Fred Cop

Sorry to be a Debbie Downer, but I heard a small bit of news which I find kind-of concerning (admittedly, it's not news at all, just a bit of speculation. Feel free to take this post with a grain of salt): So, for those of you who haven't seen this interview (this information was probably announced elsewhere, but I mainly found out about it from this interview), KSP2 will be released in Spring 2020 (Nate Simpson mentions it at the end of the interview). (For those of you who are struggling to watch the video on IGN's website, you can watch it on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/5uqpdoFCOMM) [ WARNING: Negative speculation beyond this point ]

Hrmm... ...admittedly, KSP2 doesn't really look like my cup of tea (I don't dig the whole future-of-space-travel/civilisation vibe), but still, I hope everyone enjoys it when it comes out, and I wish the developers at Star Theory all the best with KSP2. (Sorry for the roughness of these drawings, I just wanted to make something cute to celebrate the announcement)

I don't normally do seasonal drawings/artwork, but since I've got so much free time over the summer, I decided to put something together for the hell of it (admittedly I made this 2 weeks ago, but forgot to post it here until today): "Summer fantasy vs. Cold reality"

Just popping in to say hi, and confirm that I'm still redrawing the same two characters while throwing random design ideas at the wall to see what sticks. ... ...well, I mean I've been drawing some other stuff, but nothing very note-worthy/significant (I'm still trying to reduce the number of unnecessary drawings I post online, including here). Also, I've been taking a look through the other posts/pieces of art in this topic, and I must say there's some excellent pieces people have been posting here.

SHORT VERSION: FULL VERSION: I'll be honest, as much as I love the look of the new revamped parts, I kinda feel sad that SQUAD is killing off the old part's junk-like art style. I mean, I understand all of KSP's rocket parts had mis-matched styles and designs, since rocket parts were added/implemented at different times during the game's development, but I feel that worked in the game's favour. The way rockets were assembled using mis-matched parts gave the impression that Kerbals just dug up some random junk and just slapped some bits of metal together into something that resembled a rocket (hell, the item descriptions for several parts state they came from a junkyard or were found by the side of the road). Much in the same way players would build rockets through trial and error (at least before DeltaV tools and mods were available), it felt like the Kerbals knew nothing about space flight either, and were just putting something together in the hope it'll make it to space. As for the new art-style, it's sleek and modern. The colour palette and designs are consistent, and it gives a very professional NASA-esc vibe. Now, if you like the new revamped rocket parts, that's perfectly fine, but I feel the style of these modern revamped parts don't fit well with KSP (I mean, KSP is SQUAD's IP, they can do what they want with the art-style, but to me the new style doesn't feel right). Like, maybe this is just me, but I cannot envision the Kerbal-race designing something professional or sleek like the Saturn V. They're very clumsy/primitive (if the game's trailers/writing is anything to go by), so - to me - slapping something together using scrap seems like the sort of thing they'd do. As a result, it feels weird to me that SQUAD would switch to a more realistic/sleek new style (although A. that's just my thoughts, and B. for all we know SQUAD might be moving KSP towards a more serious/realistic tone). This brings me to my suggestion: In the future (perhaps after a few bug-fix updates/patches, *cough cough*), I think there should be a new skin group for most rocket parts emulating the game's original inconsistent junk-like style. I'm a bit iffy about whether to say that a "junk" rocket part skin should used by default in Sandbox/Science, but players can still switch to the three newer skins if they prefer them. Heck, there could be a game mechanic included in Career mode (preferably one you can enable/disable in the game's options) where all rocket parts use the Junk skin by default and you can pay Funds to upgrade parts to use the more professional/sleek skins. That way, you start off career mode with rockets that look like they were assembled from random scrap, then progressing to shinier modern-looking rockets. Obviously, it's a bit early to be discussing this, since not all of KSP's rocket parts have been revamped to the new style, but I'm thinking this suggestion could be implemented after the release of 1.6, or further into the future. Just at a point where more than half of the game's rocket parts (at least, the ones that need to be redesigned) are revamped. ... ...am I just complaining about something that doesn't matter? I don't know. What do y'all think about this suggestion? Do you think it's stupid/a waste of precious development time or...?

Sorry for the lack of recent posts. I've still been drawing actively, but I'm trying to upload drawings less frequently (I'm trying to stop littering W.I.P junk everywhere). ... ...anyways, I've recently been toying around with different character outfits/costume ideas, so here's some sketches of those: Honestly, out of the experimental costume/outfit sketches I've done recently, this is the only thing closest to actual character's design development. The rest of these are just silly ideas I was throwing around/experimenting with. (Admittedly, this isn't a new one, it was a remake of an old character idea I had a while back) ...also, I might've been listening to too much Michael Jackson recently (you don't have to look at it if you don't want to): -- Fred_Cop -- P.S. I know I haven't posted the rest of my Inktober drawings here, but then again you aren't missing out on much. Long story short, I gave up after day 19 as I was too busy with other - more important - work.

Yes. I post my inktober stuff daily on my Twitter account. I'm not sure if you want a link to my profile, but you'll likely find it if you search for "Ben24x7" on Twitter.

