28/06/2023 - 05:40 AM

I'm Joining Artfight!

I've known of this site for a good couple years, but was never able to join. I didn't have a tablet, and doing all the art required traditionally felt like a chore and incredibly annoying.

But now I do have a tablet! So, I'm finally joining!

In case you don't know what it is - well, first of all, google is free and can probably explain it way better than I can. But secondly, it's basically a website for artists. Here you can upload your characters (sorta like toyhou.se), and once the event start, you can "attack" other people's characters. Attacking means making an art piece. The users are divided into two teams, and you earn points for your team by attacking. How many points depends on multiple factors, like how much effort went into the piece, how much of the character shows, etc.

I've always liked the concept of it all, it sounds fun as hell to just draw stuff for other people, and get stuff in exchange! It's like an art exchange, but without the chance to get burned (which has happened to me, story for another day...), since you know exactly what you're doing and what you're getting.

I'm currently rushing to get ready. I had a while to prepare, but as usual, I leave everything for the last minute. I have a bunch of character references to make, not to mention I still gotta finish a big piece for someone IRL. Ah! So much work! And yet no job... (Someone please hire me, I'm desperate.).

You can find me here! I'd honestly reccomend joining too, and who knows, maybe I'll attack you! (God that sounds bad out of context)

Either way, that is all! See y'all whenever I have something else to say.

PS: I am still working on the website. I'm also working on another story, so I may finally have something worthwile to post here. So much stuff!

07/06/2023 - 01:02 AM

Happy Pride Month!

Yeehaw, it's finally pride month, motherfuckers! I don't really "celebrate" this month per say, but I wanted to draw a piece for it anyways cause... You know, perfect time to do so.

I have never hidden my identity as an aroace trans man. I don't talk about it a lot, because there really isn't any reason to, but I'm not ashamed of it either. I was, for a while, until I finally accepted myself, and now I'm fine!

Either way, I don't really wanna talk in depth about my identity right now (maybe later in the month, if I feel like it), but I do wanna talk about this piece!

The character featured here is called Edward Bethel. He's been a long time favorite character of mine, and I've had him for around 10 years. He's a british trans catman, quadruple-crossing secret agent/mole, english teacher, widower and all around sad man.

I settled on him being trans long, long before I figured out I was trans too. It's kind of funny, actually. For a long time I could relate a lot to him, "but he's a man and I'm not, so that's a big difference!". Needless to say, that changed lmao.

Edward's backstory (specifically relating to him being trans) was marred by transphobia, his parents not approving of him and deadnaming and misgendering him constantly. Other than his wife, even his most supportive family was still not really okay with him. This kind of made him really focused on "passing", always hiding the fact that he was trans and being very ashamed of it. That is, until he is taken to another universe after the death of his wife (long story). In that universe, no one cares if you're trans or not, they treat you the same, and he's finally starting to accept himself more. He's still not the most open, but he's opening up little by little.

Luckily, my own story turned out way, way more positive and chill than his lol. But either way! I thought it would be nice to draw Edward for this... mostly cause I wanted to draw him in the trans flag colors, I'm not gonna lie. I have so many options in characters I could draw, there's very few characters that are cishet in my repertoire (even fewer than the amount of regular humans). ...Mostly because most of my characters don't really have a set gender identity or sexuality, and I tend to go with "bisexual unless I decide otherwise" as a baseline for all my characters.

Anyway, time to wrap this up! If you celebrate this month, I hope you have a wonderful time! Actually, have a wonderful time even if you don't celebrate it. Everyone has a right to be happy. Unless you hate people for things which they cannot control. In which case, I hope your June is kinda shitty. Either way, that's that. See ya!

PS: I will finish the Character section some day. Maybe then you can read about Edward's Backstory in more detail lol.

29/05/2023 - 22:02 PM

Scattered and Busy

Hey... so, long time no see, huh?

I didn't really forget about this website, I just didn't really feel like updating it before – too much work, nothing to really say, things like that. I'm gonna get right back to it though, and maybe finally finish all these disparate pages (lol).

As for what I've been doing all this time... well, it's complicated. I've been looking for a job, unsuccessfully as always. I've gone more hard at practicing my art and fully shaping and defining my two main art styles.

I've also gotten really, *really* into DnD. I've always had an interest in it, but never quite got to fully play it how I wanted. But I finally got the chance, and these past couple of months I've been completely consumed by it.!

It's just so, so much fun! We don't take it 100% seriously, and it's just a blast. I've learned a lot, and I've met a lot of cool people. I've also reconnected with some people I haven't seen in years, so that's fun too! I've really focused on creating characters, a setting for a campaign, and a oneshot I wanna run really soon.

I've also started taking some commissions! So far, only to the peeps at our Roleplay club/group/whatever, mostly because they're all in pesos, but plan on converting them to USD and posting them here... eventually lol.

Anyways, that's all I've been up to! My life isn't really that complicated, I just get busy with a thousand different side projects, and my brain is *super* scattered, so I forget to update the things I've already started. That one Jojo fic I published is also languishing...

But well, whatever! I don't know when I'm going to update again, but I'm gonna try and make as much progress as possible on the website in the meantime! See y'all around!

01/01/2023 - 03:17 AM

Happy New Years!

Happy New Years Everybody! I hope you all have an excellent new year, and can fulfill all your goals and aspirations.

I started the year drinking and hanging out with my friends. I wasn't really planning on hanging out with anybody, but they dropped by my house to say hi (that part was planned) before leaving to go to the park, but then the rain started pouring. And, well, they were on bikes so going anyways would have not been a good idea. So they stayed at my house till like, 7 am. It was fun.

