Redemption and Embarrassment

So last post I was talking about not having done any commissions from Kaz for a while but that I just hadn’t gotten inspired. Plus he’s been doing streams like every night for days now. Well I got one coming now that I’m looking forward to. He did the Quill Weave playing RPG with a little imagining of her PC. A dashing archer. So it will be good to get that and do my color thing on it.

I actually commissioned FurNut a few days back for a followup to the Katia/Trashpanda Noodle thing. Basically I was looking through the booru during a stream to try and get inspiration when I ran across that and realized I really like the style.

I don’t think it would be trash-talking FurNut to say he’s a bit over the line into cubby sort of things sometimes. Okay, well and truly over any line you care to draw. But he’s got the cutest style ever. (Well, actually even when it IS over the line it’s still cute.) Seems like his characters are always so… I don’t know… HAPPY looking. I really became enamored of his style with this:

That’s just adorable work there. So after Kaz did his take on Trashpanda and Katia sharing a noodle with a sexy nude Katia on a plate with noodles, I noticed one glaring flaw. It wasn’t colored! Oh the shame! Well, it JUST SO HAPPENS, FN, that I have been working on learning to color… so I asked him if I could color it. I won’t post it here again, if you’re following me you probably already know the one.

So I thought I’d commission FurNut directly and ask for a followup. I’d requested something like “Katia and Trashpanda playing in the noodles”. I had something roughly like this in mind:

I fell asleep before FN could get to mine though so he held off till I was able to watch a stream. (He’s got a cool animated facial-motion-tracking avatar thing that I think we’ve officially named Dapperkitty. It’s the coolest thing ever and perfect for a stream. I want to get one. I noticed they have a Dragon so… that might happen if ever I did anything stream-worthy.)

A couple nights ago the stars were aligned and i watched him draw my commission on his stream. Before he started, he said he had an idea but it might be too NSFW for the Prequel booru.

Now look. I’m a guy, and in most cases that means I’m a pig for that stuff. I’m not going to sugar coat it. I don’t think I’m particularly INTO furry porn, but I definitely appreciate the well done ones. And it’s been my experience that if an artist has an idea, let them run with it! It’s better than anything you could dream up. That’s why I commissioned this from Kaz:

I had no idea what it was going to be, but Kaz said he had an idea for an Adine picture and I was more than happy to pay $10 to get it realized. Because Kaz ideas are pretty often best ideas. Best $10 I ever spent? Probably not, but it’s up there!

So I told FurNut to go ahead with his idea. And yea – it was IMHO a good one. A very good one. Also his method is VERY amenable to coloring. His lines are clean and uniform. Believe me, after coloring scanned paper drawings, it’s like heaven!

Here’s the thing. I can’t post it directly here. I really do want to keep this tumblr SFW – at least marginally. Here’s a cropped version anyway:

But I can link to it, with the VERY clear admonition that it’s NSFW. Depending on your definition, it’s porn. Not sex, but… well, if you don’t fear clicking the link, you can be the judge…

NSFW LINK! CLICK AT YOUR OWN RISK!

But it’s so CUTE! And I was very proud of my coloring job on it too. I honestly think it was 2:00am last night when I finished it. (I get obsessed easily). So I made a version with no nipples and no… well… camel toe? that I thought might just squeak by the Booru rules as questionable.

Kaz still had his stream up so I popped in and asked him if it would be acceptable.

He laughed and basically said. “No. No no no.”

I’ll be honest, I felt bad. Embarrassed. I felt like I should have KNOWN that based on his reaction. Why could I not see that it was so over-the-line that it shouldn’t have even been a question? Still do kinda. I guess I’ve just gotten so desensitized to such things that when I see something so cute, I don’t really “see” the sexual part of it as much. I dunno.

Well there’s plenty of other places to post it. Other than FurNut’s booru I’ve upped it to e621, FA and Sofurry now. That’s enough. And I’ll get over my embarrassment quickly. By the time I finish coloring QW’s PC, this will all be a vague bad memory. And I’m aware I’m overly sensitive to such things – esp. considering some of the other side-works I do.

I feel like I’m failing BDPrequel

I think last night’s stream was the 2nd stream I’ve failed to get a commission from Kaz. A couple streams back I wanted something but was out of ideas and I think it was FurNut that came up with “Adine and Katia trying on lingerie”. However, I had to bail on the stream and Enheldor asked if he could commission it instead. Wasn’t even my idea so, sure!

