(CC0) Just put this together so I could have some bright and cheery art on my bank card and because I’ve been wanting to replace my old banner art for HeliumSqueeze for years now. I drew and colored Puffy (Left) and Pinks (Pinks), but I grabbed and slapped on a generated beach for the background because I only had a couple of hours before the cutoff for submitting the art for printing on the card, and the background is really not the point. If I had been thinking more clearly, I’d probably have reused the bubbles and balloons tile pattern from PoppingSpree instead, but I think the bank card tends to not like repeating pattern backgrounds.

When I get around to _actually_ replacing the banner, I’ll git rid of those pixelbrush lines for some thicker more cartoony vector lines. And I’ll have to rethink how I’m going to put the HeliumSqueeze text in there. These specific balloons end up looking kinda distracting like kinda off jawbreaker candies instead of balloons? I dunno, I’ll improvise when I get time. Actually, maybe I should go ahead and make the leap to trying to do 3D models for the characters for the banner since that’s the general direction I want to go in the future anyway.

Full Sketch Page etc. The purple-on-white sketch of Ribbon Badge in the middle-rightof the canvas is actually a live-streamed doodle made by Alixesque! Alix is a super cool and good friend, please check out the page!

A lot of half-doodles and reworks and color swatches kinda tossed about the page. Also you can see where I was trying to revisit the design for Zooey again. This time I was trying to take some of the yellow/orange I like from Tails (Prower) and the purple mane from the Rarity fanart animation version of the same Zoobe Luna Fourth of July meme. I was going to keep most of Rarity’s hair style almost directly in tact, but instead I decided to go with kind of a mohawk sorta look to draw a bit from Kazooie (Banjo-Kazooie)’s visual language. Gives her a silhouette that’s a bit different from most of my characters. I feel pretty sure I’m going to stick with the orange/yellow instead of the white, I’m just now sure how deep I want the orange to be yet. I don’t want it to read as “flesh color” but I don’t want it to be overly abrasive on the eyes either, even if that fits the character’s personality. And I think it reads a bit more clearly that she’s easily agitated, actually kinda loves music and dance, and likes to live open and true to her beliefs one way or another. I assume before the whole encounter with RB, Zooey was a roadie for a small indie band. At some point she probably broke off and used her earnings and loan to setup a recording studio. I have a bunch of other thoughts about this, but I don’t think it’s quite ready to be organized and tossed out as a “plan” yet.

At the bottom is a doodle for zbombiibunnii. They were *very* clear that being lifted up by the buns, having the crosses on the eyes, and having dizzy birds/stars were very important to them. I got the distinct vibe that this was a kink type request from somebody who is still kinda self-conscious about their interest, so I did the second balloon-centric thing to kinda show what I meant that what they were asking for isn’t that far off from what I spent almost 20 years drawing to begin with. Either way, the bomberman-themed-bunny character isn’t one that they specifically asked for, I kinda came up that spur of the moment based on the reference album they sent over. And from the sound of things they were very happy with it. When they asked what the name of the character is, I went with “zbombiibunnii for now”. They also said they imagined that the person lifting up their character might be Dark Zbombiibunnii, which I think is kinda cute and that’s what lead to the color choices there. Buuuut I probably need to like, actually take the time to draw out both characters less visually obscured if this is going to become a recurring thing. I don’t normally do art commissions because the stress of formal commission arrangements makes it hard for me to get anything done. But doing informal requests for subscribers or familiar faces doesn’t stress me out quite as much and it becomes a bit easier for us to kinda find a cozy midpoint between me being a bit easy on the effort and them not having to overpay for work I don’t feel I can deliver. Or. Something.

So uh, anyway, was neat coming up with a spur of the moment bunny bomberman OC. Kiiiinda makes me want to toy with returning to the Bomberman series to see if there are things I can draw from it for my own characters and settings and whatnot. Bomberman is a series that I’m always pleased to see around and think fondly of, but I typically do not actually enjoy _playing_ because losing in it tends to feel particularly bad. But the bright cartoony colors and shiny look for their bomb-centric world appeals to me, and I think it’s not _too_ much of a stretch to have bomb-style balloon stuff.

I’m still not sure what the best way is to label whatever it is I’m doing. Most of the stuff I make isn’t as overtly kink-coded as it used to be as my libido is starting to go. I used to think the best approach would be to treat things that had erotic intent exactly the same as pornography and treat things that weren’t exactly the same as any other “tame” thing regardless of how it looks outwardly, but after a while it became painfully evident that the binary “is or isn’t mature” doesn’t work very well at all. I think my current approach is to just go by feel, but otherwise claim the bulk of what I make would be under the bulk category of “Probably nothing too out of place from what teens will experience, but it’s targeting adults who adore the bright and cute aesthetics but still want topics and situations that are treated for as nuanced and complicated as they often are.” So then I look at stuff I draw like this particular ZbombiiBunni sketch and my first thought is “ehhh, this is maybe a little too suggestive and bodily-objectifying than I’d really like to be known for.” But I think I did a fair mix of sticking to the general aesthetic tastes I already like, and stuff that I think really targets what Bombii wanted.
I dunno.

Anyway, I ended up suddenly falling asleep immediately work and woke up just around midnight, so I think my sleep pattern is going to stay a bit busted for a few days. One of the more important coworkers at the small team I work for passed away suddenly in his sleep with absolutely no warning that anything was wrong. The whole team is kinda shook and we don’t know exactly how we plan to proceed. That same day, water to the house got shut off for a while and that kinda made me a little rattled. We got the bill paid and water turned back on before long, but it just made the whole day kinda disorienting.

(CC0) and a bunch of relatively aimless doodles to end on. If you actually want to check those you’ll probably have to click past the thumbnail to full size, I don’t know legible any of that is at thumbnail scale.