I don't actually have an issue with an extension of their hip that helps them grasp, though it would not be bony, as they do not have bone. Waxfaces lack an external sauce, though.

The other changes at a glance look sufficient, but I see mni is in the thread, so I'll wait to se what he thinks.

I'll make a quick comparison to help...this is like if, instead of marine tamow -> tamjack -> seashrog, it was just a direct jump from marine tamow to seashrog.

I'll try to help when I'm more awake. I don't think this is gonna get through without any art edits anyway, though.

"Too brain" issues is mni's department, but this is what the pirate waxface redraw looks like so far for reference:

I'm not sure the pirate waxface could jump straight to chimp. I've been working on a redraw of it to make it look less like it's brandishing a spear, since people keep getting confused on this.

Note, waxfaces lack hooves; in the pirate, they're just pigmented pads.

Their ancestor would attempt to mate with literally anything. The purpose of useless mating in this species is to make them not keep trying to fight other males when they already lost or there's no females available, though they're probably not aware that that's what they're doing.

Everyone has been calling descendants of the shrew sauceback "shrewbacks", so it's the common name for the group now.

Fatcoat (Properpellis atholus)
Creator: Disgustedorite
Ancestor: Torpcoat
Habitat: South Jujubee Temperate Ocean, South LadyM Temperate Ocean, Jujubee Tropical Ocean, LadyM Tropical Ocean, North Jujubee Temperate Ocean, North LadyM Temperate Ocean, Wind Temperate Coast, Dass Temperate Coast, Jlindy Tropical Coast, BigL Tropical Coast, Clarke Temperate Coast, King Tropical Coast, Chum Tropical Coast, Elerd Temperate Coast, Fermi Temperate Coast, Soma Temperate Coast, Oz Temperate Coast, Hydro Tropical Coast, Fly Tropical Shallows, Maineiac Temperate Coast, Wind Temperate Beach, Dass Temperate Beach, Jlindy Tropical Beach, BigL Tropical Beach, Clarke Temperate Beach, King Tropical Beach, Chum Tropical Beach, Elerd Temperate Beach, Fermi Temperate Beach, Soma Temperate Beach, Oz Temperate Beach, Hydro Tropical Beach, Ramul Temperate Beach, Maineiac Temperate Beach, Driftwood Islands Tropical Bank, Driftwood Islands Temperate Bank, Driftwood Islands Tropical Shallows, Driftwood Islands Temperate Shallows
Size: 70 cm long
Support: Endoskeleton (Jointed Wood)
Diet: Carnivore (Diamond Pumpgill, Scuttleball Gillfin, Cerulean Gillfin, Islandball Gillfin, Colonial Filtersquid, Wolley, Bloister, Strainerbeak, Gillrom, Imprisoned Wolley, Floating Pumpgill, Metamorph Spinderorm, Burraroms, Gulperpump, South Polar Shardgill, Gillarill, Southern Gillfin, Ocean Echofin, Follower Gilltail, Kiturorm, Scuttlers, Globespot Gilltail, Quralrorm)
Respiration: Active (Lungs)
Thermoregulation: Endotherm (Cotton, Blubber)
Reproduction: Sexual (Male and Female, Live Birth)

The fatcoat replaced its ancestor in its overlapping range. Its cotton pelt has mutated to cover its entire body again, supplemented by waterproofing oils to have it not cause drag exactly as it did in its ancestor's ancestor, and it is now straight instead of curly. This allows it to thermoregulate properly on land as well as water as a small creature. Speaking of, it no longer exists exclusively in water, as being a small plent with a heavy newborn size restriction and not being fully adapted for aquatic life, its ancestors' babies were extremely likely to drown immediately after birth and therefore they were under a massive selective pressure that led them to simply resume giving birth on land. This was extremely easy to do, as their legs were still well-developed and never actually lost any ability to be used on land. Its toe "bones" are broad and fused into flat, flexible paddles, which do not restrict its ability to walk while also making them function better for swimming. It has countershaded coloration, which makes it more cryptic.