I was a little disappointed the next morning when there was no sign of it in makimb0′s imgur, but not really surprised. Whether it was too lewd or if it simply wasn’t interesting enough for Kaz, I’m not sure. FurNut picked it up though from Enheldor and did a really cute take on it in his style. I thought the original was Adine and Katia, but if so it got changed to Adine and Rainbow Dash. In fact, his was b&w greyscale and I colored it. I was going to link to it here, but realized it might be just a little over the NSFW line for posting directly on this blog.

However, here’s a link to it if you’re okay with that:

WARNING – NSFW

I’m afraid I’m not much of a fan of ponies, but it was still cute I thought. I do have a couple commissions coming in sometime soon, the main one being a commission for something like “Katia and a butterfly” or something like that. (I was trying to be too cute by half and make it totally non-lewd). Looks like I got a nice butterfly and perhaps a distant Katia on the ground far below if I saw it right in the stream imgur. Also got a crayon Katia-picking-up-quarters coming.

But last night’s stream I totally struck out. I just couldn’t think of much. The one idea I had was to do a commission of QW’s D&D character. I really liked the bit from the sidestory where QW was playing with some friends at a bar when Katia stumbled in drunk and would love to see more related stuff.

But Kaz didn’t like the idea or something. I just like the idea of QW, who’s normally a pretty conservative stick-in-the-mud doing something as uncharacteristic as playing D&D. And of course, what kind of character would she choose?

Afterwards, I realized we might already have that:

Granted that was technically Dodger but, cmon, we all know it’s a young QW right? And really I don’t know if imaginary PCs change all that much when you get older. If so that would be a pretty awesome D&D character anyway.

Which led to an idea I would love to come to fruition one day. I think Kaz would be the ultimate DM. I’d love to play some sort of RPG with him in a stream someday (even if it involved ponies). I bet he’d run a great game.

(Yes, I mined through Kaz’ tumblr looking for some vaguely appropriate image)

Of course, for practical reasons that’s unlikely to happen. I think one of the recent tumblrs brought in like 50+ viewers. How can you make sense of a 50+ player RPG? You can’t. And as much as I want to be ‘special’ I know I’m kinda not. Just noisy and lewd which really isn’t the same thing.

I am going on vacation in mid August to Washington DC and NYC and will be staying in Bethesda for a couple of days. Kaz lives about an hour from there and I fantasized a bit about going to meet him. But I’ll chicken out. Let’s face it, I’m not the right demographic (if you didn’t know already, I’d be considered OLD by most the fans) and besides it would probably be awkward as hell.

I wish that weren’t the case, but there’s a helluva difference between yabbering on a stream chat and saying “Hi. How are you? I’m that old guy that keeps asking you to draw cat boobs.”

Yeah, I think I’ll have a great time visiting Washington.

Do NOT mess with Goggles!

Got a couple new commissions from Kaz recently (and I still honestly haven’t send my $ to him for these, so I am PROMISING myself to go get that in the mail as soon as I finish this!

I do like coloring scans. It’s just fun for me if I like what I’m coloring. But it’s been a while. So I was happy to see a bar-stream recently (as homestreams aren’t physical commissions). The first one was just a doodle-thing Kaz did that I asked if I could have. The intent was no deeper than Kaz asking if people could see the stream. But perhaps it has some deeper existential meaning. I didn’t spend much time on it – it’s just a doodle after all…

Playing with hard shading mostly. I also commissioned a couple at a homestream – might as well put those up here, though they’re 100% Kaz – I had no hand in them but for the commission. I was on a Weedum-Ja kick that night so I got Weedum-Ja topless bikini. (it’s really okay. Argonians are canon nip-less as here):

And I commissioned one of Katia working on the update. The topless part I didn’t even ask for!

