I can’t believe it took me this long to get around to the February page of our second Calendar project. I suspect finishing the first NHS Calendar made me unknowingly file it away as “finished” in my head, and I just haven’t gotten deep enough into this second Calendar for it to feel real yet. Regardless, I did manage to get our second page out, with Beast Boy getting paired up with the Freeman boys. Since February is the month of love and all, I decided to put them in a love hotel.
I wasn’t really too sure about doing an Ask like this. However, when I thought about the joke of Mei only being able to dig into an android *this* way, but not the way she might prefer… I figured it might be fun to play with.
I thought it’d be cute if Chris’s bunny outfit was designed around the bunny girl of his series, Cream. I’ve never drawn Cream, but I used her aesthetic for Chris’s outfit here, and I hope y’all like it.
This Ask serves a couple functions for me, which is why I wanted to run with it. First is just getting to draw Ursula again, which I like, but more importantly using Corey allows me to establish something with her that opens up how she can be used in future pics. Corey’s not the type of guy who’d be comfortable around tentacles, I think. I’m sure he’s seen how other cute boys in the Studio have interacted with tentacles in the past, and that’s not really what he’s about. However, establishing that Ursula can get rid of them (without using the human disguise from her movie, which is a design I’m less interested in), now opens her up for much more content. Otherwise, she’d be stuck pretty much with oral, handjobs/fingering, and boob stuff, which is fine, but now we have a canon explanation for drawing her with human lower parts if I want to later.
Here is the One-Shot comic for August of 2023! The script for this comic puts together several pairings that this Subscriber has been trying to make happen in Character Asks, but usually in ways I didn’t really feel I could make work in that format. They finally get to see some of their crossover ideas come to life here, though, and I hope y’all will enjoy the results.
For this First Shoot poll, I decided to try and stick to characters I didn’t expect my audience to know. I wanted to see how they’d vote without the bias of familiarity, so I used characters from older or more obscure properties that I enjoy, but I know aren’t as widely known or popular. Maison Ikkoku is an anime that most will probably recognize for its use in “aesthetic” or “city pop” anime videos and gifs, but it’s a pretty fun romantic anime about a bunch of characters living together in a small, aging boarding house. There’s a fair number of anime in this genre (whatever it’s called), but to my knowledge Maison Ikkoku’s the starting point for this type of series. A staple in a lot of these series is the slightly older woman who drinks and is flirtatious, usually single and a bit bitter. I always love these characters or one reason or another, and Akemi’s a great example of the archetype. I was happy to see her win the poll, even though I liked a number of the options people had to vote for, and I tried to capture her charm here in this First Shoot.
Her partner, Sakura, is the older sister of Nadeshiko in Laid-Back Camp, and I kind of like this pairing. Something about their red and purple colors works well for me, plus I like that they both come from pretty grounded and realistic anime series. They also have very different vibes, with Akemi being something like a lascivious aunt, while Sakura’s more of a stoic big sis type. Anyway, I hope y’all enjoy this debut of an undervalued character.
The West Supreme Kai is a minor DBZ character I always liked, but haven’t had much for generally. With this Ask, I thought it’d be fun to give her a small handful of surprise partners. Since she has very little characterization in the show, I took this as an opportunity to just be a little random with the character selection, although I decided to pick three ladies who have all been in the 1 Club for quite a while, like she has. Clockwise, we have Sayuri Kinniku from Kinnikuman, Tara Boumdeay from Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, and Tiana from The Princess and the Frog.
These two questions happened to be posted next to each other, and I felt like they fit together in a really obvious way. Peach and Zelda, as the two princesses rescued in so many Nintendo games, often get paired up (even in official stuff like Smash Bros.), but I’ve never drawn them together. I think they’d be friends in the Studio, too, though. I considered using the Twilight Princess Zelda design, because when I think of Peach and Zelda shipping it’s usually coming from Smash Bros. Brawl. Also, while Breath of the Wild Link was in the newer Smash, Zelda in that game looked a bit different, so Peach and this version of Zelda don’t have many appearances together that I know of. However, at the time of writing this, Tears of the Kingdom isn’t even a full week old yet, and I just kinda wanted to draw this new shorter-haired design for Zelda. Even though Breath of the Wild was a huge part of my life for, like, two years, I barely ever drew it. I don’t expect to draw much of TotK, either, but but doing a little bit here was fun.
I made a joke about doing Bitzi’s NHS MILFs pic during the “Year of the Rabbit”, but I thought we could also do one for our resident rabbit-named mom, Bunny. I’m really enjoying drawing her when I can, and I hope people will like seeing her again. There’s actually one other rabbit mom I’d kind of like to draw, but she’s not in the Studio yet. So, I guess I need to decide if I want to use NHS MILFs as a series characters can debut in, or if I want to draw her in something like MomSwap first.
Also, for anyone interested, here’s the Q&A video I did for Subscribers last month:
There are three mother/daughter pairings I really like from Tomo-cha Is a Girl!, and I’d like to do each of them in the MomSwap series. Like with Dragon Ball at the beginning of the series, I’ll alternate between them. We already got Tomo and Akemi, and since I’ve drawn Gundou already I figured Carol and her mother could be the next MomSwap. Carol’s a character I didn’t expect to like when she was first introduced, but she turned out to be one of the funniest members of the cast who often steals the scenes she’s in. Her mom’s especially cute, too, with an adorable accent. They have a great relationship, too, with some cute scenes together.