The fatcoat has a powerful bite. It uses its prehensile tongue, which has a hand at the end, to snatch prey and pull it into its mouth. This is similar to the strategy employed by Terran cephalopods. It can administer an electric shock to stun smaller prey, but for larger prey it kills entirely using its bite. Its lower jaw no longer acts as a fin, as it did not provide much stabilization anyway and was better used as exactly what it is--a jaw. Its ears are small, but not nonexistent, and it senses vibrations in water better using fat that occupies the space where its dome once was. Speaking of, it lost its dome for the same reason it no longer uses its jaw as a fin--it was not assisting much in stabilization and, as a truly vestigial structure, it was completely lost. Its tail is short and points upwards so that the butt nostril may be quickly raised above water.

The fatcoat, as its name implies, is fat. When basking on shorelines, which it does regularly, it almost looks like a pathetic floppy sausage. Nonetheless, it is able to stand upright and waddle on land fairly well like a Terran penguin. Tropical populations are somewhat less fat, but still chubby, as being fat keeps them streamlined in water. It is social, basking, migrating, and hunting in groups of up to 30. As mentioned earlier, it gives birth on land, as it is not as aquatic-adapted as any secondarily aquatic animal that actually exists and can actually birth in the sea. Juveniles cannot dive at birth, as the limitations of plent reproduction and giving birth out their mouths forces them to be small, as it did in their ancestors--far too small to successfully fight currents and breathe. However, they are fluffy and able to float like ducklings or baby otters, guided and fed by their families swimming in the water below.

The fatcoat no longer has only one baby at a time (now 3-6) and gestates for considerably less time (1 month); in fact, its ancestor being listed as having 1 baby that gestated for a year was almost certainly an error, given its small size and mouth restriction that implied it somehow took a year to grow a baby that physically cannot be any larger than a rat. The fatcoat is very successful and can be found on every landmass. Its success can be owed in part to seafaring shrews, as it basks on their nests and on islands of driftwood that only exist as a result of their activity. This has allowed it to be able to technically bask and breed on open water through use of these floating structures.

Gallery image: Albino

Velocitoon (Sorex crash)
Creator: Disgustedorite
Ancestor: Opportunity Shrew
Habitat: Darwin Chapparal, Darwin Plains, Vivus Rocky, Vivus High Grassland, Dixon-Darwin Rocky, Dixon-Darwin High Grassland, Bone Temperate Riparian, Irinya Temperate Riparian
Size: 62 cm long
Support: Endoskeleton (Bone)
Diet: Omnivore (Sausophrey eggs, Hearthead eggs, Brighteyes eggs, Argusraptor eggs, Interbiat eggs, Cardicracker eggs, Teacup Saucebacks, Guangu eggs, Dinotuga eggs, Shikaaree eggs, Nectarsnapper eggs, Kehaida eggs, Ramchin eggs, Nightsnapper eggs, Robynsnapper eggs, Vivus Slitherworm eggs, Lizatokage eggs, Thin Lizatokage eggs, Egg Lizatokage eggs, Grassland Lizatokage eggs, Xatazelle eggs, Xatagolin eggs, Eggslurping Sorite, Fruiting Grovecrystal fruit, Tubeplage fruit, Scrubland Tubeplage fruit, Scrubland Quhft fruit, Boreal Tubeplage fruit, Feroak berries, Fuzzpile Berries, Bristlepile berries, Gecoba Tree fruit, Robust Arid Ferine berries, Cragmyr berries, Dungshell Fraboo)
Respiration: Active (Lungs)
Thermoregulation: Endotherm (Fur)
Reproduction: Sexual (Male and Female, Live Birth, Pouch and Milk)

The velocitoon split from its ancestor. Through convergent evolution, it closely resembles its extinct distant ancestor, the velishroot. Much like the velishroot, it is very fast. Though it still feasts upon the eggs of saucebacks (now identified more by scent than sound), it will eat other eggs as well as egg-eating competitors such as the Eggslurping Sorite. It has also adopted a taste for fruit, allowing it to avoid too much direct competition with either its direct ancestor or with the neoshrew. It is also able to utilize its very good hearing to locate and gobble up adult teacup saucebacks like they're popcorn, keeping the populations of the rapidly-reproducing tiny saucebacks in check. The velocitoon is also able to break open the shells of eggs, crystal fruit, and rarely even fraboos by holding them in its mouth and chucking them sideways into rocks. It has four toes on each foot.

