Yo I'm Gen, I do illustrations, pixel art, and TTRPG design.

Thought I'd make a thread to post work, answer questions, and talk about art process stuff for my own enjoyment and for those who are interested.

Stuff I post to NG is a slow trickle of my back catalogue of work. If you'd like to see my entire body of work then you can find it on either Tumblr, or Twitter. And if you'd like to see my in-progress TTRPG Songs we Sing, I have it on my Itch.io for free! But you can also throw a few dollars at me for it.

Anyways here's a few deets about my tools:

Tablet: Cintiq 13hd (I had a kamvas pro 24 but its usb out port broke right as it went outside of warranty, so I'll have to see if i can solder that back into place)

Art Program: Clip Studio paint

If you want to ask questions then drop them in this thread! I love being helpful.

To start off let me talk about my old favorite:

Deity of Blank Canvases

This is a piece I'm very proud of. I made it as an attempt to emulate the sorta diorama-esque feel of modern gacha game art such as arknights. The dynamic whisp of smoke along with the interesting silhouette created by the multiple arms always grabs me when I look back on it. It probably sounds conceited to gush about your own art, but I'm just that happy with some pieces.

The face has a subtle pattern to it to evoke the feeling of paintings such as Malevich's Black Square. Despite being, well, a single solid color, it has depth to it. There's imperfections and ghosts of something beneath that your eyes start to pick out as you look at it. I placed subtle texture on the face to create that feeling of being drawn in as one would be drawn into the horror of a blank canvas, which has all the possibility in the world, but none that you can grasp. It's an expanse that consumes your soul and identity. Were you ever an artist? Will you ever draw again? That's the sort of emotion this trickster diety is meant to prey upon.

Deity's in my setting are neither inherently good or bad. They can be benevolent, malicious, or simply transactionary. They're gods of things as well as concepts. They're the gods of things we've made and the things we fear. They're those ideas given name and form. There's something so fearful about this deity's promise to give you inspiration for your left hand as described in the quote below the piece in the gallery. It's a tangible sacrifice for something that's important to you. It's a sacrifice of your body for art. How hard someone would consider such a thing says a lot about their relationship with art and how healthy that relationship is.

Also I'll admit he's sorta sexy.

Tiefling Portrait

Commission portrait I did for a client. These are some of my favorite eye pupils I've done. I wanted to create a lot of depth of colors in the skin as well without getting too muddy or overly rendered and I think I did well with that.

Hard Wired Island: Tales from L5 Album Cover

This was the first album art I've ever done and it came out pretty well I think! Doing full scenes is always a struggle where I see the depths of hell for a bit, but nothing ventured nothing gained!

:)

Missed your art. Weird how I basically grew up on a decade of your art online.

it's always so surprising to hear that people have been enjoying my work for so long! In my head I'm always like, "Still gotta establish myself and really put myself in people's heads", but I guess I've been doing that all this time, which is weird to think about!

New art portal post!

"Have we... Made Contact?"

I went off the rails for AC6 and completed all its achievements already! I love this series deeply and it got me into drawing mechs in the first place so I definitely had to do fanart for it.

There's a lot of humanized Ayre designs so I wanted to throw my interpretation into the ring.

Kin Eater

A fun halloween pic of my sona as a werewolf within the context of my setting Songs we Sing. In the setting knights are those who've eaten a deity to wield that deity's power through their own body. If they become too bloodthirsty though then the deity inside of them becomes too powerful and takes control in a frenzy, turning them into a monstrous beast.

This particular iteration though is what if someone just ate a deity that was way too strong for their body already. A deity of a mountain is ancient and powerful so it'd just turn you straight into a maneater.

Not too much to say about this one besides that I wanted to draw the whole disembodied hands thing for a while now.

The thought of drawing more hands than necessary is harrowing, but still we persist.

This was a fun commission since I got to practice lots of weathering on this guy. The rust was tiring to apply over a long time, but by drawing on the rust on a separate layer from the base color and using a clipping layer on it with multiply + a dark purple color, I was able to get the rust in the shaded areas to more easily blend in.

Ref sheet of my current vtuber avatar. Right now it's just a png-tuber since I'm too lazy/busy to get into rigging but maybe one day

I've had these in my pocket for a while so I can use them in my TTRPG book eventually.

You can find more info about them all in the preview on itchio

Standouts though are collectives who are a swarm of little lizards who are the broken up soul of people who function as a single person by working together. Armatures who are a robot body with a human soul stuffed in them. Non-Condoners who are slug people who live inside discarded armor. Then there are knights who have obtained the power of deities by eating their flesh.

Update of an older pic cleaning up Ayre's face since I wasn't happy with it and also making it look less like an arc of pee is coming out of her crotch. A surprisingly common misinterpretation.

A few other tweaks were made to the screens and other minor details to make it look better overall

Some fanart I did for an artist's OC!

Some assorted sketches of random things

Old pic that I updated with some better shading and cleaning up. I liked the vibes on it and thought about using it for the book so I think it deserved a bit more love

Guardian of the Mountains

Older sprite that has a creature design that I'm pretty proud of. The contrast of its single eye buried in the hollow of its horns and the replicated eye motif onto its follower's mask, which ironically blinds them is so strong.

Salvage Union Mech Commission

Super happy with the graffiti I drew on this one. Had to manually go in and shade each of those colors due to bad planning. Don't live like me.

Recent commission for a client. The more organic surfaces and forms proved to be surprisingly challenging, also the circular medallions tied with the ribbon

Old art from a couple years ago. I'm still pretty proud of it though and I love the design of this OC in general. Background was made using posterized and edited photographs of vacuum tubes

A fun commission to draw a spartan from halo infinite!

Some more old sketch pages

I like it I like it. The Deity of Blank Canvases is the best considering you mention Arknights which is a fun gacha game if you're into defense tower games.

Description on this one says it all: MHA OC commission to draw this character along with design his outfit. I'm really proud of the effects on it

Just got in a boxset with cards that I did robot design and illustration work on! Absolutely floored by how good these look in-person!

I'm just so excited that I have to share these everywhere I go! It's been a long-standing dream to do art for a card game from when I was a kid and now I'm here!

I'll try and upload some more of these illustrations to the art portal soon

What kind of brush you use for the line work in Clip Studio Paint? I love how organic and sketchy your lines look.

I use a round pixel brush actually. I turn anti-aliasing off for it and my fill tool/magic wand/lasso also and it keeps the hard edges/pixels.

Got a screencap of my standard settings for it to help out. I forget why I have 0 stabilization. Maybe because I felt like it felt more raw while sketching lines.

This is in clip studio paint but you can make a similar brush in pretty much any program, though for some reason I just hate the way photoshop handles brush pressure where it doesn't taper in the way I want for these pixel brushes.

This mech you made looks complex to do and come up with. Did you use any 3d software (ex: Blender) to help with the perspective and details?

Naw, I always tell myself I'll learn blender one day but I keep putting it off. It's mostly my own sense of form and perspective along with some drafting classes and mechanical design know-how to fill in the gaps

It's sort of like how people put together outfits, you just sort of put together a "closet" of your favorite joints, heads, arms, and legs in your head and start to mix them together in pleasing ways