2010

Not quite the beginning. But close enough

Not much has been saved of this year. And the few images here were done during November and December. It however is the start of our journey towards digital art, and perhaps the beginning of the resurgence of Femme Tails as a phenomena during the decade of the 2010s, so these warrant their own little space.


"Finished" Artwork


Falling Thru The Sky

Digital. Cover of "FreeFallin'" by Zutcha

Digital artwork of a two tailed vixen holding to their magenta dress, as they are seemingly on free fall, they have an embarrased face and heavy motion blur is applied to the clouds behind them. An alternate take on the prior picture, most notable, the magenta dress is now blue, and the sky has changed in hue to be more cyan to facilitate contrast. The original image by the original artist, recovered from a low-resolution copy-of-a-copy. Same description as the first one, but in B/W

The beginning of it all. This is it. Tails has always been the apple of our eye, our muse, the vehicle through which we escaped to another place, and another time. All of these things would eventually lead to Mila, whom you'll get your fair share of art during the 2020's. But for now, here is this humble picture, an edit of a wip/scrapped piece by an artist by the name of by Zutcha (original image seems to be lost to time, but a copy has been provided). It is hard to not forget about that name, given this image would surpass the original in popularity and it would sour their perception of us and our work.

It is tempting to imagine how things would have developed if we had the confidence in our own skills to just doodling in paper and just publish our much more amateurish, and now gone, drawings instead. But alas, this is what we have, and, it is probably a good time to just face the reality of how we came to be.

This image came in two versions. We were not sure if we wanted to keep Amy's dress' colours as-is for this, or if we wanted to go with something else. In the end, the blue coloured dress would be a recurrent theme in the future, and potential inspiration for others. Though, given how orange and blue are complimentary colours, it is kind of a natural choice and we gave ourselves too much credit back in the day.

We would eventually try to redo this picture later in time, but it simply did not feel the same. Perhaps a good project to look towards, redoing a lot of our old arwork in our very own terms with our accumulated experience.

Overall, there is a lot of melancholy attached to this piece. But, it is probably the cornerstone of our career as artists moving forward.

Tailsko And Sonic Wallpaper

A wallpaper featuring both Femme Tails and Sonic, with views of Emerald Hill Zone

Two characters, Tails, a two tailed vixen, and Sonic, a blue hedgehog, stand in a platform so small it can barely hold the two of them. Tails is looking at Sonic wishingly, almost in awe, with her torso pointing in the opposite direction, both of her arms facing down, hands held together, and her tails down, almost defensively or embarrased. Sonic stands next to her, his torso facing to the right, and looking back at her, with a blush on his cheeks. He appears somewhat akward at the whole situation. Behind them there's a scaled up background of Emerald Hill Zone from Sonic 2 for the MegaDrive

Honestly, we have zero recollection of the making of of this picture. For the image name and it's resolution it is clear it was supposed to be a wallpaper for our laptop at the time. A MacBookPro 2,1. No knowledge of the original author, either.

By now, we were getting a hold on how GIMP was working and how some of it's more advanced tools were working. We were using the vectorized path tool to stroke out inks with uniform length and we were following Jess[1]' advice on how to use the GIMP for colouring. To this day we still use the tool for drawing and rendering. We'll probably come back to this at a later point in the exhibit. For now, suffice to say this is the beginning of our, now, delightfully short-sighted fixation with the perspective tool and making backgrounds out of textures and planes. This will be a recurring thing, and perhaps, a definining part of our art style of the era.


[1] For a variety of reasons, the last contact between both of us has been over 13 years ago, and it is likely they don't even remember our existence. They are, however, relevant in the context of how we got to use our current toolset. So they get a mention and a linkback for historical accuracy's sake.

Commodore Amiga Logo in High Quality

The demoscene's touching influence manifests itself at last.

A recreation of the Commodore Amiga logo over an hexagonal pattern

Even less to say about this picture than the last. We were always fascinated by the demoscene, and specially, Amiga demos at the time, they were awe-inspiring, and to a point, they still are. This would inform a lot of our sensibilities for pixel art and other pieces of work moving forward. As for the technical details of this picture, it's just an experiment with the font tool, gradient tool, and the built-in filters. Trying to make further sense of the featureset of The GIMP.


"Unfinished" Artwork


Fleetway Amy Rose

A drawover over a Fleetway-esque drawing of Amy Rose

A traced over sketch of Amy Rose from the Fleetway comics, crossbow in hand. She's floating over a vague gradient.

Similar to the prior two pictures on this page. Nothing new in methodology and nothing else worthy of mentioning.

The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past - HD

An attempt at upscaling the title screen of the iconic game

An unfinished digital image of a pixelated mountain range, a lake, and castle walls over the right edge of the screen. It is an unfinished approximation of The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past's tile screen

A shortlived attempt at HD-izing memorable scenes from video games. Only a handful of gradients and a bit of a trace-over the castle tower was made before giving up on it. Perhaps due to fear of being unable to match the brickwork, not finding suitable photographs for photobashing, or some other unknown thing. Either way, this is as far as the first out of two images of this kind ended up being.