The velocitoon's coloration allows it to blend in with soil. Vivus populations are often melanistic to match darker soils. Male velocitoons have unusual blue fur on the insides of their ears, which are attractive because they serve as a health indicator and can be used to signal status to other males. Normally, fur cannot be blue because it is a monofilament, but the velocitoon has found a workaround using the arrangement of the hairs themselves. This only works because the hairs are very short, so they remain in the right position to maintain structural color rather than flopping around too much like the longer fur on the rest of the body.

Unlike its ancestor, the velocitoon lives in small groups. It still lives in burrows, often much deeper than those of its ancestor, and when it steals burrows it excavates them further for its own use. It travels far from its burrow to find food, but when confronted by a predator it can almost always sprint straight home. Each social group contains a single dominant male, some number of subordinate males, and several females. The dominant male is generally the strongest and most attractive and gets first choice of females to mate with. Mating occurs every year in late winter. Velocitoon offspring are born as helpless fetal larvae, much like those of terran marsupials, and live exclusively in their mother's pouch suckling milk early in life. They develop enough to leave their mother's pouch in early spring, but in colder parts of their range they nonetheless remain in the burrow or rest in their mother's pouch to avoid being killed by predators or unexpectedly by late-arriving frost. Upon reaching adulthood, about 1 year after birth, most of them disperse to join other social groups.

The velocitoon indirectly caused the local extinction of the shikaaree. This is because the pressure caused by the consumption of their eggs caused shikaarees to experience a considerable dip in their population. The shikaaree was not eaten to extinction, but rather was unable to eat enough to maintain itself after the population dip because, without group tactics, large prey were able to successfully defend themselves against it more and more often until the local populations either starved to death or collapsed from inbreeding depression.

Plents breathing carbon dioxide is actually a science error. They depend primarily on oxygen and can convert some of the co2 they produce back into oxygen.

Fourmaw Sauceback (Quattuorgnathus megagingivus)
Creator: Disgustedorite
Ancestor: Logworm Sauceback
Habitat: Barlowe Temperate Woodland, Barlowe Temperate Rainforest
Size: 4 cm long
Support: Endoskeleton (Chitin)
Diet: Adult: Omnivore (Logworm Sauceback larvae, Teacup Sauceback larvae, Vermees, occasional cannibal of larvae); Juvenile: Detritivore (Wood, chitin)
Respiration: Active (Microlungs)
Thermoregulation: Adult: Endotherm (Feathers), Ectotherm (Hibernation) over winter; Larvae: Ectotherm
Reproduction: Sexual (Male and Female, Eggs and Larvae)

The fourmaw sauceback split from its ancestor. For some logworm saucebacks, being able to live longer as adults proved better for finding mates, resulting in an unexpected turn where some regained the ability to eat as adults. As they had lost their jaws, transitioning to being able to eat again was a slow, awkward process, but they ultimately found a solution: convergent with the long-extinct four-jawed saucebacks, the fourmaw sauceback has similarly arrived at a four-jawed mouth through elongation of some of its teeth and gums.

Each "jaw" consists of two teeth bound together by gum tissue. The spaces between the jaws each contain a single additional tooth which aids in swallowing, giving it a total of 12 teeth, which is the typical amount for the broader Dixon-Barlowe sauceback clade. The jaws can be retracted into the mouth, though the tips of the teeth remain exposed. The gums are also chemoreceptive, as they are in all beastworms, though they are mainly used for tasting while the nostrils remain in use for scent.

