The Variable Edge

@thevariableedge.bsky.social

226 Followers 455 Following

Traditional/Digital Artist No AI Commission Status: Closed Tips, Commissions or more? ko-fi.com/variable-edge

Old "Armored Girls concept" pic featuring Pharah from Overwatch and Samus from Metroid. The main point of this pic is to have a shot of Samus switching out from her Morph Ball.
During a stream involving Pokemon Green, the chat turned to the topic of old 90's movies we used to watch, and House Party, starring Kid n' Play was brought up. There are a trio of bullies in the movie that were played by another RnB group called Full Force, and Brett and the chat got on to discussing which Pokemon would play the roles of the bullies. It came down to Machoke, Electabuzz and Meowth. I looked up stills from the movie, and settled on this one of the trio contemplating some light-hearted arson. It was a different time. In addition to giving the 'mons some additional clothing based on the movie characters, the gas can Electabuzz is holding has a suitable 'flammable' warning label on it-- a Charmander's tail.
Siege Deluxe Ironhide intentionally mistransformed to invoke his original G1 toy. Yes, this is how I have him displayed on my shelf.
Transformers G1 Starscream, sporting hips, knees and elbows that do not exist on the actual toy.
Does anyone even read this? Sound off in the comments if you did! Black and white shot of a mermaid version of April O'Neil as she swims with a quartet of suspiciously masked turtles. The pose was a challenge to do, and I might revisit it in the future to improve on it, should I get better ideas for it. Despite water being denser than air, it's still fun to make swimming characters look more like they're flying through deeper water, right? Funny thing, since I'm not very comfortable with deep water, as anyone who's been to a pool with me knows. One difficult aspect of this particular pose, is that it obscures some of my favorite personal details I like to add to my mermaids, namely their gills, their dorsal fin (both of which are still KINDA visible here), as well as a pair of fins that I give them that allow them some stability and movement on land. I have two main aquatic races planned for my story, though I don't have any actual plans yet for any significant characters in either (it's mainly set up as a possible story playground to draw from should an idea come up). There's a more traditional mermaid race, and there's one that are the half-serpent Naga, and they DO NOT like each other. Turns out that a female Naga is called a Nagini, which I don't feel is a name I can comfortably use, so that's something for the idea backburner to deal with. And if you really read all the way to here, tell me your favorite pizza topping! Personally, I love a greasy pepperoni!
An Ewok Jedi idea I was playing with before.
My dinky 12-year old drawing tablet with its pen held together by duct tape. The drawn box inserted with the "No Area" label? The area above it is the active zone that represents my ENTIRE computer screen, and no amount of settings adjustments can get it to be bigger. So I'm essentially drawing on a patch of space half the soze of a Magic playing card. So, this is why I draw traditionally, then scan it in for inking, coloring, etc.
Daisy vs Ridley
Daisy x Cammy = Daissy
Whoo, this takes me back! This is actually a scan of the final artwork, which has long been lost to time and outdated hardware, and it carries a special story. Back in the day, my family had a small company that specialized in aerial cartography. Before the time of Google Maps, our company would get contracted to do fly-overs of assigned locations, photograph them, and turn those into maps for our clients. Usually, these would be geologic studies and aerial surveys of environmental changes, etc. So what does this have to do with my summer swimsuit art? My uncle wanted to modernize our operation by buying an EXPENSIVE Macintosh computer workstation, a high-end scanner and a color printer. We could scan the photo negatives from the aerial survey, clean up the scans, then put the resulting pictures together into a full map, which would then be printed for the client. And it was all done on Photoshop.... 3.0. I had a knack for figuring out computers and programs, so my uncle let me loose on this expensive piece of hardware, let me scan my drawings, color them and even PRINT them, all so we could have an idea of how to run the software and develop a workflow. This, and a handful of other drawings, helped us figure out stuff at a time before Youtube tutorials, let alone Youtube itself, were even a thing. Now about the print itself-- the white spots are drops of paint that landed on it during a time when my room was being painted. My coloring was textbook amateur: selection lassos BY MOUSE, flat coloring with the bucket tool, tiled patterns for the wal texture, and the sky was a scan from a National Geographic magazine we had in the office. Maybe I should revisit this pic with my current skills.
Amantha dressed as a Raider, walking alongside Scrappy the rooster. She is wearing an ARC Raiders logo inspired version of the Aviator outfit, and the Electrician backpack. This pic was supposed to be the first of the series of pics I was supposed to do for February, but it ended up taking the entire month. And it was mostly because OF. THIS. BACKGROUND. I probably could have cheated this. Took and painted over a screenshot or something, but something pulled at me to try to paint an actual background plate, and make it as close to the actual thing as I was capable of. And believe me, "what I'm capable of" has a LONG way to go! There are some inconsitencies with the real setting here that I purposely decided to keep. Part of the work was using a screenshot for reference, while leaving some things up to my own interpretation. The mistakes are there because of me, and that's a kind of personal touch. The character, as usual, I base off of Amantha, and she's decidedly less anime-isque this time around. I've been looking at some more expressive design styles as of late, and I was drawn back to the influences of Disney animation (the Little Mermaid to Tarzan period specifically), as well as CG animation styles like in Overwatch. I may be going a bit more in this direction for the time being, at least until my hand changes its mind again. I wish there was a "Scrappy Walk" emote in ARC. Scrappy's the rooster.
