LATE LATE LATE, but I had the incredible honor of providing portraits for delTree and eClips in Jam2Go’s bullet-hell-cat-racing game KITTENBURST!! 🐈💨🐈💨🐈💨
An RPG/Racing game about a flying cat set in the year 200X. Explore sites on the web, race through circuits, & battle bullet hell bosses to Save Cyberspace!
Out now! http://store.steampowered.com/app/1592360/Kitten_Burst/
Been Learning to Paint Old Cel Animation Backgrounds
Lately, I've had the drive to learn and practice creating digital paintings that closely resemble the traditional background paintings found in older anime. As a first step, I decided to grab a Kingsfield 4 screenshot from @moonlightfaust and use it as a reference.
I honestly ended up kinda surprised at how good I think it turned out. I haven't really tried painting a background before, and I think this is a very good first step for where I wanna be.
How I do it
Firstly, I loaded up my reference on my second monitor and started painting away in clip studio paint. I sketched things out at first and then used the default gouache brush for the broad strokes. I made sure to use a nice variation of colors and values on the surfaces to give them texture. After that I blended stuff together using a custom blend brush I grabbed called "wet betty", and then I used the thin gouache brush to work on smaller details. I drew out the caustics and then painted some blue lighting on the walls on a layer set to additive (glow). Here are some wip photos showing all that off.
After creating the base drawing, I brought it into Affinity Photo and adjusted the brightness/contrast and added a softproof adjustment layer to make it look as though it was printed. I also used a white mask of the caustics in order to make those parts of the image transparent.
After that, I brought the image into blender in order to simulate the cel animation look.
I'm using a variation of @jam2go's under-lighting method here in order to get that nice, naturalish glow. I'm using a special compositing setup in order to simulate the little variations in light and lens artifacts you might get from capturing cels that gets processed onto the final render.
I've also given the image cel plane very subtle bumpiness in order to simulate real celluloid not being completely flat. (It's a little hard to see, but I just subdivided it and used a displacement modifier)
The light artifacts and the cell bumpiness are both animated, and I also added very subtle noise to the position of the cell to simulate how each frame in cel animation isn't placed in exactly the same spot. After rendering, it all comes together to simulate a cel animation look fairly nicely I think.
Tagged by @firstruleofmethclub to post 5 songs in my recent rotation. Since I don't have any concrete playlists to pull from this is gonna be a crapshoot, but here we go.
Photographic (Rex The Dog Dubb) - Depeche Mode
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I've been on a Depeche Mode kick recently (in other news, water is wet). This remix was a minor meme on YTMND back in like 2005 or so, but it slaps so we'll forgive it.
FALL INLOVE! - Ena Mori
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Found this one thanks to @doyoulikethissong-poll, where it did incredibly poorly (5th least liked song on the blog to date). Despite that, it's the sort of airy pop that gets stuck in my head way too easily. (similar vibes to Chelsea Jade or… Caroline Polachak, maybe? Idk, it's not a genre i fuck around with much)
M.E. - Gary Numan
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so where the FUCK is your head at, anyway?
Glorious Outburst - osc444
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There's your DDResque song for this list - osc444 is a DDR-adjacent producer from Japan who, to put it lightly, has had a rough year. This is their most recent release, and I do fuck with it.
Bounce2me - Jam2go (From Kitten Burst)
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@gauntletqueen has been playing Kitten Burst on stream with @punkitt-is-here recently, and since hearing this earworm my life has not known peace. Watch for fun references to mid-2000s flash cartoons, avoid watching if you're vulnerable to identity fraud scams.
Anyway, we're tagging people? We're tagging people I guess. I tag, uhh… well, @gauntletqueen (REVENGE), @ssecond-hand-faith, @lightwxrker, @funktrash, and uhh… @booords, why not
Tag game, cause i got tagged but i dont really have anyone to tag myself qwq
Tagged by @horse-doctor
Last song: The Eternal September | Kitten Burst OST | Jam2go
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Fav color: Blue
dont really have a favorite shade in mind.
Currently watching: Pluto
not into anime that much but i saw a video essay by curious archive called "sympathy for the machine" talking about how people will project themself on to robots in media how we perceive them on the same level of consciousness and free will as an actual person. in that vid it brought up North #2's story of being a retired war robot who want to learn to play piano because hes permanent scared by his time fighting and wanted to create something rather than destroy.
ive always loved robots and im always a sucker for sad robots stories and gave it a watch, with my only impression of pluto being that vid i didnt know anything about the detective plot b4 hand and got pleasantly surprised, only got like 2 episode left of it
Sweet/Savory/Spicy: a tie between savory and spicy
cant really pic a fav, love the savoriness of meat but love stuff that has a spicy kick as well
Relationship Status: Was in a year long committed relationship but got dumped a couple days before our 1 year anniversary, only just now getting over it almost 4 months later
Current Obsession: Kitten Burst
I fucking love y2k stuff in general so just a really fun gayme where you can fly around super fucking fast as a flying kitty (:3) to a genuinely good ost has just infected me with brain rot. currently near the end of the game but i plan to 100% next few play sessions
Last thing i googled: Bulldog Chest Harness
saw a bunch of furry art with the artist's sonas wearing them and ive been considering getting one for myself. think they look super cool in general and i wanna wear one out over a shirt because half of the bdsm harness's/cuff/collars i see im just like "damn, that just kinda looks good in general. i need to get one of those both for kink AND general wear!". anyway i think i can make an outfit to pull that off lol (currently do got a collar with matching cuffs on the way as well so im super excited 👀)
Yeah i dont really have any other mutuals ive interacted as much as horse so i cant really tag them without the anxiety of just randomly tagging them qwq
After almost 4 years of development, Kitten Burst is releasing in full on January 20th 2024. (around Noon EST).
Thank you to everyone who has supported the game through Early Access, and has followed along with development! The project became 1000% better with your feedback! For everyone who waited, you can still wishlist the game and get alerted when it releases. There will also be an little release sale for the early birds!
listening to jam2go (the album 'lookout' in particular) is like reliving the best parts of my first intense vaporwave/future funk/80s obsession back in 2014, but experiencing that resurrected honeymoon phase with NEW TUNES <333