Adult fourmaw saucebacks are carnivores, as meat is easy to digest, and they primarily eat the larvae of other "shrewbacks". They will also eat vermees, which are in a similar ecological niche. Doing so eliminates competition for their offspring. They have a somewhat slower metabolism than other shrewbacks, so they do not starve extremely quickly and can go a few days without food. During the fall, they become excessively gluttonous, bulking up so that they may hibernate over winter and even eating the larvae of their own species. Compared to their ancestor's single-day adult life, an adult fourmaw can live as long as 3 years, though its health starts to deteriorate after only 2 due to damage to its telomeres caused by genetic drift in its ancestor. Like most saucebacks, they are blind and "see" using echolocation.

Juvenile fourmaw saucebacks are generally similar to logworms, though they can digest chitin such as that in glass flora more readily. They are ectothermic and reach their adult length before bulking up into what can be best described as a fat hairy sausage and undergoing metamorphosis in a burrow. Their "fat hairy sausage" stage is somewhat less fat than in their ancestor, however, due to their lower adult metabolism and less dire need to produce a ton of gametes. Juveniles brumate over winter and emerge as adults at different times throughout the year, generally exactly one year after the eggs they hatched from were laid.

Fourmaw saucebacks lack a mating season, but their mating practices are no less dramatic, just more spaced out. They are fertile throughout the year except during hibernation, and males will try to mate with any receptive female they encounter, identified by ultrasonic chirping calls produced using their tongues. As the need to find a mate is less dire, males no longer have giant manes, instead simply having longer feathers on the backs of their necks which are raised to intimidate one another. They will fight and sometimes even kill one another for the right to mate with a particular female, and it is not uncommon for older males to have scarred faces and torn ears. If more than two males are fighting over a particular female, however, the losers usually do not continue to fight and will instead mate with each other. Though this might seem counter-productive, it instantly reduces their aggression and hormone levels, preventing them from continuing to fight over nothing. Lone losers may instead attempt to mate with leaves or other shrewback species to a similar effect. Like its ancestor, the fourmaw sauceback offers no parental care and lays lots of eggs, though the exact number has reduced to only around 200 per mating.

You put the gen in the image and the post title, it isn't needed otherwise

The species form is:

(name)
Creator:
Ancestor:
Habitat:
Size:
Support:
Diet:
Respiration:
Thermoregulation:
Reproduction:

The order matters.

Rumpipe (Aurisus polyauris)
Creator: Disgustedorite
Ancestor: Grand Buttpiper
Habitat: Barlowe Temperate Woodland, Barlowe Temperate Rainforest
Size: 40 cm long
Support: Endoskeleton (Unjointed Wood)
Diet: Herbivore (Marbleflora, Marblora, Pioneeroots, Clusterblades, Rainforest Carnofern, Barnline, Tusovinda)
Respiration: Active (Lungs)
Thermoregulation: Endotherm
Reproduction: Sexual (Male and Female, Live Birth)

The rumpipe split from its ancestor. It has shrunken slightly to adapt for the forested environment. True to its name, its woody pipe-like butt nostrils are tightly curled against its rump, making them less conspicuous to predators than in other buttpiper species. Its external sacs have been visually internalized as well, though technically its rump has grown to envelop them, as they are internally covered by what amounts to a pair of bellows-like tails encased in skin. This is because being conspicuous to attract mates was judged by evolution to not be a good trade-off for camouflage in its particular case.

The rumpipe's scientific name--Aurisus polyauris--means "ear pig many ears". This is because of its vague resemblance to a pig, and because it has a ridiculous number of ears. Plent leaves can be easily reduplicated in most groups, and the outer ears of phylaurans are just modified leaves; therefore, the outer ear can be reduplicated as well. The many ears form a pair of ridges down the rumpipe's back, which break up its shape in the forested environment with aid from its many vertical stripes. The "ears" can also be raised and lowered in sync to communicate emotion, which is important for this social creature. Only the front-most pair leads to the middle ear, and therefore only they can detect sound.