Mockup for a "what-if" magazine ad for FFVII Remake Intergrade, poking fun at the classic ad for the original game. I couldn't use the Junon shot, because that's on the next game (mild spoiler). I also didn't use the original opening line of the copy, because console wars aside, that was particularly dark.
Pathblaster accessory of Fall of Cybertron Sideswipe.
Hitomi, from the Dead or Alive series, for ‪bond1250.bsky.social The wet t-shirt was part of the request, and so getting it down with pencil was quite the challenge. I'm sure there are tutorials and such out there, but I was kinda unwilling to add that to my search history! If you took a look at the preview photo I took of the sketches, you can notice that her belt was not fully shaded in at the time, and that was its state when I scanned in the piece, only noticing it after I had already started on the digital touchups (increasing the white highlights, texture, etc.). So I took the pic, finished the shading, then scanned it again and lined it up with the work that was already in progress. Now that I'm looking at the completed work as I type this, I can see that it was done at the time I was binging a bit on Chrissie Zullo Uminga's work, and it was definitely bleeding into my own drawings. Not exactly, fortunately, but I can see its influence.
Princesses Peach and Daisy in Wonder Woman inspired costumes.
Fanart of the Street Fighter 6 Dojo series, featuring (from left to right) Alex, Brett, Ted, and special guest, PokeKellz. Characters and UI art by me, background art and logo from Brett's Twitch (@ShaperofStories), used with permission.
Darkstalkers' Felicia gleefully naps atop a HUGE ball of yarn. Pencils with a touch of digital screentone and textures.
Two thumbnails, whose text line up to form the word, "aisle".
Fanart of 2025! Starting from the top, left to right: Row 1: Pokekellz, X-Ladies, Kitty Pryde Row 2: Month of April: Beach, Daisy O'Neil, Easter April, April Lavigne Row 3: Jedi Leia, Shadow Shadowcat, Mai Bust, Lana Bust Row 4: Mermay-troid, Machu, Arcee, Brett (Super Beard Bros) Row 5: Daissy, Chun-Peach, Rose-alina, Morrigan & Lilith Row 6: Felicia, Hitomi vs Ayane, Voodoo & Velocity, Gambit & Rogue
Greta Garbo
From top left: Elita-1 (Studio Series, Transformers One), Ironhide (Blokees) Scrapper (Studio Series TFTM) Bumblebee (Blokees)
Mega Man faces down the Robot Masters from his 3rd game. But someone's coming from behind... as a friend, or foe?
Mega Man 3 robot masters, with a more mechanical flair.
There's a lot I feel that could be improved on this drawing, but as I don't usually draw men, that's certainly a given. I'll likely revisit this pic again in the future, either with the same characters or not. The layout itself was easy enough: Rogue is a strong girl, and Gambit is the type of suave playboy who might take being sweetly coddled, but not if it takes him off his coolness game. As always, I went with their 90's looks, complete with the banded metal boots. While the art is cleaned up some through Clip Studio Paint, and some texture brought back by way of sharpening the image, the vellum board I usually use felt different and off for this one, to the point I actually considered scrapping it and starting all over. Might have been due to the storms and humidity around the time I worked on this, but the pencils didn't feel "right" going over the surface while sketching, and even during the shading stage. I'm glad I stuck with it to the end, and it looks good enough-- my mild dissatisfaction with the final pic lies in my own execution of the concept, not the way my tools behaved. I've been actively going for a certain visual language in my art style. Anime-inspired of course, but I'm sticking to certain style rules I'm placing for myself, such as the way I structure bodies, to the way I draw hair. Rogue's curly, wavy hair is an example of that. I expect that maybe even the way I render bodies, faces and expressions may change down the line, and I don't know if I might like how it may look at first. But as much as I've had to accept the changes when an artist I follow adopts a new style, I should be just as open to making such changes in myself as well. Even if it may lead to actually drawing more males.
I have a tendency to "draw from memory". If it's a character I've drawn often enough, like Daisy, I may have memorized close to 90% of her design, so okay, cool. But MOST of the time, I just want to draw, I have a "pretty good" picture of the character in my head, and I'm somewhere where I can't just pull up my phone to look up references, like when I drafted Doreen here while standing in a grocery line. "But lots of the details still came out right!" Nuh-uh, that came AFTER, when I had to do LOTS of erasures to fix up the acorn-like padding on her sleeves, and damn, she got through SO far into the process before I realized I LEFT OUT HER EARS. So, if there was one thing I feel that made me a better artist, it's the simple acceptance of my mistakes, AND HOW I LEARNED TO NUKE THE DRAWING WITH AN ERASER if I need to fix something. I'm a bit proud of my lettering though. I've been writing in a "comic font" ever since high school, because I was writing my own comic at the time, and had to do my own lettering. Said comic was in large 12 x 18 inch sketchpads, and I had no computer or scanner, and for that matter, even professional comics did not have computer lettering yet (Shout-out to lettering legend Tom Orzechowski, who seemingly lettered practically every comic I read at the time.) If anything, it led to my teachers liking my written assignments, because my handwriting became easier to read than most! So... yeah. Also The Emperor's New Groove reference, and a touch of Peanuts' Woodstock chatter, because I'm the type of nerd who always has to reference something!
