DA FREAKING BLOG........

HI!! i am back yet again. and this time i would like to tell you a story..... a story of character designs, good and bad, and the one and only story of how my darling circus demons came to be....
that's right! today i wanna take you through (almost) every iteration on the three circus demon's designs and my thought processes at each stage!!

this whole thing began with a few little doodles i did in my calculus class senior year of high school, where i drew a few people with some wacky clown-makeup-esque eyes. i liked the idea of using these eyes in a character design and thought it would make for a fun jester guy, so i made this demon jester whose design may seem a bit familiar to you:



now uh. this design sucks. and i knew it sucked at the time-- the colors weren't looking great, the hair and face were really weird, the patterns were WAAAAY too noisy and it was generally overdesigned.... but i liked the underlying idea of this half day, half night type demon jester guy, and i wanted to run with that and try again. and i also decided-- hey man, there's some fun stuff i could do with similar ideas. wouldn't it be cool if this guy had some funny little friends? and also these eyes fit better on a circular head with no nose. maybe i could make it some sort of doll. ooooo maybe they could all be dolls!!

from there we reached these designs:



which. honestly still suck. you can see i got the jester to a place pretty similar to where they ended up, but i needed to play with the scale and the shapes to make em look a bit more appealing. the ringmaster was supposed to be a toy soldier ringmaster from the very beginning, so the outfit was pretty solid, but the more complex eyes weren't reading properly as an expression and the weird mouth didn't help, and the colors just weren't super cohesive. the clown? i had absolutely no clue what type of doll they were supposed to be. i just wanted a guy who was the big spooky scary one who actually isn't all that threatening, so i just went into it with "punk clown" and missed the mark on both of those ideas. which i knew at the time, which is why i never finished outlining them lol

so i didn't like these designs either, and i gave it another shot!! this time with more of an idea, making the clown a robot and thinking a bit more about the color pallet:



this one was also my way of messing around with the symmetry tool for character design-- you can see that i did a lot of the sketches and outlines symmetrical, which was actually pretty helpful in figuring out how i wanted them to look. here i got basically all of the design elements down, just with totally different shapes and slightly different scaling than they would eventually end up with. the clown in particular was pointier and skinnier with thicker upper arms, and the ringmaster was a bit more blocky. jester's preeeetty close to the final design, though! and importantly, this was when i decided on using pure black and white in their main pallets and then unique outline colors for each, which was REALLY important in how i thought about them as sort of otherworldly, vibrant spirits in physical bodies. also, the pure black looks so much cooler than the dark gray in the last designs lol

next up was individual character drawings to lock down the way i drew them:



i smoothed out the ringmaster's blocky hair cause it's more fun to draw this way, made the clown a little softer and more exaggerated, and. just kinda left the jester as is.

final stage left was height lineup-- the human characters all had one o these as well, and MAN did some of em look different, but that's something for another time. anyway, here's the dolls:



yay!! shapes and proportions looking a lot better!! still had a ways to go in evolving the way i draw them (and devon, who's just kinda chillin there) but this was what i was working with when i started drawing sprites.

if you wanna see their current key art, you can go check out their page..... but seriously i love drawing these guys and i put so much effort into getting them where they are, and drawing them and my other characters for this project has been a HUGE boon for my art style and its development over the past year and a half. love you, circus guys....

4/3/2025

hey, it's been a while! but i'm back and i'm back with a vengeance. here's a little devlog of what i've been up to circus demons wise:

first order of business (to get back into things) was redrawing all of vera's sprites. i originally drew them almost exactly a year ago and didn't spend much time on them at the time, so when i did vera's little character sheet and did a good illustration of her i decided i wanted to redo her sprites to bring them more in line with the new design and give her a wider range of expression while i was at it. here's a little comparison of her neut/smile sprites, from march 2024 and march 2025 respectively:
once i finished that, i started on sprites for lythe and cameron. lythe's are done for now (though i'll likely add some more expressions and maybe another pose later) and cameron's are all sketched!

second order of business was some backgrounds. we're about halfway through chapter one (rebuilding) in the writing right now, so it's pretty important that the circus gets, ya know. rebuilt. i went over the old circus backgrounds and finally actually made their final, rebuilt and customized versions!! obviously i won't be showing them to you for spoiler reasons, but rest assured that i was actually pretty happy with the results, and i'm sure it'll be pretty satisfying to watch it all come together. now i just have to write it...

speaking of which!! the last order of business was solidifying some character backstories and writing-- again, this is some stuff i have to keep close to my chest for now, but i can tell you right now that i wrote a LOT about devon's backstory and had some reaaaaally exciting "ah HA" moments when it comes to tying together some themes and character narratives. i won't give you any details, but here's a sketch of an 18 year old devon as a little teaser for you:



so that's what's been up!! we're at about one year since i started coding my funny little circus idea in ren'py, and i couldn't be happier that i've been able to keep it going, even if my motivation slows sometimes. i'll be looking forward to updating you again sometime soon!

3/23/25

ooooo look a SPEEDPAINT!!! isn't that cool?
this miku design is from a little series i did like a year ago where i made some mikus based off of different vocaloid playlists i have, and this was the one for my sleepytime playlist :] it's definitely my favorite from that series and so i wanted to draw it again. super happy with how this painting ended up, i think the style really fits the misty cloud idea i had for the hair more than my original heavy lines and cell shading so. i just thought i'd let you guys see some process stuff!! i loooove this digital painting style it's so easy and fun and lovely and can end up looking so cozy and lovely :D

i've been drawing a lot of really cozy stuff recently. probably cause the holiday season's coming up and i'm really excited to head home and spend time with family, of course, but i'm just reaaaaally into drawing like people drinking hot chocolate under blankets and stuff lately. enrichment for me

11/23/24

i've been spending a lot of time animating little gifs lately...... obviously you can see the ones i did of my silly lil dolls on the circus page (which fun fact: the one of the clown was done MONTHS and MONTHS earlier when i first made my neocities account as a lil test and then the other two i just did like a few weeks ago when i finally really started working on gettin this whole thing set up!!) but i've never really been the animating type until recently.

i've been having a suuuuper fun time with it though. that shadow gif was genuinely sooooooo fun to make and only took me like an hour despite being fully colored and everything so. i'm working on animating a little thing with surge the tenrec right now to experiment with more serious, dynamic animation (see below...)



ermmmmmmm so basically it's pretty epic :] and i'm excited to do expressions and stuff for it yay! anyway. just a little animation update cause i've been doin fun stuff recently!!

11/19/24