The rumpipe is social, much like its ancestor. Its pipes are used not only to attract mates, but also to communicate with its group, producing complex whistling and honking sounds including warning calls (a disharmonious "HROOOOONK") and social noises (gentle whistles nearby and short toots at a distance). To attract mates, they "sing", much like a Terran songbird, using their four pipes to produce chords.

Rumpipes are nomadic, as they lack any means to protect themselves in nests or burrows. Like all ambulatory plents, they mate mouth to mouth and give live birth. Their offspring are fairly developed and can walk and even run within an hour of being born, despite their small size stemming from the limitation of having to squeeze out of their mother's mouth. This is so that the group doesn't need to stop to care for young, which would put them at higher risk of predation.

The rumpipe was so successful that it has outcompeted the buttpiper within its range. This is because its camouflage is more effective than the buttpiper's within Barlowe's woodland biomes, thus the buttpiper was eaten or chased away from its food source more often than the rumpipe. The buttpiper still exists in other biomes.

I'm not sure if the harem-eating waxface is feasible. Harems are only utilized by a small subset of the twineshrog population and are not a heritable practice, so even if the male doesn't fiercely defend his harem well enough, the practice could still fall out of favor for a time long enough to cause a population crash or outright extinction of the predator.

This thread is neglected. Here's a ton of ideas I posted on the discord that have not been used:

• Azelak shrew - a shrew that's just like an azelak
• Miniaturization of Fermi megafauna due to the shrinking landmass
• Phlyer flora
• Shrews inspired by more derived / less cute mammals
• Tons of genus groups descended from the eusocial nodent branch, they make great ants
• Long slinky shrews that look like genets
• Plant that poisons the ground when burned, killing (but not extincting) burncumference and allowing its offspring first access to the cleared land
• Saucebacks with patterns inspired by ground birds
• More brightly colored jewel-eyed saucebacks
• semi-aquatic eyed saucebacks that look like loons
• more endoparasitic fauna
• endoparasitic soriparasite
• "Shroll", a shrog with a green face that lives under a nest that resembles a bridge across a river
• ghara on a short-snouted critter
• advanced diving shrog that hunts in the twilight zone and uses a tether to not get lost (either using sinews from prey or gaining string independently of twineshrog)
• Shrews with air sacs and hollow bones (as they don't have the restraints that mammals have)
• Shrews in places where there should not be shrews, like underwater
• Some kind of eyed sauceback with a literal handlebar mustache made of feathers
• More canopy-dwellers in forests
• Shrog that moves inland and becomes an herbivore; much like the panda of Earth, it manages to maintain a diet which is technically still protein-based and is able to retain its intelligence as a result. Maybe it could be eating crystal flora, those are relatively easy to digest and are packed with protein.
• Handed bone-eater that just snaps bones over its knee and eats the marrow
• Wildcards with subspecies that do this
• Replacements for every single snapper with an inexplicable fish-like tadpole under justification that it's a huge waste of energy and having some adult traits is way, way more efficient.
• More stuff with manes
• LGBT representation on the level Beta has
• More organisms that make use of the tundra wetlands created by snowmelt, geese do this
• we need more organisms with funny proportions (like Canada lynx and Tibetan fox)
• bashercoat evo that gets even fluffier
• A smaller "lord" or "knight" signaltail replacing the baron signaltail on ramul island
• super tall gossalizard which has sclerites on its legs that in turn make it take less energy to pump blood to their heads (as the skin in the legs will not stretch out to let blood sink into them)
• shrew saucebacks, but from other sauceback groups like waxfaces and loafshells
• pirate waxface evo that gives up its pirating ways and joins forces with a new species of shrog, using its wax to improve nest waterproofing

Serina: A Natural History of The World of Birds
https://sites.google.com/site/worldofserina/home

Pluvimundus: Life and Environments of the World of Rain
https://sites.google.com/view/pluvimundusproject/
(^ note, this project also incidentally showcases some of the hidden potential of Earth clones on alien worlds!)