Then somewhere along the line during the barstream I got onto an Adine kick – (aka Goggles from Angels with Scaly Wings). He drew me one physically which I’ll finish this post out with. The other I THOUGHT I wanted physically too but he talked me out of it to await him going home and doing it there. The commission was “Katia washing Adine in the shower”. (There’s a shower scene in Angels with Scaly Wings.) Little did I know Kaz had a plan for that involving a .gif animation:

Yeah, he was right. That needed to be a .gif. However, I found out quickly that there are some quite-serious fans of Goggles (Spencerish just one!). Well, I hope to quell any hard feelings with this next one. However, since it doesn’t contain any Prequel characters, I can’t put it up on the Booru there. Here’s the commission before I got my claws on it:

And I just finished coloring it, revising the text to be more readable etc:

Even my wife got that joke and she has no clue who Goggles is. (Though she did ask why she’s talking into her tail like a phone. Part of Angels with Scaly Wings reference there.)

And then, I just had to include this one to finish up, even though it’s not mine:

QW Opines on Discords

I think it was at Kaz’ most recent barstream (he’s been doing homestreams mostly lately) I actually joined early and he had drawn this:

Of course I had to at least ask for it! I have coloring and shading practice to do at the very least, and having a concerned QW looking out for my mental health seemed an awfully good way to start, even if she’s far too late. I posted a version of it on the booru last night but realized this morning I got her tongue totally wrong. So here’s the flatcolor version with a basic green background.

And of course my standard soft shading (with cleavage! I couldn’t very well leave that out even if I’m keeping it minor this time.)

But I think it was Pronin who was suggesting I use more hard edged shading, so I gave it a shot. I’m just not confident in it’s use to use it alone yet. In fact, it was this fan art from Heresy! that made me want to try it:

I’d gotten an early linedrawing of it from /trash/ and did my own coloring – I didn’t realize it was Heresy! himself that had posted it. I thought it was some old, dead linework. I even did my own color job of it, (which is embarrassingly bad compared to his and will never see the light of day!) But this seems like a good example of both soft and hard shading used effectively.

You can follow Heresy! at http://icantbelieveitsnotheresy.tumblr.com/

So here’s my attempt at that, timid though it is:

I figured the best background would be a shot of my Discord screen itself, and thus the final version:

Oddly enough, there were more comments about my desktop on the booru than the actual artwork! Well, that and the whole subject of Discords. Honestly, I don’t mind them at all. But I’m already lost. I just liked the picture! So don’t shoot the messenger. I don’t even agree!

As for that start button – I’m using Classic Shell and you can customize the start button. In fact, it has 3 different images for 3 different states – default, hover and click states. That’s Zorryn’s more-than-a-little-awesome-if-not-legendary “Nearly Finished” from https://www.furaffinity.net/view/10898361/ :

in it’s default state. Hover and click states are… let’s just say more of the same but zoomed in to varying degrees. 🙂

A coloring job got a little risque

Budnick got a commission from Kazerad a few days back. However, the booru has been so active lately, and the thumbnail is practically all white, that I don’t think it got the attention it deserved so I asked him if I could color it.

Here’s Kazerad’s original:

I do agree with Budnick that I think that’s a fly over her chest. Rather than the clavicle and collar bone. Which would make sense given the context. So I’ll cut to the end result:

The only major change I made (other than deciding what color her outfit was) was the breast shading. It just didn’t look even to me. So yeah, I modified that. But… then… Well, see, I had extra time. And I’d been working on her breasts so long… one thing led to another and…

I’m so sorry. But breasts are just SO much fun to work with! I couldn’t help it! It’s like my and slipped and made cloth-physics-defying cleavage! Why? WHY? I feel such a cad. WAIT! I STILL had more time! Yes, the ultimate sacrilege. The dreaded Nip-Bumps.

I’m so shamed. I can never go out in public again. Kaz will ban me for this, I know he will! I mean, there wasn’t even the barest HINT of such lewdness, yet here I am, breaking all the laws.

The first one is the only “official” version. These others are just my pervertedness showing itself yet again.

And now… just one more bit of self-confession. The order I did these in is exactly reversed. In fact, I started with the perverse ones and cleaned it up from there. 🙂

More Prequelstuffs

I knew it. I got a little bit of $ in my Paypal account and left $20 in there just in case Kaz did another stream before the big U. Then my alert went off on Friday that his stream had gone active. Woohoo! Even better, I was doing nothing Friday night anyway.

Homestream this time. I think of that as both good and bad. Good because commissions aren’t physical drawings and they come already Kaz-colored. Bad because I don’t get to practice coloring – and I DO have fun coloring. I think I didn’t get enough crayons as a child.

