I will also show 2 bonus crops at the end of this post – one that I posted yesterday on Bluesky, and a bonus version here with color flats added.
Bluesky Censorship
Though before showing the images, I want to briefly mention the widening scope of censorship currently going over on Bluesky. This isn’t something that has only happened on there – it’s been a recent occurrence across several platforms in recent years. Most notably, for this year, are the Itchi.io and Steam bans. But before then, it was Patreon and Gumroad, as well as others. Bluesky, however, is a little unique in it is one of the most far-reaching among these recent censorship pushes.
These are important topics to me, but (at least, for now) too wide in scope to broach entirely in this post. I’d want more time to word everything properly, as it’d likely be an essay’s-worth of words, if I tried and tackled it now.
But what I want to note about Bluesky for the time being, is something I thought about posting there – and maybe I still will, depending on how this week goes, and if the admins there react to the backlash or not.
What I want to say is this:
General thoughts on the widening scope of censorship in recent years
Some years ago, it used to be widely understood that if you wished to protect the art you like, you must also defend the existence of the art you dislike – or even find repulsive. You are free to be disgusted by anything, not look at and filter it, and move on.
It was when people began forcing everyone to censor anything uncomfortable that lead to where we are now. Where multiple platforms are widening their scope of censoring artistic expression, which used to be widely understood as a key aspect of what it even means to be human.
Social platforms have spent years inciting the dehumanization of their own users toward themselves and each other. These recent censorship crackdowns are a reflection of this. Platforms would prefer censoring expressions of sincere humanity, in favor of the most banal visual products, aka “content”
Bluesky specifically
With that, I’ll just write what I posted there, with some expanded thoughts since I am not limited to a wordcount here (I’ll link to the social post itself afterward, if you’d like to see the original, much shorter thread):
I’ve been making some small UI tweaks to this blog and my main site that I wanted to document for myself somewhere – and this blog seems the perfect place to do so!
Name change
The first change, which is both the most and least obvious, is I changed the address for this blog.
However, if you happened to click on both links, you’ll see that they both work! I was really happy to discover a way to do this. I’m going to start using the Landy domain for the sketchblog, but the original address for the blog (including all past posts) will continue to work indefinitely, even for new blog posts! While the old URL (“Liz”) will show if you manually browse to one or click an old link on one of my socials, once you click to another place within the blog (such as another post, or the recent posts link in the menu), it will then show the new (Landy) link. This is incredibly helpful, because I’ve been thinking about how I want to use the Landy domain, but I was not 100% certain I wanted to move the sketchblog over to it entirely. Now, I can sort of have it both ways.
I’ve actually had the Landy domain for several years, mainly for identity reasons, but I never got around to using it for anything (other than the base URL – without the “sketchblog” part – redirecting to my portfolio site). The base domain still redirects to my portfolio site as of this post, but I have plans for it soon for it to become its own thing, separate from my portfolio.
Along these lines, I also changed the blog’s name to “Landy’s Sketchblog,” whereas before it was “Liz’s Sketchblog.”
I’ll go into why I wanted to consider this change later on in the post, after showing the layout changes. But I wanted to note down this name change at the top, because it is an important change for the clarity of this blog.
Layout Changes
While looking through my files, I unfortunately realized I didn’t save as many screenshots of the layout changes as I thought I had. But that’s okay, I’ll just post what I do have.
Desktop Layout (Sketchblog)
Let’s start with the changes to this blog! Here’s how it looks now:
Current sketchblog layout, main page with off-white background. Link color also adjusted to slightly more green.
The latest change I made was switching the background color for the main content area from white to an off-white – I’m not sure this will be the final color, but I’ve been leaning toward using more of a variety of colors for my Landy/non-“Liz” pages recently. It’s more fun!
Here’s how it looked before deciding to change the content area background color:
Sketchblog layout, main page with white background.
Here’s how it looked before I decided to change the blog’s name (also apologies for the misalignment of these screenshots, they were taken on-the-fly while making the site updates):
Slightly before the current layout, main page.
In the above, the main change with the current layout is decreasing the size of the blog title and description, as well as lowering the opacity for both, as well as the nav links and social icons. This is to emphasize what should be the main draw for this blog – the content of the posts themselves.
