Hey all!

Apologies for the lack of art recently; long story short is I pushed myself too far and developed a RSI in my drawing wrist last month. It’s still in the process of healing (I’ll be out of commission for another month at minimum though I’ve been slowly drawing for single 10-minute chunks per day).

The good news is it hasn’t affected typing or the ability to work on non-drawing projects. The even BETTER news is I made the 125k gunter/f!corrin fic I finished into a (limited time) physical softcover book!

you can buy it here; link to purchase: https://www.blurb.com/bookstore/invited/10213522/9505662283de6bea6b3dc8b0fc4e6c28fa87b0f4

the fine print:

  • price is the absolute lowest I can set (I earn $0; every cent goes to blurb for printing).
  • you do have to sign up to blurb to check out fully (i know, its dumb, just delete your account after you get it).
  • this listing will be up for a limited time (two weeks?) as I honestly don’t intend it to reach a broader audience than… basically y’all following me here. 🙂 this one’s for the gunter die-hards.
  • if you gotta have the fic and have major issues ordering for whatever reason, reach out to me at overlord@kradeelav.com and i can ship you a version, though you’ll have to be willing to give me your address and paypal over something to cover shipping if necessary.

sooooo the peerless @lululeighsworld and I got together to make a possessed!Gunter FE: Heroes unit ~ !

Leigh did all of the amazing writing (seriously, I was on the floor mallet’d by FEELINGS upon reading the forging bonds for the first time), and yours truly stitched together the art & UI. Leigh’s inspired me with their unshakeable devotion to the character not to mention talented writing and so it felt like a delightful inevitability, and an honor nonetheless, to collaborate here 😀

Ao3 mirror (writing & art): https://archiveofourown.org/works/53279173

 

(In reply to a message originally on tumblr. A nice soul sent an inquiry about any tips drawing old men I’ve learned recently; here’s a few insights that may or may not be helpful. -krad)

You’ve probably already seen my post on drawing old folks in general, but just in case if you haven’t, it’s over here. I link it mostly because there’s a book mentioned there (Morpho: Skin & Fat) that is a far better resource than anything I could mention; it talks about how gravity affects sags over time and wrinkle placement—all that good stuff.

I will say, what has been useful to learn recently is that it’s very possible to over-render age lines, and that “more lines” doesn’t always mean better.

Sure, we’re probably sick and tired of the standard gacha-style “two lines by the eyes and mouth” stylization and how it doesn’t cut it when you want a believable 60+yr old. But there’s also the other extreme of drawing too many lines/creases where the clarity (emotional clarity, visual clarity, character design clarity) of the art piece gets lost. Sometimes one well placed crease/shadow can believably (and handsomely) age a person more than five of them.

That’s when you get into the interesting game of ‘knowing how to draw all the creases/wrinkles so you don’t over- or under-shoot the number of lines’ for clarity. It’s a fun tug-of-war between placing the lines for the specific expression, placing them for Teh Sexy (if you are drawing them for fanservice) vs placing them for that specific character.

Lastly, it’s fun to collect stylized versions of old folks and see what shortcuts do work for other illustrators. I don’t have the tumblr post on me right as of the moment, but there’s one floating around that mentions Urasawa’s various manga/anime series is a great example of the sheer variety, and there’s other creators too. For example —

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Same medium, four different dudes (still could be more variety!), but four vastly different line placements that are still flexible enough to show believable but consistent acting.

Hope that helps ~

notes on drawing old people:

  • morpho’s skin + fat book is an invaluable reader for an easily-digested anatomy study. here’s that book plus a few others. please support the author if you can.
  • like other naturalistic carbon life forms in nature, lines don’t have to be perfect. (personally i find tiktok-standard young people the hardest ones to draw because if you draw a line with the eye a smidge off, it looks weird. old people, you got a lot of forgiveness in them lines. hell, multiple lines just look good as wrinkles.)
  • fleshy things sag, and they always sag towards gravity (down). if you had to pick three major areas to draw, the bit under people’s chin, the tits (unisex), and the belly are generally the main three.
  • a cluster of wrinkles tend to pop up in joints that bend a lot, notably knuckles, elbows, and knees. those same joints have a habit of enlarging, whether due to inflammation, or the surrounding muscle wasting away a bit.
  • you move real slowly and your range of motion is a lot more limited because joints hurt in particular. (aka your hands/elbows/neck/shoulders can’t reach shit they used to.) old people’ll often have canes/back-scratchers/etc discretely within range to help with this, to almost act as a limb-extender.
  • with necks in particular, you tend to move your whole upper body in one piece rather than your neck twisting independently from the shoulders.
  • … and you really don’t want to fall, and maybe your eyesight’s going too. so you’re always double checking whether or not your surroundings are stable. old people sit down gingerly (hands might grasp a table or railing several times for the best position), and gravity is not your friend getting up either.
  • backs tend to hunch over and stay in the bent position. because of this, and the muscles wasting a way, old people often tend to look like they “shrink” slightly versus an adult in their prime. a notable exception is people who’ve had military training, and the difference is striking.
  • lastly, when in doubt, watch some videos of some old people even just for a few seconds, and mentally sketch out how you’d draw the freeze-frames. which bits move, and which bits stay stationary?