Chumi, : Welcome to the artist commentary! This is a CC-full bunch of updates. We’re so happy about the warm reception you guys have been showing our newest nymph. It’s making me smile, we’re all smiling! But let’s get to it!
Floral: We are all in the CC fan club and we’re so happy to indoctrinate all of you into it too!!
Kim, CC-pilled: I love all our new kiddos, but lowkey CC is a fave of mine that I was really excited for y’all to finally meet… hehe… HOOHOO…!
Haven: I’m so excited I made this image 2 years ago and it’s true.
Panel 963 by Annie “Chumi” Lee
Chumi: Boxes full of bombs, gold, booze, pornography, candy, explosives… A recipe for a damn good night!! We can’t forget the licorice scottie dogs.
Magazines by Annie “Chumi” Lee
Chumi: The mags… At first, the chest was full of real-life vintage saucy magazines. However, because Black Inches was featured in Intermission, it was pivoted so all the saucy magazines became candy-themed saucy magazines! I had a bit of fun researching other types of licorice candies to spin in a pornographic way. The licorice feet one basically wrote itself. Coin Slots is a reference to a Spongebob clip where one of the characters inserts a coin somewhere that displeases a seahorse.
Floral: RED CHEEKS ba-boing
Kim: When Chumi posted these, they cracked me tf up. I can’t stand the titles and the slogans LOL.
Panel 964 by Annie “Chumi” Lee
Chumi: The room is taken from a panel featuring the Midnight Crew, sans pretty much everything except one door, a lightbulb, and the same exact crack in the corner. And it’s purple!
CD Sprites by Annie “Chumi” Lee
Chumi: I got to give CD a new look!! We wanted to bring back the big hat, so bring back the big hat I did. The leftmost one is what was featured in Homestuck proper. In order to get some inspiration, I googled “big hat”. I saw a picture of Zendaya big hat and put a Pikmin flower on top. My next favorite one is the barbershop pole. I wanted to use a striped pattern, but all I could think of was candy canes and barbershop poles. That one really ended up growing on me, it’s just very silly and not even a damn hat.
Floral: THESE WERE ALL SO GODDAMN GOOD. I’m happy we went Pikmin but the Barber shop hat was a close second for me.
Panel 965_02 by Annie “Chumi” Lee
Chumi: A sensual stroke… I totally forgot that CD only has 3 fingers until I started looking back at old Intermission panels.
Floral: Sooooooo sensual.
Panel 968-970 Thumbs by Floral, final panels by Annie “Chumi” Lee
Chumi: Trying to hide his shame with a big hat… It wasn’t enough…
Floral: Loved drawing these thumbs of the CD gag, silly sequential stuff like this is why I love comics.
Floral: While I can’t show you the full Derse room yet, I was actually finalizing CC’s official room at the same time as this update. I hope everyone liked the hints they received in this update. The beanie babies and Gir plush were actually last minute inclusions we figured out on call.
Chumi: Looking forward to the commentary in which we can break down CC’s room bit by bit!
Panel 975 Thumb by Floral
Floral: Loooooove this stupid little thumbnail, he’s so cute.
CC Flashstep Assets by Floral
Floral: I had a lot of fun trying to capture this specific flash step animation because I loved the texture of it.
Chumi: It ended up looking really good!
CC Explorations by Floral
Floral: The iconic CC silhouette reveal took a lot of revisions and explorations to get just perfect, especially when I realized being in front of the window wouldn’t work with Derse’s dark night sky.
Thumbnails by Floralmarsupial
Thumbnails by Kim Quach
Kim: We had some extensive discussion about how we would handle the transition sequence between going from Derse then swapping to this mysterious new location! I remember having a vision so strongly for this update you can see above I was trying to suggest boards while drawing it on my phone’s Notes app while I was out LMAO.
The most important things we were focused on preserving: adding to the mystery and the overall “flow” of movement. I’m pretty happy I was able to get that epic hero mode landing shot in there.
BUT! Before we get into the epic reveal, let's talk about how we got to the design… :-)
Haven: Let’s get into the design!
Concept art by Kim Quach
Haven: Early on we were doing a lot of nymph exploration sketches and Kim made this one and it was so good we needed to make it a character.
Kim: Awww I remember this LOL. The one that started it all (of CC)… I was just spitballing a bunch of random Nymph designs when we were trying to explore how nymphs could possibly look like, one idea I thought would be extremely funny if there was a nymph just absolutely fascinated with the idea of satyrs.
Chumi: THE VERY FIRST CC…..
Concept art by Andi
Kim: Literally an hour later Andi made this. Once they posted this, this is where we all knew… We were all getting charmed by the idea of fujo squid… We had to iterate more…
Concept art by Haven
Haven: I went to town on some character work, Unnamed Seafoam Colored Fujoshi Nymph became the cloppingConnoisewer! An early design idea for the nymphs is I wanted them all to have a color on them that linked to another nymph. You can see on early Ly’lac art that she had red socks to match with AA, and CC had purple accents to match with Ly’lac! Also had goggles for the voyorbs because I thought it’d be cute if both eyes were impaired a bit.
