Gracious Anthracite @anthracite@dragon.style

Today I was out walking
when I had a brief flash
and saw the people I was passing
as collections of cells gathered together into muscles
pulling against the bones that they grew for some cells to live inside
slithering against each other like a bucket of live eels

And it was kind of beautiful.

Is it #introduction time again? Sorta seems to be. I'd boost the old one but it's a little out of date.

Hi, I'm Peggy, and I run dragon.style. If "maintaining a Patreon to pay the hosting, putting off updating it for a year, and occasionally opening the place up for new users" qualifies as "running" it.

I am a trans lady who spends most of her time drawing complicated sci-fi comics and sort of earning a living doing that via Patreon.

Adobe Illustrator has been my main medium since 2000, it's a pretty unusual choice but it works for me.

I used to do burlesque, then pole dance, as a hobby and a way to stay fit. I miss it and should find something similar again.

You may know me from elsewhere as Egypt Urnash.

@irisjaycomics eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs
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Oh right. Drat. I can't apply pattern swatches to art brushes. Guess I'll have to change it to be a variable-width stroke.

omfg the person who took our order at the coffee shop is so obviously a freshly hatched egg, I wish her the best of luck in her transition.

Or I could just draw solid shapes, as I normally do, except with outlines, and a little more attention to certain aspects of how they overlap. I can add some effects to the lines later on, as well as do some cleanup of messy line/shape overlaps. I think I like this, it is MUCH faster than trying to make a perfect piece of line art and fill it in later.

Annoyingly it feels like the Blob Brush and the Eraser is, for once, the right tool or the job; I figure I will duplicate all this line art and use Live Paint to do flats, then add some more shading on this layer, or a layer with a similar opacity mask to make it a little mottled.

And I can tell right now that not being able to casually reposition body parts as I decide the pose needs some work is gonna be A Pain, I almost wonder if doing my normal flat colors first, THEN doing lines OVER that, might not work better for me. How the fuck do you people who focus on line art deal with everything wanting to be layered by phases in the process instead of parts of the objects being drawn, ugh.

Experimenting: a commission I'm working on looks like it's gonna maybe need to have *gasp* OUTLINES so I want to fiddle with this some methods. Also I seem to want to draw more Bookshelf Porn.

1. initial rough
2. inks with Astute's Dynamic Sketch
3. inks with pencil tool
4. pencil tool inks with an attempt to make it automatically give me a heavy outline, wow that'll need a lot of work before it saves me any time

Yay, that's the first shelf unit's bottom two rows of books returned from the boxes they went in for the hurricane. Next I guess I get to decide how to handle expanding into the new shelf space, there's a decent chunk of books filed out of order in the second shelf unit...

The non-Headroom version of Paranoimia from In Visible Silence is so goddamn chill. Someday I would love to stumble across an extended super-chill cover of it. The only real cover of it is a super-upbeat one on Fon Mixes, where Carl Cox tries to dance it up.

I suppose I will just have to acquire a decent bass, learn to play it, and produce a thirty minute Paranoimia
Groove.

I just spent a while reorganizing some books; now I think I am going to kick back with a beer, a slim tome my the former head priest of the Temple of Set, and a playlist of three different versions of "Paranoimia" on endless repeat.

There are two cats in this picture.

Tonight I went out to G’s Pizza for a shrimp pizza and holy crap I needed that. I think there is some useful element I completely lack in my diet outside of shrimp, and I have not had anything with shrimp since before the hurricane until tonight.

Your degree system only goes up to 10=0? Pfff, get with the times.

This cargo net was five bucks well spent.

Totally not a TF catalyst.

I have not played Undertail 3 nor do I plan on playing it, yet I know my timelines are about to be flooded with fan art of it.

I find myself wondering if a goofy drawing based solely on verbal descriptions of its characters would be amusing.

Has this red slip shrunk since I last wore it? Or have my titties gotten bigger? Possibly both.

And some new books showed up on my doorstep today, so I guess it’s time to emulate Stella for a little while!

(I have an earlier edition of the Greer as a pirate PDF and it is super solid. Looking forwards to seeing what’s changed beyond “I have given him some money now”.)

Three days ago, I woke up and felt like what I needed to be working on was a picture of Stella quietly sitting in a library, reading. So I spent five hours over those days drawing this.

Can you find both snakes?

Process notes:
https://egypt.urnash.com/blog/2021/09/18/research/

Prints/shirts/etc:
https://www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/89236449

AI source/high-res:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/56315448

fillin' in some stacks

hooray for custom brushes and blends (and distortion meshes, I just make Illustrator do all that perspective work for me)