Quantumqstar - QuantumQstar

Madranek looks like a pretty sweet guy. What's his story/what's he like/got anything interesting to tell us/etc? :) Spill! <3

Madranek is a minor councilman for a small wealthy province of Esterahad, he's psychic and is sort of a mentor figure to Lillia who is a very young powerful psychic. Because my story is mostly about politics a huge portion of my characters are politicians of some kind D: 

I needed my own super sentai-inspired hero, so here's Heliolux :D I started a big overly detailed design sheet becase someday IMMA WEAR THIS.

cutting, unraveling, gluing, and brushing out yarn to make fur takes FOREVER whodathunkit.

What are the naming conventions?

Assuming I have them, lol! Honestly I pull names out of my butt. Sometimes I'll put in a little more effort depending on the story (I have one where I made sure at least most of the characters have names that are marginally clever puns) but for the most part I just go with whatever I think of that feels right at the time... D:

HOW DO YOU ART SO GOOD?! Also why you no been on for like a year?

I was on the fence about answering this XD; BUT I got a bunch of new followers recently (HI THERE) so I figure I will give it a shot. tl;dr guys.

That’s.. kinda related to the second question. It’s hard for me to articulate why I am such a freaking hermit. It’s not shyness… a lot of it is sensitivity because my relationship with art is SO personal. People can dislike me IRL all day long and it’s not even an issue cos FFF they dont KNOW me. But if they don’t like my art its like OMG I’m giving you a peek into my BRAIN, that IS me, it just got personal, time to throw down. When I say I peaked early, I was a fairly active artist on the internets when I was a teenager and got a LOT of attention I wasn’t able to handle well. The pervasive attitude that artists are sort of visual candy dispensers with a duty to share everything they do makes me reeeeaaally uncomfortable. I don’t draw for attention. I draw because I have stuff in my head that has to come out, and because creating makes me whole (I say creating instead of drawing here because I also love to make stuff, dance, sing, play music, I wanna do EVERYTHING).

I feel weird saying “I don’t draw for attention” because there’s a sort of implied diss that I don’t want to be there. Attention is actually really valuable! Motivational encouragement, constructive criticism, etc, all great stuff. I have made a lot of amazing friends through sharing art, and I totally love talking about it all the damn time, it’s often the medium that gets in the way with me. I like realtime chats best. I’m gonna sound like a cranky old lady now but it took me way too long to figure out tumblr and I miss IRC >:( And in my crankly old lady old age I just don’t have anything to prove to anyone and fucks are no longer given. I draw what I want, when I want, and share when I feel like it. SORRY NOT SORRY.

I’ll be honest, it’s only because once in a while someone tells me that they are really inspired by my art that I make the effort to share. But I forget often, and the fact that I can go thru really long periods without drawing much at all… well. Gushy fangirling is about the only thing that will bust down that wall these days. I used to feel guilty about this but it’s just how I am.

I’m a lot happier answering more specific asks about art tho XD Composition? Design? Style? CLOTHES? Lighting/Materials? Color theory? COLORSILOVECOLOR? Gimme.

Painterly 3D, my truest of true loves ♥

My fiercely burning Tony Stark fetish has been flaring up and the only cure is FAN ARRRT

Camera phone and photoshop express for android are poor substitutes for a scanner and actual photoshop, but those don't fit in my pocket, ok. I've been using my phone so much for stuff I'm considering getting a nicer one.. I kinda want a galaxy note for the giant screen and stylus, but I need my qwerty slider, kinda want a mytouch slide for the 12megapixel camera and HDR... etc. Godammit gadgets still not scifi enough, gimme all these things in one smartphone already I basically want a pocket-sized tablet laptop is that too much to ask??

:p

Extremis Tony is my favorite (ugh don't get me started on that magical bleeding edge armor, I suppose he stores his extra mass in a pocket dimension??) but a while back I did some research on bionanotechnology for a paper and I always have my own sci/fi bullshit ideas for how stuff works. Instead of having an undersuit stored in his bones (arrgh bones aren't hollow, learn to anatomy!) he'd sweat out a protocellular metallic gel that functioned as a medium for nanobots and synthetic flora to leave his body and interface with the armor like a circulatory system. He'd sprout fiber optic "hair" that would wire into his nervous system. Wetware! It would be super gross :D

I steal ideas from myself (in this case the Antonia Stark that I did forever ago)... cos it IS challenging and fun to design robot armor, but you can't really improve on perfection :p There's only so much you can do before it loses its iron man...ness.