Kim: Then Haven really took the concept home!!! He really brought CC to life… For the longest while, CC had a long skirt, can you believe it?
Chumi: So cute, such a shiny smile… My lovely guppy.
Concept art by Kim Quach
Kim: Some explorations of different tendril styles we were thinking of for CC! Going short? Tied back? Long?
God, this art is almost three years old now… Oh how long we’ve been cooking on our kids. I can’t believe how bulbous I used to draw the mantle eyes.
Chumi: The middle style is still SOOOO CUTE, I’m kinda biased.
Revisions by Haven
Tendril Concept art by Chumi
Concept art by Andi
Meme by Andi
Concept art by Haven
Haven: Yeah, I just kept going. I totally fell in love with this design. Soooooo Ky’uuuuuute~!
Chumi: A deluge of concepts by all of us, until we arrive close to the final design! The first iteration of CC’s scythe was that the blade was the head of an old nymph. The skull socks were a damn stroke of genius.
Kim: I’m quite chuffed that the emo bang managed to persist all the way until the final concept LOL.
Now that you know how our lovely CC came to be… Let’s talk about the part where we get to SEE ‘em!
Panel 978_01 Sketch by Kim Quach
Panel 978_01 by Kim Quach
Kim: I’ve been really enjoying using CSP’s animation files when I’m making panels! Especially setting up my files with really wide “margin” areas helps with sketching the overall pose I’d like to achieve. It rings very similar to what I liked about drawing within Toonboom programs. :-)
Plus it’s fun to doodle! Have a Patreon exclusive peek at some of the margin doodles I accumulated in this update’s file. ^_^
Sketches by Kim Quach
Kim: I’m addicted to drawing CC… such a fun character design especially with such a fun personality. We really popped off with this one.
Panel 979 Sketch by Kim Quach
Panel 979 by Kim Quach
Kim: Oh he’ll yeah…. You know I love me a good dramatic angle…
Panel 980 Sketch by Kim Quach
Panel 980 by Kim Quach
Kim: Heh… nothin’ personal ya old hag…… You don’t usually really see these kinds of smooth animations in Homestuck, but the comedy of getting that delayed slice effect was Important to Me.
Floral also helped out with providing a design for who this poor rando nymph that was gonna get eviscerated.
Nymph Assailant by Floralmarsupial
Kim: I’m quite chuffed by this drawing. It vaguely reminds me of those Japanese umbrella yokai LOL.
Panel 980 Background by Kim Quach
Kim: Also, as just a little extra, here’s a background-only version of this panel! Just because I like how it came out.
Panel 981 Background Concept by Floralmarsupial
Floral: Our first exploration of this environment! Haven is the mastermind of these concepts so this was my first time exploring it myself!
Panel 981 from Homestuck: Beyond Canon
Kim: I put together the final composite of this panel, but the amazing background in this was the beautiful combined efforts of Floral and Haven!
Panel 981 Background by Haven
Haven: Here’s the revised background I made for the sprite panels! It looks a little familiar doesn’t it! This environment is possibly my favorite one we’ve conceived so far. I’m always excited to draw more of it.
Panel 982 Thumbnail by Floralmarsupial
Panel 982 Sketch by Kim Quach
Panel 982 by Kim Quach
Kim: This one was another fun one! The idea behind this environment was that these were ancient ruins from a Satyr society. The fun part about trying to make these collage-style panels is trying to find the right parts for it… It was also a little chance to show a little variety of Satyr influences! We got a little bit of some Greco-Roman architecture plus some Buddhist pagodas from Indonesia and Vietnam here. :-)
Chumi: The background looks so beautiful and starry…!
Panel 983 thumbnail by Floralmarsupial
Panel 983 Sketch by Kim Quach
Panel 983 by Kim Quach
Kim: It’s almost kinda funny how AA is only ever a haunting silhouette at this point. Girl, get out of the shadows!!!
Fun fact, I wanted to commit to the infinity mirror effect – if you look closely even the mirrored reflections are even animated too. LOL
Panel Thumbs by Floral
Floral: The original sequence of CC swimming back home, we wanted a nice lead into showing the extreme scale of this environment. Having a character at the bottom of the sea is so fun, the things we can do with it as far as environmental design is unbelievable, and Haven has done such amazing exploration of those possibilities.
Panels by Haven
Haven: My favorite location! And I got to draw more of it!
Original “CC Home” Concepts by Haven
Haven: Concept art of CC’s... Place of residence. I had a number of things in mind with this that all changed as the story developed. One of the main differences between the previous versions and current being the fact that there is only one of these. It’s very lonely for our little CC at the bottom of the sea sea. My inspiration for this design was a combination between Jade’s Atom symbol, hollow seed pods, Christian Ethiopian art, the Hollow Earth from Atvatabar, and the Flammarion engraving. There's more details and inspirations to get into but that’ll have to wait for the next time!
Chumi: And for next time we shall wait! Thanks for coming everyone, we’ll see you later!