Why I decided to start sketching in pen?
Today I will share some sketches I have. These sketches are all done using a pen and no erasing since I have a problem with perfection and anxiety when drawing. Kinda reminds me of the main purpose of inktober even though I never joined in that. Doing this outside of a challenge and not daily actually helped me a lot more.
I always loved drawing using a pen way back when I was at learning at school. I drew characters when I got too bored of listening to the teacher. However I always kept it to myself and felt less pressure to make it perfect since no one would judge it.
While I still feel the inside pressure is not as bad anymore or I wouldn't be sharing this and I'm actually kinda of proud of them. My lines aren't as shaky and the proportions for someone who is rusty (I haven't drawn in 5 years I think) aren't bad.
Funny enough the last time I drew with this much frequency was when I played New Leaf. I don't know what is about Animal crossing that makes me motivated to be creative. Besides my original story the only franchises I feel convince me draw are Animal Crossing, Spyro and Undertale but Animal Crossing is the clear winner.
I have no issues drawing the animal crossing character in their nintendo design as I have previously trained on that so this time around I wanted to challenge myself a little. I am aware of my flaws at drawing are a lack of practice and I really want to someday become good enough to draw human characters. Since I was young I have always drawn animal characters, mainly dragons because of my love for Spyro. During my high school days I was real good in realistic art (because of art school) but I stopped drawing after I finished and then lost all that experience that hopefully I can slowly build back again. My goal is not to be perfect I just want to be good enough to draw my original character and be proud of it. So to reach towards that goal I though I should join two things together "Animals" and "human proportions" and if I start to master it I think I'm good to make the transition to human drawings.
My goal with these sketches is to create anthropomorphic versions of the animal crossing characters and after a bit of training maybe I could do more than just sketch. Hopefully one day I will maybe do little animations or stunning digital art.
The sketches and headcanons
I separated the sketches I have into groups by themes. The theme of today is "Jay and villagers that like him too much". I'm a person that when it plays the games likes to interact with the villagers and watch them interact with the world. From that I create headcanons and from that I create lore and a story. I plan to share with people, in my Drimusa journal threat, clear images and videos of the origins of my headcanons for each different characters but in here you will get the sketches that work on those ideas.
When I began to sketch I started by drawing Jay and then I moved on to Marlo. I won't be showing you those very first drafts as they don't look good or are drawn in a way you couldn't understand what was going on because they are very experimental and schematic. However it didn't take me long to attempt to draw Marlo and Jay together because I love their relationship in my game. If you notice in the sketch on the left I was still referencing their original designs and I do keep coming back to it as I try to find a balance between that and the style I am discovering through the sketches. If you notice I draw Jay a lot better than Marlo and I think that's thanks to my New Leaf days when all I did was draw Jay XD My goal with Jay is to mix his original design with a fit jock human body but keep his portions resembling a swallow bird (that's Jay species). With Marlo I want to mix his design with a more chubby human body while still resembling a hamster. I am still debating if Marlo should be shorter or have his height be the same as in game because hamster proportions for a taller body is making it hard to achieve. Because of the proportions struggles I am having with Marlo and the fact that I was not at all familiar with real life hamsters I did some research and it got to the point that google thought I wanted to adopt a hamster for some reason and started to recommend me hamster products.
I kept sketching but I started to get tired of just drawing Jay and Marlo and thought it was time to add another animal to the mix to see what I could do. I thought about the characters that had headcanons with Jay and I remembered Raymond. During his stay on my island in two different years (in 2021 and 2022) he did some small but still impacting things worthy of headcanon. One of those things was his interest in Jay and I thought at the time I would ship Raymond and Jay (kinda do not gonna lie
) but Jay never looked back at Raymond with that interest so because of Jay it was not meant to be. A few months later Jay and Marlo are a thing
and I had just acquired Raymond amiibo... I felt the island was getting a little dull so I called on Raymond back to my island Drimusa to start some drama. I wondered if Raymond was going to mess with Jay and Marlo relationship
. Let's just say he didn't just mess with those two but with everyone else including my character. It was real bad guys so I made him leave hehe
it was fun anyway.
So that is the reason for this sketch. Both Raymond and Marlo love Jay but Jay pretends to be all "happy" and himbo about it when in fact he enjoys the attention.
By these sketches maybe you get the picture of my headcanon Jay personality a little bit. Yeah guys Jay seems to like to hang out with cat office CEO, mafia hamster bosses and rich powerful woman...he's a mess but then again everyone in Drimusa is a mess.
Don't even get me started on Raddle trying to get along with Jay after trying to step down for his "villain" role after Raymond took it away from him. To this day Raddle is still trying to get to know Jay and I am still wondering if he is starting to like Jay. Marlo was already jealous of Raymond and he will get jealous of Raddle if he keeps being near Jay. This is funny to me because Jay in New Leaf was a nobody and only my character and Bonbon showed some interest but now in new horizons he turned into some kind of chad for both female and male villagers. With those themes in mind and the fact that I started my series on my Alamor channel I decided to sketch about that.
I've been learning how to use Blender but still got ways to go so while I'm learning that, MMD is a great program to quickly see how the model works as the community shares alot of premade animations. These models are 50% made by Nintendo 50% made by me I modeled the Iggy moustache and hair, Marlo and Jay eyebrows. Plus edited the textures and created new textures for Iggy since he is not in the new horizons game.
Unlike Jay and Marlo that still have a lot to learn about how a proper healthy couple works XD Anyway! I started by drawing Muffy but after drawing her I knew I had to attempt to draw Zell which I was a bit scared to do because he's a gazelle and it is a bit harder to draw than sheep or birds in my opinion. I think Zell porportions don't look bad at all but the head does. I fixed it in the drawing to the left.
