Nikolai Jakobslock

I'm gonna do a couple posts, but I try not to post too often and getting new art of my own to share every day means I've fallen behind on my backlog of cool art to share, so I'll try and do a few of these. As the userbase continues to scatter, it's possible that I will simply stop doing these, and if that happens I will probably do a series of posts about some of my favourite artists to follow and where you can find all those people, now.

Mother of Pearl by Io
Such good value grouping, here. Love how murky they've made this kelp forest, and yet it still feels lush.

"some linework ??" by Seven Deven
Once again, murky waters, a kelp forest, and great value grouping. That lighter cloud of bubbles pointing directly through the line of action of the main character and right to the high contrast light area of the conch shell. I really like the decision to make the individual bubbles this super bright saturated green. It works so well with the rest of the palette.

"And have a good week" by Gregory Fromenteau
Sometimes I am simply charmed by a very well executed version of a simply concept and this is one of those cases. Really love all the detail crammed into that airship and there's a great blend of like, sailing ship, steam boat and steam train all mixed in there.

untitled by Marina Lunina
I think this is maybe FF6 fan art, but that's not why it's in here. It's in here for it's colour palette and it's incredible sense of movement. This whole thing is like streaming and swirling around.

Matoya by Josh Corpuz
Josh Corpuz is an artist with a really good handle on the sort of Akihiko Yoshida ink drawing look and has a ton of great fantasy character design in the Final Fantasy sort of vein. This character was a response to the prompt: "I want FF17's protagonist to be a lady in her 70s named Matoya." Josh has just a really solid grasp on costume design through his work. I particularly love this lady's jacket. Incredible collar.

天 華 亂 墜 by Guling Guo
Okay, so here's more fan art and an emphatic request that you read Land of the Lustrous, but even without that context this piece is eerie and really well composed. Really incredible colour use. I love how the more neutral teals of the flowers and leaves make the blue hair on Phos pop super well, and another perfect example of value grouping, using the shadows on the hands to establish focus on the figure even though the figure and hands have the same local colour.

I'm fairly sure I need 3 of these catch up, but I'm gonna leave it out of ?, for now, in case I underestimated.

raised from veiled layers / eggs etchable with bytes from / the swan delegate by SAJAN
First off, Sajan uses alt text and titles their work, which makes doing these much easier for me and I must thank him for that. I love how this kind of splits a difference between 70s psychedelic sci-fi and traditional woodblock printing. Beautiful and subtle colour work in the darkest value areas, particularly around the textiles/embroidery, and a lot of excellent textures that help this feel like aging inks on weathered paper.

Dragon, Monster Design by ju
Love a good dragon. I initially read this thing as not having eyes, and I can't tell if I like it more with or without. The star of the show to me is the neck scales which resemble the way hummingbird neck plumage looks. The texture of the scales on the base of the neck and deltoid of the forearm where the white skin starts seems to suggest that the white skin is stretched over those scales like a thin, rubbery membrane, which is creepy in a good way, to me. In terms of colour and tonal construction, there's such stark lighting here, that makes this so sculptural, and the use of a grayscale palette with those hyper saturated vermillions in there is so cool.

Busy Street by Alariko
Alariko is one of those cases of an incredibly skilled very young artist who I have had to begin just looking at with admiration instead of jealously. Excellent buildings, using this sort of warped perspective that feels right and gives the whole place this kind of jumbled together look that fits the atmosphere and lends a certain style to it. So much attention paid to where weathering happens, little details in the flourishes of buildings (I'm a particular fan of the blue and white tiles at the top of the one building). I also really love that this image could just be a stylized version of reality were it not for the two witches flying above, in a way that immediately situates us into a more fantastical setting.

Arambou Blues by Rudolf Hima
I have so much respect for the paleo artists working today who are able to take the absolutely silly proportions of the various kinds of pterosaur and make them look majestic in any way. This is a truly excellent evocation of sunsets during an period we usually don't see represented, after the sun is hidden by the horizon, but where we still get those last dregs of crimson visible where it set. Rudolf's colour use here is perfect and feels like some of the best kind of wildlife photography.