She Kicks High. Remember that ad? Funny enough, and despite the likelihood that such an ad would probably not be made nowadays, it actually was one of the tamer ads that would be churned out by game publishers during the early 2000's. There's a veritable rabbit hole of questionable advertising decisions from that time that made me wonder what I might have had to deal with if I pursued a career with my Marketing degree. This is a current-day take on one of my old commissions, except in the original, the client asked for Hitomi to be fighting Asuka from Tekken. I decided on this one to keep things "in-house", and made the opponent Ayane, who for a time was my favorite DOA girl until Hitomi came along. Hitomi's jeans were done by doing a layer of hatching over the pencil shades. When I was in high school, I drew my own comics, the kind of which I am likely never going to post online. But I was starting to be influenced by manga, and so I wanted to do everything in black and white. But I had no affordable, sustainable source for stick-on screentone (seriously by the time I was in college, I ever only came upon maybe THREE sheets of "zip-a-tone", and they were never in the shades I needed. But one manga I read had pages where the art was shaded, not by the usual dotted tones, but parallel line hatching. So I figured, why not do it myself? So I had PAGES of art where things were shaded by me going over the art with a 0.1 technical pen and a ruler. And I'd even layered different passes at different angles to get a darker shade if I needed. The art is not stuff I'd boast about now, but the amount of experimentation and technique I put into it back then certainly is.
MerMay-troid
Velocity of Cyberforce
"Ever dance with a succubus in the pale moonlight?" This was a fun pic to work on. Drawing Morrigan and Lilith Aensland in a dance pose was a no-brainer for me, and it just flew onto the paper like nothing at all. Funny enough, I got the idea for this, like a few other pics, while standing in line waiting to pay for groceries. I have taken to keeping a sketching kit with me, and I broke it out and drafted the sketch while I waited for my turn. There are a few small touches that let me play with the composition, not to mention the way the pic can be seen. I referenced a photo of the Moon when I drew it, and intentionally made it upside-down. Playing with the idea of "which way is up" is something I like to do when it comes to flying characters, and for a duo of supernatural ladies, it helped with the mood. Now, is Morrigan dipping Lilith, or is Lilith carrying Morrigan? And yes, those are the lights of a city behind Morrigan, meant to screw with your view a little bit more.
Felicia from Darkstalkers relaxes on a giant ball of string. I actually thought of this pic while standing in line for groceries, and I had my sketching materials on me at the time. So while carts of groceries were being tallied and paid for by the people ahead of me, I did the basic layout of this sketch, then did the rest after getting home. Obviously, the ball of string was the more challenging part of the pic. After sketching out Felicia's pose, I took a small plate and used that to draw the basic circle, then painstakingly drew in the details with my sketching pencil, then, after Felicia herself was already finished, line-wise, I went over the entire thing with my 4B mechanical pencil to tighten up the lines. Felicia was shading with my pencils, but with the string, trying to shade it after all of those lines might have meant the detail would get smudged over. So, after cleaning the pic in Clip Studio Paint, I applied one layer of dotted screentone for a simple shadow coming from Felicia. I had considered doing a floor shadow, but left it suspended in space, in case I decide to use it for something else, like a sticker or something. Felicia's snoring "Z" was based on the Darkstalkers logo typeface, or as best as I could estimate based on the rest of the actual letters of the logo. If you read all of this, comment if you pronounce "Z" as "Zee" or "Zed"!
Screenshot showing my current follower count!
Shh, Felicia is sleeping...
A certain catgirl's clawed hand caresses her (BIG) ball of yarn.
Although Kasumi and Ayane vie for placement on who's my first DOA favorite, my ultimate favorite would have to be Hitomi, who a sunny, vibrant personality that I was drawn towards. Gameplay-wise, she was exactly like she fought: simple, direct, and (thanks to DOA's camera and effects during certain hits) downright brutal. She also got the short end of the stick for a time when it came to costumes and other art, so I felt obligated to give her some love. This pic was one of the first I did where I took a pencilled piece and did everything else on computer. I think I was still learning to use Clip Studio at this time. There's another version of this that has a more black and white manga feel with more screentone shading.
Psylocke, Rogue, and Jean Grey of the X-Men, in their iconic 90's-era costumes. My work has become slightly less super-deformed, but this was where I started to have fun with my lines and figure work.