Project Nereus
https://sites.google.com/site/projectnereus/home

There's a project I forgot the name of that's completely gone because a staff member had a mental breakdown and deleted the entire submission and archive categories on the discord server. It wasn't even an old project, it was made in 2019.

The forums vs discord thing is well beyond just an issue of the spec community. It is affecting all forums of all media types. People are trading public, easily navigated and searchable, and completely wayback machine-compatible websites for chatrooms that can vanish from the internet permanently with no hope of backup without warning.

12 years later, I finally continue the tradition of spreading the "Corrupt a Wish" game to new forums.

How to play: The person above you made a wish. Grant it, but with a dark twist, tradeoff, or unintended consequences. Then, make your own wish in the same post.

The only difference between corrupting a wish here vs other places is that you can make Sagan 4 jokes and everyone will actually get it

I'll start: I wish I could eat oranges more often.

Crack theory: [Susie and Gaster are the same person]

I refuse to elaborate, even though I could, because it's funnier that way.

In recent times, more and more forums have shut down in favor of discord servers; GamingSteve is dead while most of the community is on a Discord server, KITO outright shut down and encouraged people to join discord, and many other communities, though not explicitly replaced, have little forum activity while they're bustling on Discord. Sagan 4's forum probably isn't going anywhere, as Discord-based submission and review is objectively inferior to using forum threads (trust me, we tried it once), not to mention text-heavy stuff isn't very discord-friendly, but it seems much of the community agrees that discord seems to be better for casual discussion. However, I think there's room to discuss the possibility that some other types of discussion may be better done on the forum as well.

For example, discussing theories, major retcons, and anything else that it's reasonably likely it will need to be searched up and referenced later. Discord search is really bad, you know? Not to mention, it's too easy to permanently delete all message logs.

Also, organism ideas. God, the channel on the discord server suffers from idea burial all the time because if an idea is too cursed it sparks a massive load of discussion.

Outside of that, there's also off-topic discussion. Though Discord has a threads feature now that somewhat alleviates the problem, it's really hard to get granular discussion that doesn't get buried by the next topic. Forums keep it all contained in forum threads that don't have any considerable impact on navigation in comparison, while allowing members to quickly find out who in the community shares interests with them.

There are some things that I think it isn't a big deal that it's done on Discord, like wip feedback; art can be done in a day or two, so there's not much need for ongoing discussion, just post a wip, get feedback if desired, and done. It doesn't really need the formality of forum use, and it probably won't need to be searched later.

Also: If Alpha had originally been Discord-based instead of Forum-based (but the limbo still occurred), all the archives we have of the old forum would not exist. Discord servers cannot be backed up nor can they be accessed on the wayback machine.

Thoughts?

I like them, Coolsteph likes them, Oceansky likes them, Cheatsy likes them, others like them, why don't we have a thread for chatting about Undertale and Deltarune? So I made one.

There's actually a meme going around, the "god dammit Kris where the hell are we" meme, of which I made a Sagan 4 iteration (minor Chapter 2 spoilers).

--

We don't appear to have spoiler tags yet (MNIDJM please let me access the rest of the control panel), so make sure to hide spoilers for recent releases and discoveries with transparent text! Example:

CODE

[[color=transparent]I'm a spoiler![/color]]

Becomes this (select to read):
[I'm a spoiler!]

Don't forget to [get the banana]! potassium

Edit: I am aware of Toby Fox's statements that Undertale and Deltarune are separate, however they nonetheless share a lot of characters and lore, so it's hard to discuss one without the other unless we're only taking about characters exclusive to Deltarune. I see it as the same as discussing different Zelda games in a single thread.

Kinda surprised by the lack of comments. Anyway, I'm also working on several other stinzers. I don't think I posted them on the old wip thread, but they include a willosaur-like apex predator, a mesopredator with a very long middle foreclaw, and an herbivore so ugly I had to commission someone to draw it after giving up on trying to draw it myself.

