Snacked for a Hundred Yume @ Decrepit Dwellings

The third entry for my Snacked for a Hundred Yume project, about time! Today we’re at Decrepit Dwellings.

Trusting the process

The background here took far longer to finish than SHY 02’s: unlike Sky Kingdom, Decrepit Dwellings has way more details scattered all over the place, spanning from junk and lamps on the floor to doors and windows on the buildings and pipes hanging well above the ground.

But none of that compares the fear that a single detail struck me with at the sole thought of having to paint it… the bricks. The idea of having to paint a pattern again (the first time was Sky Kingdom’s floor and it was nightmarish) horrified me, so I tried to cut corners by overlaying a bunch of mostly-random paint strokes until it remotely resembled a brick-like texture, while crossing my fingers that it would end up looking decent. The end result looks dusty as hell, but… passable maybe? I guess that’s a good enough tradeoff for spending very little time on them.

Livelier than ever!

I can see some kind of central purpose in all the SHY entries so far: SHY 01 was a test to both see how viable the project’s concept could be and to push my lineart-heavy backgrounds to their limit. SHY 02 was all about learning to painting a background without a direct reference and integrating lineart in said background.

Meanwhile, SHY 03 begins to spark some more life in the artwork through Urotsuki. For example, here I used her as a self-insert to capture my own confusion when I completed the YNO Vending Machine Finder expedition in-game: the sprite of the snack I had bought looked like a tube of cookies… until it spewed out light blue liquid.

The original idea wasn’t sprinkling extra life in the drawing, though - I had just thought it could’ve been a funny throwback for other players who had been taken off-guard by that snack animation, just like me…

…Fine, I’ll admit I also did this to draw Uro in my new cooler style again.

“Flow” in SHY 03

While working on the extra lineart I was just talking about, I realized that the drawing was completely missing proper “flow”. Not to mention, there was no context whatsoever for the “tall beverage” (as the wiki calls it), outside of the bottom lineart.

I decided to address them with a single addition: a snack “popup” right over Urotsuki’s head - just like how it happens in-game - standing out from the background with bright colors.

This is supposed to “direct” the viewer’s eyes in a “Z” motion of sorts, starting from the top, moving to the snack popup, and finally reaching the bottom lineart (I didn’t really care about the order in which these two were seen).

That said, I frankly doubt that it’s getting the job done that well with such a small size. But hey, at least now I know I should plan ahead of time the flow of my future works.

A couple extra words about that extra lineart: only now I realized that Uro’s hand on the left does not match her hand on the right.

Wrapping up…

Procrastination isn’t taking all the blame for the long making of this drawing: this one was actually pretty tough to finish, plus I’ve put way more work on this than I originally expected. Regardless, it absolutely paid off: I’m really satisfied with this one! My only worry right now is how I’ll be able to stay true to this standard in future SHY entries - speaking of which, there are “just” 3 more queued up!

Little spoiler, Forest Pier is next.