Hello
P
Penelope Greene
. It's great to see a new artist around here, especially someone who's willing to tackle yaoi content. We get a lot of vanilla boy-on-girl stuff, so variety is always welcome :)
I would encourage you to
Edit your first post in order to gather together the various files that you've created. Alternatively, you could share your work via the
Downloads system -- each character or mod would then be a separate webpage with a description and preview image. Downloads are potentially easier for you to organize (because updating and editing a "megapost" can become tricky) and easier for fans to discover. For example: it's possible for a newly-registered Undertow user to quickly find all of the
<yaoi> content or all of the characters with
<silver hair>, which is much easier than browsing through dozens of forum threads and expanding hundreds of Spoiler tags.
If you run into difficulty with any of the forum-software stuff then just let me know and I'll be happy to help out.
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One minor artistic nitpick: it isn't
necessary to crop a hairstyle around the character's ear.
Ideally we would try to draw a single contiguous hairline which passes "through" the ear and across the neck
(here's an old example). Afterwards, you can split the hair into two pieces and move them to the appropriate quadrants of the template. When this is done, part of the hair will appear above the ear and another part will appear behind it. The overall appearance will be
identical to what you've already achieved, so it might seem like a silly waste of time. But if you do it this way then it becomes possible for users to apply different ears (such as Small Ears of Elf Ears) without revealing any gaps in the hair.
Of course, this involves extra work for the artist and most people won't even notice the difference ... so please feel free to ignore it. On the other hand,
if you're taking extra time to carefully
trace or crop your hairstyle around the ear then this technique might actually save some time for you.
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As a general bit of advice: you may find it useful to consult some of the veteran artists here. They can explain the nuances and tricks of SDT modding
(such as the purpose of the template quadrants, or the "ear cropping" issue, or the game rules which cause semen to stick to hair), and they can provide feedback or advice about drawing techniques, shading, etc. For example:
@SyntaxTerror has compiled some information into his
Static Hair guide, but if you have other questions then you could always
contact him directly. Artists will sometimes get overwhelmed by people constantly asking them to draw things and so their forum posts may seem grumpy. But they're usually happy to converse with someone who admires their work and earnestly wants to know
"how did you do that?" or
"how could I improve my art?"
My own specialty is physics-based animation, which
usually pertains to long-haired female characters. But it can also be applied to
short hairstyles, as well as
male characters. If you have a particular project in mind then I could help you to animate one of your designs.
Flash can be very daunting when you're starting out, and many SDT artists never choose to get involved with it. Nonetheless, it's still possible to participate in the creation of more complex mods - in the form of collaborative projects. Flash modders can potentially script or animate your artwork so that it's more responsive in-game. You can also create clothing or body mods simply by drawing on the relevant
template files. If you'd prefer to work solo then that's totally OK; I just wouldn't want you to feel that you're
restricted to one type of work because of the software tools involved.
And of course you can always dive into
Dialogue modding. No special software tools are needed there. The more advanced and interactive dialogues
do involve a fair amount of scripting and some very specific syntax, but it's possible to write a standard dialogue using nothing but Notepad and imagination.