I really wanted to stretch that $20 to two commissions so they’re not gonna be awesome but still… I did want to get one in as First Commission as I’ve noticed that the first commission he tends to spend more time on. (Is this another time management issue with Kaz?). I came up with Katia working on the Update.

Then someone in the stream added, “NEKKID!”. So.. Katia working hard on the update… Naked.

I think honestly he started this at 8:30pm. He was nearing completion around 9:30. But then he started revising shading. I even started telling him, “STOP! It’s okay as-is!”. I felt guilty for taking 1.5 hrs on a $10 commission. But he ended up with this. I’m happy! (Debating if I should use my photoshop skills and lower the monitors just a TEENSY bit… No! Stop thinking like that! BAD DRAGGY!)

Then he started on Rick2Tails’ commission. The commission involved another fanart that I can’t post here and was basically, “do another take on this”. Let’s just say it involved Surly Bartender and Rajirra. Rather surprisingly Kaz did a pretty much straight-on Bartender Gropes Rajirra’s Tits! And at the last minute added “Erotic Honk!” caption.

Why do I mention that? Rick2Tails asked me if I could remove the caption. Once again, being the naughty draggy… I did so, just for R2T. Well, it was like 15 minutes in Photoshop. Not exactly hard to do.

I think I might actually have pissed off Kaz with this edit though. Well, gently pissed. I saw on R2T’s FA page that he’s requested the edit not be sent to e621. I feel bad about that because you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. So I’ve learned a lesson here anyway. I will hereby never mess with anyone else’s commissions. It’s official and honest. I can mess with my own though!

Finally I had another idea for my 2nd commission. I like Weedum-Ja and she doesn’t seem to get enough love. (I can’t imagine why? She has, like 4 different frames in the entire Prequel canon!). Someone mentioned that Kaz would be more likely to draw Argonians topless because they have no nipples (Probably. Who knows? Such things apparently are quite variable with Argonians.)

So rather than have it be just blatant lewd topless, I thought of accidental bikini top loss at the beach. So I commissioned that. Instead, I got “Swamped by a Rogue Wave Weedum-Ja”:

I think I captioned this something like: “Fortunately Argonians can breathe underwater. But Weedum-Ja’s bikini top was never seen again.”

I really like this one. Something about the swirly water in it really appeals to me. You can picture this as one frame in an animation where she’s tumbling around out of control. So much so that I may do the un-thinkable. Rather than make it more lewd, I might actually edit it to make it LESS so by editing her bikini back in!

Oh, who am I kidding? If I made any edit, it would probably be to add a lorebreaking nipple.

It wouldn’t be the first time… http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/80565/?

NitW – Prequel Crossover

Yes, I know it’s been done before – there’s just too many similarities to resist a Prequel/Night in the Woods crossover. I recently bought and played NitW and really liked it. I think Kazerad sort of mentioned that it’s kinda an overdone crossover when I asked for a Katia/QW Night in the Woods at one of his streams recently. But I knew Kaz would come up with a unique spin on it. And he did. Never underestimate the power of Kazerad when he’s drinking at a bar!

If you’ve not played Night in the Woods, you may not get the reference. There’s a dream sequence where Mae (protagonist anthropomorphic cat) meets an apparent god. A rather impersonal, unfeeling, uncaring god who shows her the nightmare creatures that live beyond the stars. All very Lovecraftian.

Here’s a shot of that scene from the game:

So leave it to Kaz to substitute Mae for QW (well, really Dodger who may or may not be Quill Weave in a younger form) and the Cat God for Katia. Clever actually!

So of course I had to color it.

I’m pretty pleased with the outcome. One kinda odd thing though. There’s some details that are faint but show up just fine on my laptop monitor, but don’t show up on my desktop. Oh well. It still looks pretty good IMHO. Just the barest of yellow hints at the edges. Glowing eyes. Yup, pretty successful color job if I do say so myself, even if there’s not really a heck of a lot of coloring really to do.

Got a couple more Kaz-drawn coloring jobs I’m working on too, though neither are especially noteworthy honestly. But I sure did like this one!

Katia Riding Bryce

A while back in the Angels With Scaly Wings days I commissioned Kaz to draw Katia riding Bryce. This is the resulting drawing.

