once in a blue moon I get the urge to animate something, and yesterday evening I got the urge to sketch out a little walk cycle, to prove a point. I chose Penny because Penny is just circles and therefore should be easy to draw over and over

I started out with the head, torso and legs, and once I was kinda happy with that, I added the arms, tail and skirt on using different coloured lines to stop myself getting too confused. I thusly ended up with this;

This took roughly 20 minutes, mostly of me guessing where the legs should be and making sure it looped. I could see several issues with it, notably the fact that the stride was stronger on one step than the other, and that her head is made of jelly, so afterwards I went back to edit it again.

Soon I had this;

Much better! Especially on the legs. Looks less like she’s tripping over with every step. This is a Penny walking with purpose,,,

I then went to bed and came back to it the next morning, where I then got the smart idea of lining it in Clip Studio rather than FireAlpaca, which I’d been using up to this point. This idea had pros and cons.

The pros being that I get to use my usual brushes instead of the FireAlpaca ones, which don’t agree with my touchscreen and glitch out occasionally. The cons being that I had to sorta guess if the lines weren’t awful and needed redoing, and therefore found myself constantly redrawing little bits, resaving and then shoving back into FireAlpaca to preview the animation.

But I managed! And I got this out of it;

Which is acceptable, I’d say. Still a little jagged but I only drew 6 frames so that’s to be expected. I’d draw more but that’d mean colouring more and I have better things to be doing.

On the subject of colouring… It was a surprisingly simple task, despite the fact I’ve added a bunch of new markings to Penny’s design a few months back. It’s where Penny’s simple shapes came in handy, I tried to use the lines to measure where to put each marking. Overall I think that worked, though it again took some tweaking.

Have the final product in both traditional GIF and also APNG because it looks nicer.

(Oh, and I flipped her around so more of the orange on her face would be visible, I could’ve done the other side but it was looking a bit flat for my tastes.)

So yeah, there ya go.

My general belief is that animating is one part figuring out how to animate something, how the weight and physics and timing and all that jazz should go, and five parts just drawing over and over.

I also think that the sketching part of animating gets easier the better your grasp of anatomy and 3d shape gets. This is because you’re basically using the same skills you develop to draw in order to animate. Easier to decide where the arm should go when… you know where the arm should go.

Starting an animation? Is fun. Finishing an animation? Super fun. But the bit in the middle is a chore, I tell you. If you’re in the zone and pumping lines and colours out, it’s fine, but if you’re not into it? It feels like a ridiculous amount of work.

Respect your animators, I tells ya.