Lancer development sketches by Peyton Gee
Peyton's work on Lancer is always great, but I wanted to highlight this as a great sample of in depth design process for a single illustration, iterating on the big jacket school of character design with a bunch of unique and and interesting variants. The front view is also great at immediately delivering a level of sass and character to tell you who this pilot is at a glance. As a side note, I would wear any of these jackets. As another side note, Lancer should let me work on it.

Definitely gonna need to do more of these because it was just portfolio day and I got some great new people in my feed, but let's talk about these 6 pieces from the last couple weeks first.

Cassette Player by Toof
The first thing that catches my eye here is I like this kinda retro shade of orange, like I might expect to find as the shade a locker is painted in a school in the 70s, which I feel like fits with the tapedeck aesthetic. If you've followed these for a while, you'll know I love this kind of maximallism in detail. Toof is employing these repeated round shapes to unify the elements and sections of extreme dark to guide the eye to important parts of the image, which allow the intense density of detail to function almost as a rest area. I love the suggestions we get that the outer layer of this figure is a clear plastic like that late 90s electronic aesthetic you get with the clear-purple Gameboy Color and N64s.

"Thank you for watching G-Witch" drawing of the Daribalde by Ippei Gyoubu
Ippei Gyoubu has, over the years of me getting into mecha anime, been cemented as my favourite mechanical designer working on the franchise. Just a myriad of extremely cool guys. I absolutely adore this image of the outer armour of the Daribalde melted off. It's got a really good sense of form in spite of the fact that Gyoubu is not using any shading other than for occlusion shadows, he's just using the ink of the drawing to provide contours. I love to see the faceplate of a Mobile suit melt off and have it look like it has a mouth, that's just an all time aesthetic. Also Guel continues to look mostly swagless after losing his ridiculous mullet.

negative space lads by Maung Thuta
One of Maung Thuta's most impressive abilities isn't just the speed at which he's able to produce them (these are part of his daily sketches). It's also that the designs are so original. It's rare to find ones that really feel derivative, and these two are no exception, both using this simple principle of "the torso's got a big hole where the neck and chest would be" and creating a set of designs that feel of a faction with one another. There are a ton of cool shapes to admire in these, but I am particularly fond of what a simple and elegant design the right one's shoulder joint is, such that those cannons have full articulation without need for an elbow in the design.

Fisherman by Betty Jiang
Betty Jiang is someone whose work you may recognize from pieces like her incredible evocations of oil painted portraits of Souls series characters. She has an incredible traditional feel to all of her most recent work, and this charcoal drawing is part of a series of actual traditional media drawings done for a show at Gallery Nucleus. She is a master of economy of detail here, making everything that is not the focus of the image fade into nothing or at the very least simplicity, while (for example) the faces of the fish and fisherman are lovingly rendered. I find it impossible not to be awed by her work, and I truly recommend getting up close and appreciating the degree of brush texture she incorporates into her work.

magician character design by Eva Eskelin
There are actually two character designs as part of this post that share similar design elements, so I'd recommend clicking through and seeing both. I know Eva's work mostly for landscapes with really interesting stylization and texture, particularly her really interesting treatment of foliage, so these character designs were a very cool change of pace (though both styles are truly incredible). This still features Eva's amazing ability to stylize and I really like the choices in things like making that orange cloak's billows abstracted into these jagged shapes, and then shading it by having the shadows fade into hatch marks. The texture on the dress is also just amazing.

The Chariot by Mint
Mint has continued to release her tarot drawings. You may remember in a previous entry of these I covered her card for Death, which I was very taken by. I really love what mint manages to do with such a limited palette, creating very readable shapes and flow with really blocked in solids. The armour alone has about 8 or 9 different subtly different yellows in there that do an excellent job of portraying the interesting things gold does with light.

I put this one off and now I have even more catch-up to do, so I'm gonna go up until the end of last week and then go back to my regular (irregular) posting schedule.