Quick little update on the Inktober front, I've reached the phrases/stimuli which I haven't planned for in advance, so this batch is mostly full of weird stuff (just because I couldn't think of what else to draw). On the bright side - at least for the drawings I'm not being lazy with - I'm definitely improving. Just to get them out of the way, I'm sticking all my lazy drawings into the spoiler below. I wouldn't recommend giving them a look, but feel free to check them out if you so desire. Anyway, here's some of the more notable ones (a.k.a. the ones I prefer showing): Day 06 - "Drooling" Another weird one, but one I'm very pleased with. I wanted to try turning it into a repeating pattern (where the head drools into the "Brain" paddle-wheel of the head below it, which is drooling into the "Brain" paddle-wheel of the head below it, and so on and so on) but due to the fact this drawing took up most of the page in my sketch-book, it wasn't really possible (although, with a bit of editing trickery in GIMP, I could still make an endless pattern based on this drawing). Day 08 - "Star" I'm actually kinda sad about this one. It's supposed to be a joke but it doesn't quite work due to how poorly worded it is. I tried replacing the text in GIMP to see if I could rework it to be funnier, but I came to the conclusion I'd have to redraw it all over again (to fix up the composition/framing so it would fit with the new dialogue). A real shame too, as I personally think this is the best drawing I've done for Inktober thus far. Day 11 - "Cruel" Originally I was planning on drawing Schrödinger pushing a cat into the box, where he'd say something along the lines of "I know the odds of you surviving this are 50-50, but there's a higher chance you'll make a glorious contribution to science". I felt this might've been a bit too dark/not funny, so I left it out... ...then I remembered a specific quote from Portal 2. There's a bit where you grab a personality sphere who gives a list of facts, some true, some partially true and most just plain silly/false. One of these facts goes as follows "The Schrödinger's Cat paradox outlines a situation in which a cat in a box must be considered, for all intents and purposes, simultaneously alive and dead. Schrödinger created this paradox as a justification for killing cats". So I put the latter half of the quote into the drawing. It's probably still a bit too dark, but it's way better than anything I could write/come up with. ...so yeah... more coming soon! -- Fred Cop --

Meanwhile, I'm participating in Inktober for the first time. I was aware about it last year, but being my naive self I thought I didn't need to do it. After realising recently I seriously need to break out of my comfort zone and draw new stuff/try new things, I decided to participate this year (I'm probably going to regret it later, considering my work schedule for the next few months is pretty packed, but oh well). So far, I've made three drawings, two of which I don't think are that good (so I'll be sticking them into a "Spoiler" tab. View them if you want, but I personally hate how rough they are)... ...and one which I think is a good indication I'm improving (and the only one thus far I like/deem "acceptable").

Welp, I guess now's the time for me to talk about what it's for. A few weeks ago, Crows Crows Crows announced they were working on a virtual "public Discord museum" and they were looking for submissions (it wasn't limited to 2D art, they were also accepting 3D models, audio, music, etc). Of course, I decided to seize this opportunity to get my 2D work out there (even if it was only going to be seen by a handful of people). I sent two submissions. This short strip... ...and this random drawing I put together, which I thought would fit in with some of the other silly/ludicrous art-work being submitted. Skip ahead two/three weeks later, and the museum has been publicly released (although it completely flew under my radar as the only link/announcement of it's release came from the Crows Crows Crows Discord chatroom). After looking through the virtual museum, I'm sad to say neither of my submissions made it in. I personally thought it was because they didn't fit in with their vision of what the museum should be (heck, the "we're in a museum" strip was really just me seeing if I could get away with submitting meta/forth-wall breaking content, not really something to be taken seriously), but the guy who was putting it together - William Pugh - stated he was sorry that not all submissions made it as he was under a tight deadline to get it together within a couple of weeks. If you want to check out the virtual museum anyway, here you go (it's available for Mac and Windows, no Linux version is planned as far as I'm aware): https://crowscrowscrows.itch.io/museum -- Fred Cop -- EDIT: So the museum got updated...

I'll be honest, I also like the eyeballs, but at the same time using lines/dots for eyes seemed to work better for some characters than others... ...so I decided to kill two birds with one stone, and now some characters have eyeballs, while others have lines/dots (depending on their personality/traits): [This strip is supposed to have dialogue, but I've deliberately removed it here because I'm saving the full version for something special... hopefully]

Thanks so much for the positive response! I wasn't expecting people to like it (honestly, I was pretty hesitant to post it in the first place), so hearing people respond positively to my stuff gave me a significant moral boost. Thank you. I'm afraid I don't have much cool stuff to show, but recently I've been doing some more experiments, specifically I've replaced the characters' eyes with simple lines (after discovering my basic character sketches - which used simple lines to represent eyes - was more visually appealing than drawing... well... proper eyeballs): ...I've also been experimenting with using less colours to create the illusion of darkness/no lighting (it's not quite perfect, but at least it works): And as an added bonus, a long while back I figured out how to change the desktop background of the computers I use at college (typically, the option to change the background is disabled, but I found a simple loop-hole). Instead of completely replacing my desktop backdrop, I found the original image used for the computer's default backdrop, and ever since then I've been re-using the default background but adding extra stuff on-top. This is the latest version I'm using, which I created a few days ago: (For the record, no one on my course seems to have noticed it... well, either that or people have seen them, but didn't bother to ask me about them). -- Fred Cop --

Oh wow, I had no idea a topic like this existed. I'm afraid I don't have a lot of KSP-related drawings/sketches to show (mainly because I haven't produced any for... almost a whole year), but I do have some experimental stuff I can show: -- Fred Cop --

Just realised I never got around to posting this: As a fan of the original GameBoy, I wanted to try doing some pixel art with the limited GB colour palette. Since the original GameBoy's colour palette was mostly green, I thought it'd be fitting to draw a Kerbal. (I kinda cheated with the colour palette though. I think the GB could only show 4 colours, but I used 6 - the extra two colours being black and white)

I've recently been working on an experimental comic series, and my latest one was just a silly little KSP-based joke. Here it is;