Waking Up To Seeing A Comment On Your Fic From Someone You Admired Way Back When, But Haven't Interacted

Waking up to seeing a comment on your fic from someone you admired way back when, but haven't interacted with since you went on an unintentional hiatus for too long:

via GIPHY

Hey hey, it's Monday!

Knuckles needs to work on his communication skills something fierce.

Two preview images for this week!

Both of these turned out pretty decent. The spotty leaf shadows on Knuckles look better than my previous forested images, so I call that a win. And the scribbly shading on the scenery works.

As for the other, I'm glad the shading still shows through because I like how the shadows on Snively turned out. I shaded it normally and then used a gradient fill layer to mostly colorize everything red like "robot vision," so the colors of everything kind of disappeared (except for where I very specifically faded out the gradient). I also had fun with the interlacing lines and messing with the text (it actually says stuff, but I used a symbol font to obfuscate it because it was distracting in readable English).

See you Monday with the chapter link!

The next chapter is posted! It's a short one this week.

Also, "fun" fact (that's also in the notes for the chapter): this chapter is the last one I wrote and posted during the story's original run before going on a ten-year hiatus due to losing steam, getting distracted, general life stuff, etc.

TEN YEARS.

Don't worry, I'm not doing that to everyone reading now. The story is done. Has been for over a decade now, so there's no reason not to keep up the posting schedule. You don't have to wait ten years, just one week.

But yeah, I wrote this chapter, posted it, and then...got married, had three kids, graduated college, moved states twice...lots of things.

So if you see a marked improvement (I hope!) in the writing for all the following chapters, that's why.

Hey hey preview time! This is the last of the one-illustration chapters (the rest have either two or three).

Can't say as I'm super happy with this, but I had to tell myself to stop touching it, so it is what it is. Again, I blame not having formal training (I make do with online tutorials and fudging around with Photoshop settings). I do like how the "lighting through leaves" effect worked on the tree trunk. Wish I was better at it on other surfaces. Oh well.

Say hello to two of my chao (yes, I have them in my SA2 Battle chao garden)! Angel is the neutral flying chao attached to Knuckles' leg, and Frost is the hero swimming chao in the water.

Preview for the next chapter! Surprise, it's an echidna!

I mean, if you've looked at the tags (or summary) for the story on AO3, you'd have seen Knuckles's name already, so I guess this is only a surprise to people who are merely watching for the illustrations and not reading the story. But whatever.

I'm not entirely sure I'm pleased with this one (my wonky angles on foreground vs. background notwithstanding), but I'm calling it good because I'm done messing with it, and falling back on my "I'm not anywhere near formally trained" excuse. It is what it is, and I can live with that.

See you Monday with the chapter link!

Told you I wouldn't leave you guys hanging for ten years! (Not on purpose, at least.)

This is where the story came back from hiatus, and what did I do? Fight scene!

Like I said last week, all the previews from here on out have at least two images, and oh boy, do we have some fun ones this week. Also, useless spoiler warning, I guess?

Unlike last week, I'm actually pretty happy with these, especially the first of the two. Fight scenes, yeah!

That first one has some pretty good energy (thank you watercolor stroke brushes that I could stack to get that swipe effect for the background), and while the shading layer was slightly complex due to all the little shapes, the overall coloring job was still far simpler than last week's wooded scene.

As for the second.... I like the menacing angle, it was actually really easy to color (background was super-simple), and most of the time was probably spent roughing up Knuckles' shoulders.

Chapter on Monday as usual, and we'll be getting into the stuff written after the ten-year hiatus!

And now the chapter is up! I hope you enjoy!

Here's the preview for the upcoming chapter of Falling into Darkness. Keeping with the grey theme, because apparently all my illustrations for a while are in Robotropolis.

This chapter just has one illustration, and our first proper full-body look at roboticized Sonic. I drew some inspirations from the design for Mecha Sonic (roboticized Sonic) in the Archie comics, such as with the gold elements, but also wanted this design to be its own thing (and needed certain design elements to be present for...reasons). I also really like how the shape of his curled hand became so much clearer to read when I colored some of the incidental lines to be closer to his "skintone."

As for Sally, her overall design is inspired by a lot of things. I'm not great at drawing her SatAM incarnation, and have honestly been a lot more influenced by how she looked through the bulk of the Archie comics (thanks to reading that for a while in college, and from the sheer amount of fanart of that version I've seen). I tried to tweak her look my way to have her fit in with the Sega-styled characters, without just resorting to her post-reboot look from the comics. I'm pretty happy with it.

I didn't originally have a background sketched in for this picture. It was just Sally and Sonic facing off against each other. I started painting random fog around them, which looked fine, but then decided I wanted to take a stab at painting the scrap yard behind them instead, very roughly with a painterly brush. (By the way, I cannot recommend Jazza's digital brushes enough; I'm very happy with how they feel to work with, and they're what I'm primarily using for all the shading and effects and the like, save for the edges of these illustration blocks.)

Anyway, see you Monday with the chapter link!