Fishies by Angela Sung
What impresses me most about Angela's work here (other than that I find plein air gouache work to be a magic unto itself), is that this actually looks appealing. While I might be known now for mechs more than anything else, I used to illustrate food a lot, and I found that it was very hard to make food look appealing when using colder colours and neutrals, yet Angela is able to incorporate blues and even sickly neutral greens into the shading of these nigiri and still have them look delicious. Hell, the white fish at the front is practically opalescent, shaded with pale grey greens and violet, and yet I want to eat the shit out of it.

A monster by Scott Higginbotham
I have been following Scott's work for about a year now and he is extremely prolific and has excellent fantasy design chops. There is a discord I am in dealing in a real dark science fantasy space that pretty regular drops his stuff into the inspo thread and it's easy to see why. It's dark fantasy in subject, but it maintains this wonderful pastel palette, it never forgoes colour and conveys a huge amount of personality. I really highly recommend checking out more of Scott's work because there's so much of it and it's all pretty fantastic. There are about 100 pieces I could've put on this list, I just happen to pluck this one out because I love the look of copper armour with fur the colour of verdigris.

The Duviri Paradox by Eleonor Piteira
Eleanor's work I encountered through portfolio day on twitter and is one of a few from there I'll talk about today. This is an illustration done for Warframe, but I quite enjoy it on its own merits. It's nearly grayscale, but the the hue shift between the green of the night sky and the ochre of the brassy structures is doing a lot of spatial work in spite of it being a very flat composition. There's this nice diagonal cast of light across the image, and there's this clever reflection of the shape of the light in the little chunk of milky galaxy through the cracked open part of this rose window. Squint your eyes and the only part of the stars that remains visible fits perfectly in the gap left behind and it's at almost the same angle the light is being cast from.

Gull Bullies by Mathias Ball
Mathias ball does both narrative and editorial illustration as well as shirt designs. I own one of their shirts and it's extremely cute, imo. I really like, in his editorial work, the way these rough textures replace role of smooth gradients in colour transitions. It has this very nice naturalistic feel to it and it creates these really chunky shape separations that let them do compositions like this that would be really confusing in a more blended style that nevertheless work. I'm always a fan of this kind of swirling motion, and you'll note that pretty well anywhere your eyes go in this piece, the lines always swerve you back to the loon's beak and the fish.

Illustration for Onmyoji: The card game by Kuri Huang
Kuri's work is probably my favourite discovery of portfolio day this last time around. You can see my consistent attraction to the ornate, and I really love this semi-abstract background that looks like collaged textiles. I would wear a garment in that fabric, or hang this as a tapestry. It's a really instantly readable piece that gets better as you look closer. I didn't notice at first, for example, the abstract sand dunes upon which the worshipping figures in blue are standing, or that there is a complete serpentine dragon in the sky. Truly gorgeous work that made an instant fan of me, last week.

Coffee bot by Rachel Frick
I don't put a lot of 3D art on here, if really any, but I love this frog coffee maker every time it comes across my feed so much and wish it was a real thing I could buy.

Illustration from Last Rites by Gryme
Gryme's style development over the last couple of years has been really cool, using a lot of rough broken clusters of black lines to create great texture and flow. I really enjoy Gryme's black and white work this high contrast almost Mignola-like approach here is working really well. The composition is great, the white line taking through the whole thing, broken by that banner that helps the eye circle back to see all 3 knights. This image was done for my friend @sulcata's Heart supplement, Last Rites, and you should check that out too, especially because it features more of Gryme's stellar work.

theres a micspam pasta of heavy and medic having sentence mixed sex and it was made a mere 5 months after the game's release

yea so like, how incredibly terrifying are the mercs tf2 as entities? let's make a huge goddamn list. not exhaustive obviously

assuming all actions which the characters can perform in game, with in-game taunts or weapons or baked-in skills they have, is a canon ability of each character (except where clearly-assisted):