Then I went to sleep. It takes me like 2-3 hours to fall asleep, so I was starting to fall asleep at around 8:30 am. At that point, my dad came into my room looking for something (I think it was his phone charger, that my sister frequently "borrows" aka steals). I always have a huge glass of water near my table, and it seems my father didn't see it cause he dropped it, and all the water fell on top of me.

The mattress was soaking wet and so was half of my shirt, and I said bye-bye to my sleepiness. So I grabbed the sheets that were dry and my pillow, put them on the floor, and tried to sleep there. The idea was good, except for my dog who woke me up constantly by walking on top of me, or crying when I wasn't playing with him. Eventually, I fell asleep, but it must have been around 10 or so, cause I woke up at 6 pm lmao.

Besides that though, it was a good time. I ate a lot of food (my favorite part of any party) and did nothing of importance, so it was great.

Every New Year, I also have a tradition that I do. I started it in 2016/2015, can't quite remember. Basically, on the 31st of December, as late as possible, I draw a bust of a character, marking it as my last drawing of the year. Then, on the 1st of January, I draw another character on the same page, marking it as my first drawing of the year. When I started doing this, I had plenty of characters who were pairs or thematically connected in some way. After doing this for as long as I have, though, I have run out of obvious characters so I just sorta draw whatever lol. Here's the drawing I did this year!

Either way, that's all I wanted to say. Enjoy your new year everyone!

15/12/2022 - 05:25 AM

Little Animation I made

Today I procrastinated on the thing I needed to do again, and instead made a little animation. Here it is:

Making it was a WHOLE process. The computer I have access to (and animate and make all my stuff with) is super old, it's an old goverment-granted laptop from 2012. It's 32 bits, so between that and how old it is, a whole lotta software doesn't really accept it. I tried messing around with pencil2d, but it won't pick up my pen pressure. (Edit: I managed to fix it and now it picks up pen pressure. Still not too useful tho.)

So I've been making all my gifs with FireAlpaca... or well, assembling them there, but drawing in Paint Tool Sai 2. Basically what I've done so far is draw everything on Paint Tool sai 2, save the file as a .psd, and then import THAT file into FireAlpaca and progress from there. The animations that are just sketches, I do directly on FireAlpaca.

So today, I downloaded SAI Animation Assistant and it's quite a nifty thing! It's no replacement for proper animating software, and it bugs out a little when I have a lotta files, but it works fine enough for now.

Either way, it was a huge help with animating this whole thing. I did it in chunks: first, the hat, then the eyes blinking, then the eyes looking to the side, and lastly the wink. Originally I wanted to assemble it all with the program's help, but it wasn't quite working, so I decided to assemble it in a video editing program.

I use VSDC for all my video editing stuff, apparently it's quite simple but since I know nothing of editing it works just fine lmao. I use the free version cause I ALWAYS use the free version, thus is the life of a broke latino. Putting it together drove me insane. I had to separate the body in different pieces for it to look right: At the very top, was the part of the hat that goes on front of everything. Then, goes the eyes, and lastly the body with the back part of the hat.

The benefit of doing it like this is that I could really control how much I wanted everything to last. Importing the pictures was the simple part - deciding how long I wanted everything to last and fiddling with it was what took forever. I messed with it so much when it doesn't even matter lmao. I'm probably gonna keep using this method cause it works - at least for longer animations

But the part that TRULY drove me insane was trying to export the gif in a way that didn't look like shit. I kept trying, toying with all sort of things, but VSDC kept exporting it really low quality, you could practically count the pixels. So I went to use a video, but it wasn't exporting with a transparent background, so I had to fiddle even MORE to get it, and even then it could only be exported in a .mov file instead of a .mp4 like I wanted. THEN, after all that, I went to a website to convert from video to gif. And despite the background being transparent, It seemingly cut off parts of the background too because the outer edges look all pixely now. Idk what settings I should touch, if anyone knows please tell me.

An unrelated addendum: I have been avoiding updating the site cause I had added those sidebars all manually on every pageg they appear in and thinking about having to update them all manually was giving me a heart attack. Luckily I figured out how to make it so I only have to update it once (thanks, sadgrlonline tutorials!) and now I'm not scared anymore :D

04/12/2022 - 06:35 AM (edited)

My First Post

I finally decided to make my very own website! I used to have one back when I was around 16, but I got tired and confused wayyy too fast and abandoned it. What pushed me back to making one now that I'm 21 is the need to have a single "hub" so to speak to post all my things in - specially when it comes to my worldbuilding and my art. So far I've been relying on toyhou.se for storing all my character information, and while that's great and all, it's not a good place to store random worldbuilding info, nor is it adequate to store my fanart.

Built wholy by myself because I wanna make it look just right. It's still a MASSIVE work in progress while I figure out how to exactly lay it out - I have a good idea of what to do but I'm not fully done yet lol. I'll probably start by uploading all content here for the archives, and then start posting new content later.

Since this is my very first post and all, I guess introducing myself would be a good idea. Hi, I'm denjidenji, also known as Nicolas. I'm a hobbyist artist, writer, game designer, animator, illustrator, and pretty much everything else that catches my eye lol. I'm 21 and from Argentina. I'm bilingual - I speak English and Spanish, and am currently learning Japanese. I have a shitton of info about my characters that I love to ramble about, so if you're down for that then I can provide lol. This site is heavily inspired by Funamusea's old website - which was very influential on me at the start of my path as a "serious" artist.

At the time I'm writing this, the proper "blog" link does not exist, so this is gonna go straight to the Home Page lol. I would add the blog section now, but I stayed up the whole night programming this so I wanna take a break and sleep first lol. Yes, the logo is unfinished as well - so is everything. But, I'll deal with it later. If you are interested in this thing for some ungodly reason, check on it from time to time. I'll make sure to keep it updated this time!

Edit: *banner, not logo. Gosh, I was really sleepy when I wrote this huh?