Elsie Quarterly - Q4

Good Evening! This is Elsie!
Welcome to the last Quarterly of the year!

I’ll go into it in the LookBack, but this year has been quite eye opening. I learned a lot about what I like to do and what I want to do going forward. I pushed myself to do things out of my comfort zone and I was rewarded greatly. But for now, these were the highlights of this quarter.

I try to do Inktober every year if time permits. Usually I also try to give the inktober an overall theme to accompany the chosen words so this year I picked Pokemon. Most of them were pretty straightforward but there were a few where I had to wrap my brain around a concept.

I’m trying to post more original works. Next year I’d like to post even more!

As always I have been doing a lot of art for VShojo lately. I use each opportunity to try something new or improve.

Pluto was the best anime I watched this year in a year full of absolute bangers (JJK Season 2 was a close second). But the reason Pluto beat out JJK Season 2, Frieren, Scott Pilgrim, and so many others is becase you just can’t ignore the impact that Astro Boy had on the industry. Pluto is my favourite manga and the anime absolutely did it justice. What a profound piece of artistry.

Hands are one of the hardest things to draw in human anatomy (personally I think feet are harder). So of course when I saw the option to reserve a Kotobukiya Artist Support Item Hand Model. The awesome thing is that it was supervised by renowned hand artist (lol) Takahiro Kagami.

I didn’t know quite what to expect about Star Ocean Second Story R. I generally liked what I saw in the 2.5D visuals and the combat system seemed pretty good from the trailers. What I got was a very thoughtful JRPG with tons of systems to learn and use to my advantage. I love when a game gives you systems to play around with and exploit to your advantage. It’s definitely the type of game you should go into blind.

I want to make more shirts in the new year. I used Patreon to pilot some shirt designs and I think they look pretty good, though the material quality could be better.

Check out my wrap up post for my vacation in Japan. It’s still my favourite place in the world!

I remember playing Super Mario RPG on SNES all those years ago. It was probably one of the first RPGs I ever played and because it was Mario, it was super easy to get in to. Square really did a great job on the design of the game, making it beginner friendly to start as you learn the mechanics. The game also has such a unique and comedic voice that sticks with you long after you’ve finished the game.

Elsie see fancy design thing from a favourite IP? Elsie buy.

I only saw two films in theatres this year, one of which was Godzilla Minus One. I am a pretty casual fan of Godzilla, but I have not enjoyed some of the recent Legendary produced Godzilla films so I was surprised to see Toho had put Godzilla in North American theatres. To my surprise it got glowing reviews so I decided to see for myself! It was as good as people said and more. I typically like films where Godzilla evolves like Shin Godzilla (my favourite Godzilla film) so it would have been nice to see more of the evolution, but the story and solutions the people have to defeating Godzilla in this movie were really clever. I enjoyed this one immensely and will absolutely be buying this when it’s released for home viewing.

I missed out on this one when it was playing in theatres initally. I found it while browsing on Crunchyroll and since I enjoy Makoto Shinkai’s work I watched it. I did not expect a certain scene to hit so hard I definitely shed a tear. Definitely go watch it, it’s one of Shinkai’s best works.

It was still quite the quarter even with the vacation taking up a good chunk of it! I didn’t do as much art this quarter as I would have liked but sometimes you really have to force yourself to rest and reset.

See you in the LookBack post!