Hey, you forgot the biome color key

Things are about to get fuzzy.

Part 5: Refining the Texturing

Texturing is a vital part of shading, and it was vital to my art getting where it is now.

After the Seashrog, I basically just could not go back. There were some species after it like the Stonebeak Phlyer that were drawn in the older style, but the visual improvement made me less and less willing to do that.

Throughout gen 162, I made improvements to the technique I used for texturing, such as using different brushes for different textures. This illustration of the wolf shrew in particular (made before OviFan's redraw, clearly) was where I started using bitmap blending brushes for fur, in this case by modifying MediBang's built-in acrylic brush to blend like a watercolor:



But there's a couple issues with this method: it's slow, and god does it hurt my hand. I think it was after I did Great Leotam that I realized I had to find another way.

Treehook Tamow demonstrates the first major experiment:



Here, I used a modified acrylic brush, though any bitmap brush that's kinda streaky will do; I made it really big and turned down the transparency, using it to paint multiple hairs at a time in white, set to either soft light or overlay. This doesn't look anywhere near as good, but it's considerably faster. This is what I've been using for the majority of my submissions, at least until now.

Something changed when I was making a little bit of Serina fanart...


This actually uses a different fur texturing method. It isn't super obvious, however, because I was trying to replicate Sheather's art style. But see the grass? The grass is important here. Let's look at a drawing where it's more obvious: this illustration I did for the Lemupus.



So, obviously I discovered a new method for painting grass--and then, directly inspired by how Sheather uses a grass brush to paint fur, I decided to see what would happen if I used it as a fur texture. Suddenly, I could do passable fur super fast.

The way this fur works is that I have made a "fur" bitmap brush out of my grass brush, and I paint the fur on twice--once in black and again in white, on separate layers. Depending on what I need to do to bring out the color, I set each one to either overlay or soft light. I find that having the dark layer set to soft light and the light layer set to overlay looks best:


This method is still new, but it's super fast and looks good, so I don't think I'm gonna stop using it any time soon.

The Future?

As long as one keeps drawing, their style will continue to evolve. I will probably add onto this if I make another big jump in how I shade.

This is only a summary of my process of getting from copying a Sonic comic book artist to whatever it is I'm doing now. I can try to make a more in-depth tutorial for each style in the future, but for now, feel free to leave comments here.

Part 4: Revolution and The Making of Seashrog

Once upon a time, I screwed around with random noise generation and accidentally made a background so pretty that not even the slower version of my shading method could come close to matching.


If you recognize this, you should, because it's the background on the seashrog:


The seashrog represents the first vital step in reaching my current shading style. After I made that background, I realized I had to do something to make Seashrog match, because according to the rules the background must be the same quality as the creature itself. Let's break the seashrog down.

Seashrog actually started out shaded exactly like most of my stuff beforehand; the additional texturing and shading effects were only applied after I did the background and realized this wouldn't cut it.


I started with the fur. For a bit of context, I've done something like this style of fur texturing before; I used to do complex base editing for a few years before I started shading my own art.

On the final image it is set to soft light blending mode; this is what it looks like on normal.


The way I accomplished this was by using a watercolor pen. Your art program of choice most likely has something similar, it might be called a blending pen instead. What I did was I first drew on black lines matching fur direction, then using the watercolor/blending pen I went over them the same direction in white. This created varying shades of grey that give the approximate effect of a fur texture when set to the aforementioned soft light blending mode.

This alone did not make the seashrog match the background, however. I think I actually went back to the tutorial I originally used for inspiration at this point, and remembered that airbrushes are recommended for shading smaller details. That was the missing piece.


Sans fur or markings to show what I did better:


This discovery was revolutionary to the development of my shading style. In later work, I dropped the cell shading layer altogether and shade entirely using the airbrush. I don't think I could ever go back, and I've only done a few faunal species with simpler shading since. However, doing fur this way was very slow. I'll get into how I have worked to refine fur detailing and other forms of texturing since in part 5.