Naturally I had to color it. It’s what I do, right? Here’s the sketch a bit cleaned up with flat colors…

And then with shading, highlights and a Skyrim background screenshot motion-blurred.

I probably should have left well enough alone… but… if you’ve never played Angels with Scaly Wings (and I highly suggest you don’t honestly – I didn’t. I just watched Kaz play it on some streams.) there’s at least one, maybe a couple of scenes where a conveniently placed bottle prevents viewing of any potentially offensive parts of Bryce. And thus the similarly-conveniently placed bottle here. (In fact, it probably is worse WITH the bottle since it is… large.)

But no, I had to go and wreak havok by making some of the bottles a bit more transparent than intended. Don’t worry, it’s a silhouette at best. But still, no mere bottle is going to suppress the manly manliness of Bryce!

Yeah, you’ve really got to WANT to see the difference to see the difference. Good luck with that. I’m out!

And… I Relent. Backbone of a Wet Noodle.

Man I’m a wimp when it comes to Prequel. Even when I heard there would be a distraction while the ‘real’ update gets delayed again, I was all, like, ‘NO! It’s not enough. Dammit, not AGAIN! I don’t care what the distraction post is, I want my Canon Update and I’m going to stay rage-quit till it comes!”

Yeah. That lasted about as long as it took for me to bring up my PC and check it out. I thought this was a really nice smooth .gif btw!

I mean, sure it’s a short loop, but that’s broadcast-quality looping anyway! Float On Aggy! Float On!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D5fGLOLSwI

But that’s not what really won me over. Naaa… that was:

Can there be anything cuter than two Argonians playing with Argonian playing cards (even if one is a slave)? “Pick a card, any card…”

And Cider did all this? Damn, I thought I could recognize his style better than that, but this looks damn Kaz-like to me. That guy should get a medal or something.

So, yeah I’m still a LITTLE pissed. But I thought about it while walking my dog this weekend. WHY am pissed anyway? And it came to me… I’m pissed because deep in the back of my head, I think Kaz is fucking with me. (well, not me exactly… us readers.)

So why do I think that? Two reasons… First, he seemed to imply that it was almost ready for April 1st. So a month should be plenty of time to finish it. But that could just be me reading more into a few words than was ever really there. But the REAL reason is… Kaz KNOWS how to fuck with people, if he wants to.

It’s the whole Social Scientist thing. He could WELL be seeing just how long he can push people before they break. It’s not that I think he’s doing that, it’s that I think he’s CAPABLE of doing that. Once you know someone can manipulate you to some extent, you become wary of that. Abnormally wary.

And that is, I think, a big part of the problem. Kaz is unusually skilled at social interaction online. And he’s pointed out time and again his interest in social engineering. So it becomes fear and suspicion of the unknown. I don’t know how to do that… so someone that does is suspect ALL THE TIME of doing so.

I’ve decided that I don’t know if he is or isn’t. And there’s no way I can know. So fuck it – in lieu of evidence to the contrary, I’ll just take him at his word. Why not? If I’m being Manipulated, I can but swing from the long, abnormally red arm of Kazerad and enjoy the breeze.

A Red-Letter Day! And… I QUIT!

This is going to be a long rant – but a very non-angry rant. Can someone rage-quit without being angry? Let’s find out! I’ll throw in some images to break it up a bit.

Today I was so proud. I was mentioned on 4chan! Yay! Granted it was on /trash/ and tucked in between all the Katia-porn, but still…

“I’m guessing bdprequel is one of those furries? I see him on tumblr posting and coloring Kaz’s 30s sketches fairly regularly. I can’t imagine paying more than 10$ for crap like that, and I like Kaz’s stuff as well”

This was in response to a prior post about Kaz’ barstreams:

“I remember catching them every single time when he first started, they were fucking grand. They [sic] all the autistic furries came in and made the chat a wreck. So Kaz appointed a shit ton of them moderators indiscriminately. Now he doesn’t even advertise his streams anymore. It’s literally a fucking secret autist club where Kaz can do quick thirty second sketches for easy to please manchildren for twenty bucks a pop. The worst fucking part is, for me at least, is that I legit enjoy Kaz’s art but all these sketches he does are just lost to the fucking ether, never to be seen by anyone else’s eyes but the commissioner.”