BUT I needed to give him rocket launcher arms I DRAW WHAT I WANT

I learned a lot working on him... I don't finish things much and then when I do perfectionism can still get the best of me UGH. I definitely added enough hair for hugeness! But my teasing skills arent up to snuff and it kept collapsing immediately queue sad deflating balloon noise 8C Some problems I didn't forsee with insistence on ponytail, he is heavyyyyyy which is an amplified problem when all of the weight is exactly at the back yanking head constantly backward. I didn't add what seemed like THAT much extra hair (its basically 2 wigs worth) but like a dummy I forgot that LENGTH adds weight too. I think also trying to tease out hugeness from small origin point provides no base of support for the hair to stay huge. I... don't want to give myself a literal headache to wear it but I tried it on and it makes me feel SO! FUCKING! MAGICAL!!! BEAUTY IS PAIN I have some ideas to make it huger AND a little tiny bit lighter but it means unstyling, washing, and ripping out some of the wefts which... I want to do because theres an entire can of hairspray in him and I think I can redo with less and avoid such a rough crunchtastic texture. I also want to put more tinsel in it :P But that'll be later cos I started on my next, even longer wig ;p

I started using the internets to teach myself hobby electronics a little less than two years ago and struggling with whatever random 101 sites, blogs, tutorials, and instructables I could find. Slowly piecing together info that is never presented in an incremental-increase-of-difficulty way because its not class... It's always a continuous struggle to find information that is at your level when it is pretty much always going to be something you've already sort of learned, and therefore less useful, or something way too advanced and HOW do you fill in the gap, its always there at every level as you learn more things

I think it's useful to point out that I'm not really a self-taught artist. So while there is a TON of stuff I taught myself (particularly digital art/photoshop/coloring), I had the benefit of classes in the fundamentals (lifedrawing, construction drawing, figure drawing, etc) and that makes it SO much easier to expand from a solid knowledge base. So I'm sayin it is not the case here, while I learn to make gadgets and it is taking FOR EVER and driving me up all of the walls. But I want it so badly.

Then Adafruit put up their revised learning system site and I s2g every time I have a neat idea for a project but not sure how I'd make it, they put up a relevant tutorial basically the next freakin day. This has been happening without fail for SEVERAL MONTHS! I LOVE ADAFRUIT AND ADAFRUIT LOVES ME BACK

I always have a cosplay/props/gadgets wishlist that is miles long and an ever-expanding list of ways to make things blinky, beepy, and/or animatronic and going NUTS because I don't yet have the skills to accomplish what I want to do (which is everything), learning a skill is HARD, harder still if there are parts of it that are not interesting but sort of a necessary evil- which for me is programming, I hate it so much, its so painful, ughhg uugghhh it hurts, I have not studied this hard to learn something I dislike so much EVER but there is a blog I like called HOW TO GET WHAT YOU WANT and that has stuck with me all this time. It's how to get what I want and I'm not gonna let my hatred of programming actually stop me from typing up terrible buggy code and uploading it to a microcontroller to make leds blink and animate and change colors because I love lights and I love COLORS. Join me!

LETS PUT LEDS IN THINGS

I've got the ongoing severe project ADHD where I sketch a rad idea and draft a pattern or two and start hoarding materials and then... float to the next shiny idea like a cartoon character following the scent of fresh-from-the-oven windowsill pie. :P Screenfaced expressive robot is on costume bucket list, one evening on a whim I sketched them out on my headform and uUUgh I wanna make it but when will I?? Dunno. Need more LEDs. I feel like I'm in work/school purgatory. I can't manage full time school but it means I'm just gonna be in school for what feels like forEVER! AND I'm still so got damn tired. Came home from closing shift last nite, stayed up late panic studying for a programming test this morning, I DID OK ON THE TEST THO YEEEEAHBOOOOII, now I'm gonna pass out for a quick nap before work today fnghfgh ZZzzz. I'm ok tho just a lil moody that I gotta take things so slowly and Im STILL exhausted by it. Still thinkin about the irony of persuing robotics/engineering education after getting kicked out of top robotics school over decade ago (mind you, arduino didn't exist back then and hooooolymoly this stuff is so much easier now! wowowowow) Programming still so hard tho UGH. But I stay motivated when I get ideas like above and know that I may actually have skills to make it real sooner rather than laterrrr