Monday, September 17, 2018

The Blogger Recognition Award





The Blogger Recognition Award is given by fellow bloggers to show love and highlight worthy content within the blogging community.

I was nominated by the lovely Ruth, whose site is therollingtwenties.com. I'm so grateful to be nominated and especially by such a wonderful blogger. Seriously, I love hearing about her adventures and I dare you to find a day she's been horrible and not constructive to other bloggers. Never! She's such a kind person
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The Rules

  1. Thank the Blogger who nominated you
  2. Write a post as to why you started your blog
  3. Include 2 bits of advice you would give to other bloggers
  4. Nominate 15 other bloggers and comment on their response 

Why I Started my Blog




I started this blog as a place to share my poems & artwork, and sometimes sneak peeks into my life while creating them. Originally I wanted to do pieces where I would interview interesting people and feature their stories in a mixed media portrait and a poem. That's why I named it We Earthbound Stars! 


While I love making art of nature and animals, and abstract ideas, I also adore making art that highlights what makes individual people unique and beautiful. Life drawing is beautiful but in the art world often times only represents a small portion of the variety of looks, shapes, and personalities that exists in the human race. I want to feature people that don't fit into familiar, palatable cubbyholes.

I also found in starting a blog that the kinds of blogs I really appreciated were the ones with honest, real, and relateable writers who were honest about their struggles. It would be so easy to only post the happy, finished-product, always-successful moments and that kind of positivity does attract a lot of views. But I think the real and honest content brings the kind of viewers that stick around to read the next post, and who are invested enough to share your content with their friends.

I call myself an artist and it's my passion. But often the issues that affect my lifestyle often get in the way of being able to make art at the rate or level I'd like to, and if I didn't write about those I would still be the distant, sporadic blogger I started out as and didn't enjoy. I write about my autoimmune disorder, and my mental illnesses that fog my mind and block out creativity sometimes, and I'm lucky & grateful that there are readers that relate and appreciate seeing those problems represented in an honest way.



My Advice to Other Bloggers


My advice for bloggers is to try not to take too much advice, honestly! It's easy to get hung up on trying to find “the best way” by seeing what other people are doing, and it's a good way to start, but the way to find your voice and your strengths is to forge your own path and define what your way is!

I would also say to not be afraid of either going niche or nicheless in terms of posting. What does that mean? Well, it means don't worry about keeping your posts strictly to one topic because you can get burnt out on ideas very easily. But sometimes being too broad and posting on anything and everything can cause the views you get to be unpredictable, and people may not subscribe to future posts. It goes both ways, so a happy medium of one topic (which could be your lifestyle, thereby allowing any topics that affect your life but still having a general “theme”) and some similar topics surrounding it is a good balance!



My Nominations

This time I nominated a group of bloggers I've been networking with on Instagram but felt I hadn't given enough Twitter love to. They are all wonderfully creative and have such a good variety of content!  Here you can find them on Twitter and links to their blogs



@_ellabellax           
lifeofellabella.blogspot.com


















Friday, September 7, 2018

Abandoned Art: Stardew Valley x Dragon Ball

If you've played Stardew Valley, you'll know the range of characters and their sprites are adorable and surprisingly engaging in their storylines. If you haven't, buckle up for a look at a semi-new, incredibly relaxing and life-encompassing game that recently updated to allow multiplayer.


img credit: steam page store.steampowered.com/app/413150/Stardew_Valley


I have endless ongoing, new, and abandoned art projects in my sketchbooks and craft cubbies and thought it might be interesting to feature some of them. This is an abandoned illustration idea I had when I was playing Stardew Valley after the multiplayer update. 


I had been playing with mods that hadn't been updated for the new version of the game so I made a new farmer and got the idea to develop her into a character and draw a few of the cutscenes in the art style from Dragon Ball & Dragon Ball Z. I started with just Dragon Ball as reference but needed to reference some expressions I could only find on Chichi so there ya go. After relaxing my rules a little bit it was easier because I could draw poses/faces from the girly characters like Bulma, Chichi, No. 18 and Mr. Satan.


img credit: tvtropes.org


I made a fiesty, purple-haired female farmer to revitalize Stardew Valley, as is the plot of the game. I imagined her as the quiet, determined type that's common to start out with in Harvest Moon-type games. Eager to befriend the NPCs (even the difficult ones) but aware they've got a lot of work to do!
I've played it through probably too many times, but never as a female farmer who, although I'd played through all the romance options, ended up married to Abigail so I made my character with that as the aim. This is her character model aka sprite.



Since I would be aiming to build a relationship with Abigail, I made my farmer purple haired so Abby & Seb wouldn't be the only "dyed" villagers. (Caroline, what gives with the green hair?)

I also gave her a biblical name to fit the theme although I'm not that type of religious.

Our fiesty female farmer was now dubbed Rebecca and she was ready to revamp the old farm! Doesn't she already look nice next to Abby?






I titled this one "I can do it!" Pickaxe in hand, Rebecca is ready for hard work!



Starting out, Robin the carpenter shows up at your door to let you know about her services and how you can upgrade your house. I didn't get a screenshot of it, but it's one of the moments I decided to illustrate. All of these are initial sketches that I meant to scan and illustrate digitally, so parts of what would have been one complete picture are drawn on different sheets of tracing paper here.


First here's a shot of Robin in her home workshop for reference 

















Robin waits kindly while Becs takes in the state of the dilapidated farm.




Rebecca decides to take the challenge like a BAMF






















Rebecca in her home. There's a nice variety of  looks you can give the sprites and I really enjoyed this Peter Pan collared blouse. Not really enjoying what came of me trying to put that outfit on my drawing, however.

























I hope you liked this look into my world of art projects and how they find their way into every part of my life 😂 Although I did end up abandoning this project I liked where it was going and the creative idea of combining a game I love with an art style I love. It was fun and I definitely would try a similar project in the future.
Here are the character sheets I drew up from Bulma, Chichi, and possibly one or two shots of No. 18 or Videl, outlined so I could keep the expression or pose (woo tracing paper! Also great for designing clothes)





I really love this game and although the story hasn't changed besides allowing more character romance options, something has kept me playing this same game over and over since its release. If you grew up on Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing and haven't tried Stardew Valley, I encourage you to give it a try or look up some gameplay videos to see if it's something you'd enjoy.



At night your pet curls up into a ball and you can see it breathing gently. This game is like a digital xanax I swear.