Asuna Yuuki NHML

The Near Hentai Monthly Lady for September 2024 is Asuna Yuuki from Sword Art Online. I only watched a couple episodes of this show at a convention when it was popular and didn’t much care for it, and the longer it ran the less I felt it was a show I’d enjoy. That being said, I know basically nothing about Asuna so I just did a simple pic of her with Kirito. I hope y’all enjoy it.

With this post, NHML nominations for the month of October are now open. For those who don’t know, I’ll run down the rules real quick. Nominations are limited to one per person. You can nominate any female character you want, provided I have not drawn her within the past calendar year (though I prefer characters I’ve never drawn, period). Previous NHML winners are not eligible for a second time. Nominees must also not be from the same franchise as this month’s winner, Sword Art Online. If you violate any of those rules, I’ll let you know, and you can nominate someone else. I know it can be hard to keep track of these things. You may nominate by either commenting in the cBox, commenting on this post, or emailing me (Nearphotison2010@yahoo.com). I’ll compile a list of the nominees in the sidebar of this site, and then on October 1st I will use a randomizer to select the winning character who I will proceed to draw sometime that month. I look forward to seeing who you all nominate this time around!

First Shoot #23 – Gwen Stacy

This First Shoot poll was won by Gwen Stacy, specifically the one from the Spiderverse movies. Those films sit in a weird place for me, as there’s several characters I was interested in drawing from them, but a number of factors kept me from doing anything with them. I don’t think I’m comfortable talking about those factors here, but Gwen’s a popular character who’s getting to make her NHS debut now. I figured the most logical reaction from her to arriving in the Studio would be to fall back on her experience with hopping between dimensions, so that’s the angle I took.

Clean Break, Page 7

Here’s the seventh page of our Straight Ongoing comic, “Clean Break”. There were two scripts submitted for this page, but they went in pretty different directions and I didn’t feel like I could reconcile them. Instead, I just went with the one that felt like a better direction for the comic, although I did make a small change. I’d misread one part of the script, but liked my misread a bit better so I went with it, hopefully no one will mind. I think Armin tapping out and then Mikasa and Eren getting a romantic one-on-one moment makes sense as we near the end of this comic. I expect at most 1-2 pages more based on where we are, but we’ll see how things play out.

August ’24 One-Shot

Here is the One-Shot comic for August 2024. Like always, the script for this comic was written by one of my Subscribers. This one’s pretty straightforward, I think, with a threesome between Tsunade, Sakura and Ino. While I’m not crazy about a Naruto script winning, I’m not completely against this comic. Ino was my favorite girl in Naruto back when I read it, and she’s also the only one of these three I’d never worked with before. So it’s kinda nice to bring her into the Studio here, and I tried to give some good shots to these ladies since none of them have appeared in ages.

Studio Life Magazine 9 with Denji

Here’s the ninth Studio Life magazine cover. At the time that I invited nominations from Subscribers for this cover, I hadn’t done a male-focused one in a while (the commission with Gon hadn’t happened yet). So the theme this time was just male characters, and there was a variety of nominations. In the end I went with Denji, who’s a character with a pretty unique situation in the Studio who’s also made a lot of appearances, so I thought he’d make a good cover star.

Near Pokédex F654 – Braixen

While I haven’t played many of the newer Pokémon games, I did play Pokémon Y and had fire starter for that game. Braixen seems to have become the most popular stage of that evolution line, even though I remember really liking Delphox. Braixen got the big push by being a main character in the anime, plus (if I remember correctly) a playable fighter in Pokken Tournament (which I only played a bit of). Anyway, I thought she’d make for a good Pokédex F entry here.

Tapion Character Ask 1

Tapion and Minotia’s story in Wrath of the Dragon was always really sad. Both have been in the Studio for a good while now, but I never really did anything with them together. By now they’ve had plenty of time to acclimate to Studio culture, though, and I thought a little Ask featuring them might be fun.

Also, for anyone who’s interested, here is the Q&A video I did for Subscribers last month:

Wax Sulfur

I talked about it a little bit when I did the AMV, but I was really surprised by how much I enjoyed Gushing Over Magical Girls. It’s far from perfect, but for what it was trying to do I thought it hit the mark more often than not. I love villainess/heroine-in-peril stuff, but don’t draw it too often, but I’d like to indulge that interest a bit with this series. I have a lot of sketches covering most of the characters who appeared in the first season, and hopefully I’ll get more of them done than not. I started with this one, focusing on Magia Sulfur, ’cause it was one of the simpler ones and I wanted to get the ball rolling while the series was still somewhat fresh in my mind. The next Gushing pic I do will probably focus on my favorite of the magical girls, Azure, but I did end up liking Sulfur a lot more than I thought I would.