all
- all of the tf2 mercs access hammerspace so easily as to treat it like a toy
- all of the tf2 mercs have been physically enhanced by medic to allow him to make them impervious at will
scout
- scout becomes impervious on contact with significant alpha decay radiation, theoretically gaining eternity if dunked in a nuclear reactor for a few minutes
- scout possesses the gift of arbitrary momentous redirection of his own mass, with complete nullification of previous momentum
- scout can access eternity and grant it upon others with his Jar Of Man Stuff
- scout can, through the act of slaughter, gain incredible speed
heavy
- heavy can, through the act of slaughter, gain incredible speed, but finds this difficult
- heavy can summon an unstoppable and impercievable projectile causing instant death to any life on contact
- heavy is granted eternity through consumption
- heavy can force a victim to instantly lose all control of their actions for multiple seconds
- heavy can divert his own living energy to motion
- heavy is unusually impervious to transfer of momentum into his own mass
sniper
- sniper possesses a machine affinity with firearms
- sniper can absorb the souls of his victims to enhance his connection with firearms
demoman
- demoman can absorb the souls of his victims, and through this gains incredible power and speed, as well as eternity, but he must consume regularly, lest he be weakened
- demoman possesses the gift of incredible motion unassisted
- demoman possesses access to a piece of weaponry which allows him eternity, as well as the ability to immediately end the eternity of another carrier of this piece of weaponry
soldier
- soldier possesses the same piece of weaponry allowing eternity-with-risk as demoman
- soldier bears the curse of true eternity through respawn, and can strategically die (something he does frequently)
- soldier possesses a machine affinity with firearms and can bestow enhancement upon them
- soldier indirectly feeds on surrounding death and destruction, and can direct energy from this through his machine affinity to enhance the already-incredible power of his allies
- soldier can become nearly-impervious, selectively, to the transfer of momentum, gaining the ability of semi-arbitrary momentous redirection of his own mass, with partial nullification of previous momentum should he wish so
- soldier can severely improve the speed of his allies at will
- soldier possesses an affinity with the concept of the explosion, and can cause enemies recently affected by the force of explosion to experience increased vulnerability, as well as power his own enhancements through affecting himself with the force of explosion, and imbue weaponry with this ability which can be utilized by other entities
pyro
- pyro can utilize weaponry which the soldier has imbued with the ability to cause vulnerability on recent victims of the force of explosion
- pyro can summon a cataclysm on demand, and selectively vary its size
- pyro can conjure the kamehameha wave
- pyro gains eternity through electrical charge, though becomes vulnerable when charging
- pyro can cast fireball
- pyro can absorb the power of flame and use this to demonstrate incredible energy on any location at any time
- pyro can absorb the power of flame to gain eternity
- pyro can make damaging energy propagate through energetic links intended to bestow eternity, likely being able to murk god and possibly that nuke-dunked scout
- pyro can exist simultaneously in a plurality of realms, and create trinkets which force wearers to join them
- pyro is impervious to the damaging energy of the flame, likely absorbing the energy intended to harm them to either gain eternity or demonstrate damage
- pyro can become impervious on-demand, though only for a short period
- pyro can imbue their weapons with a force which causes all life currently affected by the flame to experience an incredible increase of damaging energy applied
- pyro can nullify imperviousness bestowed on medic's allies
- pyro can, through the act of slaughter, gain incredible speed
spy
- spy can, through the act of slaughter, gain incredible speed, and finds this act significantly easier than the pyro
- spy can gain eternity through instantaneous complete absorption of a victim's living energy, though unlike the demoman and sniper cannot absorb their souls
- spy can ignore universal barriers governing benefits bestowed upon allies and collect enhancement, imperviousness, and eternity intended for the allies of his enemy
medic
- medic is a mad immortal and has not displayed the true depth of his horror in-game as of yet. however, peer upon the comics for further reaches of his extent.
- medic possesses eternity unassisted
- medic, through feats of ingenuity, can become impervious on-demand
- medic can bestow eternity upon his allies unassisted
- medic possesses the skill to create tools for bestowing eternity, imperviousness, and incredible enhancement, to any ally he wishes
Engineer Gaming (Engineer Gaming)
- Dell Conagher is good at guitar

conclusion

the fact that engineer oppresses these incredible entities, let alone is particularly frightening to the pyro, is a testament to his ingenuity. thank u 4 reading. pls draw tf2 fanart of pyro eating the sun n then using that energy 2 slaughter scout after he gained immortality pls pls.