Well, in response to that first one, I can’t imagine paying more than $10 either. I don’t. I think every one (except one) commission I’ve got from Kaz is exactly a $10 commission (or less – I do have one $5 crayon commission!). I did commission one for $20 once, and it was appreciably better than the others. But I’d rather have 2 slightly worse ones it turns out.

And yeah, though I like to think I’m not a “Furry”, I’d be lying if I said I’m not a “furry”. I don’t live the lifestyle, I don’t go to conventions, I don’t even particularly love animals except for my dog. But yeah, I’m inordinately fond of anthropomorphic stuff, and yeah, I’ve got a FA account. I blame The Lion King. And Felicia. And Krystal. And Robin Hood for that matter. Still, seems an odd place to post a random furry-bashing thing considering this is one of the tamest images on that thread:

I do regret that Kaz’ commissions disappear though. That’s one reason I scan and color mine – to get them ‘out there’ because, at least IMHO, they’re good and should be seen my more than just me.

One thing that has honestly been bothering me though is Kaz’ continuing disappointment in the stream chats. His latest from that thread:

“Kaz here. Are the stream moderators even doing anything? To my knowledge they don’t really ban or kick anyone. I’d love to shape up the in-stream chat into being less horrible, but I don’t even know where to begin.”

My problem with that is – I love the chats! Sure they get a little bit lewd at times, but – especially considering the forum that was posted in – no where near what’s posted there! There’s stuff in that very thread that makes me cringe, and I’m not easily ‘cringed’. And Kaz’ says the STREAMS are horrible?! So I’m confused on exactly what he means.

Now granted, I yabber a lot in chats. Probably too much. Back in the day, I ran the largest BBS in Palm Beach County, FL. I’m used to yabbering a lot. I grew up on it. I have tried to lighten up though. Let other voices in, you know. But regardless of that, what does he EXPECT essentially anonymous chats on a stream to be like? Deep discussions of Oblivion lore? Opinions on the Hist? More endless speculation on how Katia is going to fail against Sigrid? We exhausted that LITERALLY YEARS AGO!

I’ve made quite a few friends (okay, maybe the term isn’t appropriate, but ‘acquaintances’ sounds way too remote) on his streams too. There was also talk of the moderators. I (think! I’ll have to check to see if this is still true this particular hour!) am a ‘moderator’ there. I don’t think I’ve ever used the power. But I’ve been a moderator before – of a forum though, not really a chat room. I can tell you it’s a thankless job that’s not easy to do. In a chat room, it’s even tougher. Do you ban someone for using ‘f*ck’? For talking about Katia in a sexual manner? I mean really, it’s a tough job with no direction or ground rules. My default is for tolerance of a lot – so I’m all but nonexistent as to moderation. Maybe I’m just accustomed to the horribleness.

All that being said, I’m hereby officially rage-quitting Prequel till the update comes out. I’m pissed at Kaz because the first cracks in the estimated date have appeared. Yes, I expected it. But I’m no less upset about it. But I also recognize when it’s a rage-quit scenario. I’ve been here before. I get over it, and I undoubtedly will here too. I’m too wishy-washy when it comes to this sort of thing. If he opens a bar stream tonight, will I really not join? Well… I probably will. But I don’t WANT to. 😦 I’ve been waiting quite long enough for this.

When I bought the merchandise, it really wasn’t about getting the ‘stuff’. Most of it is still in the box (except the T-shirt. Mines getting faded. I need a new one!) Really it was about repaying him in some way for the entertainment I’d already gotten from Prequel. It’s obviously my favorite webcomic (any comic really) ever. But… Katia is dead to me without some new stuff. The time has come to get this update out the door and carry on with her story. I want her resurrected. If my meager protest – knowing it won’t last – will in any way help that to happen, then dammit I’m quitting!

(Of note, I’ve said that before about other things and been a hypocrite. I’m probably being one now.)

I don’t hate Kaz. Not by a long shot. I love his humor, and that’s why I commission these images too – I LOVE to see what he’ll come up with. So I usually try to keep them very ambiguous and let him come up with something unexpected. Pretty much always has too – which is well worth $10 to me! But I want to see canon-Katia again for a change. Badly. Enough to rage-quit, even though I know in my heart that’s just stupid.