And here’s how it looked before I made the small tweaks earlier this week (showing the archive page, though without the categories I added later – this screenshot is from a while back):
Before the main changes from earlier this week, blog archive (without categories showing).
Mobile Layout (Sketchblog)
Mobile version of the sketchblog upon open.
When the “menu” button is pressed.
Menu expands when a category with sub-items is clicked and expands,
Here’s how the sketchblog should now look on mobile – before, the top bar was much wider by default. It still isn’t as small as I’d like (the leftmost image), but it should be a much better viewing experience now compared to before. The menu also expands, and reveals the sidebar image when the nested items are expanded. This isn’t fully to my preference (see below), but I am okay with it for now.
Mobile Layout (Portfolio Site)
I also wanted to jot down a change I did last year – I finally created a mobile-friendly layout for my main portfolio website. I know I took screenshots of how it looked before, but I couldn’t find it among the cacophony of photos on my phone – so I have only the current layout to show (I’ll edit the “before” screenshots in the future, if I end up finding them again):
Portfolio site, mobile layout, default view.
Menu expands upon clicking the topbar button.
For a sense of the previous layout, imagine that topbar covering about 30% of the screen (with an art graphic on it) with the navigation bar on it, instead of the thin bar that’s there now that appears when tapped.
With the sketchblog changes, I was actually trying to have it look closer to how I changed it for my portfolio site – but because I use WordPress for the sketchblog, I don’t have as much flexibility or control as I do for my portfolio site. I’m sure there is a way to have the topbar as slim as my portfolio site, but the time investment for me to figure that out doesn’t make it feasible, for now, as I’m not a web developer by trade. The sketchblog’s mobile layout should be functional, as well as a more pleasant browsing experience now, which was my aim.
I am pleased that I was able to figure out a way to have the menu bar on my portfolio site look more elegant than using a content managing system like WordPress! I always created the sketchblog with WordPress as a kind of “testing ground,” as I like using WordPress, but I also love the control manually writing your site gives you. I think both work well for different purposes – for something like a blog, it would probably be too inflexible if I tried to do that manually (as well as take up too much time, most likely, in terms of maintenance).
Why the changes?
So, why these updates? Well, the mobile changes are obvious – I’ve long preferred browsing via desktop over mobile. This caused me, probably unwisely, to prioritize the desktop experience over the mobile one for many years – long after mobile eclipsed desktop use. This was partially because I find the mobile browsing experience personally vaguely unpleasant – the physical act of looking down at this tiny screen has always been sort of uncomfortable or unpleasant. I think I became used to the sitting-up posture growing up with desktop computers. I never wanted to spend longer looking down at this ridiculously tiny phone screen longer than I had to.
But I understand that I am not the main demographic, and that the majority of the browsing experience nowadays is through mobile. I have to admit I partially was spurred to fix my layout after some friends mentioned they were looking at my portfolio website, which I assumed was through their phones, and was mildly horrified as I knew I had been neglecting the mobile layout. So I have them to thank for spurring me to improve it, which I should have done earlier than this/last year – but! Now it’s done (or functional).
Additional changes & thoughts
Another change I did spur-of-the-moment earlier this week, while working on the blog, was changing the title from “Liz’s Sketchblog” to “Landy’s Sketchblog,” A small change, but something I wanted to note down for myself here.
The reason is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and that I’ve decided to begin implementing this year. I have always had a bit of a disconnect between my name and my art versus my pseudonym and my art. For a long time I only used my pseudonym (“Landylachs”), and avoided actively associating my name with my art. A few years ago, I decided to try using my name with my art, in addition to my alias, as it felt right at the time. I don’t think that was the “wrong” decision, but I do think it has created this underlying tension I always have between my work as “Liz” versus my work as “Landy.” I suspect this makes little difference outwardly, and it is likely entirely an internal perception thing I am overthinking. I’ve tried to ignore that discrepancy ever since, but it never truly went away.
The main cause of the tension in this discrepancy is I am always conflicted about how I wish to present myself under these names. I feel I should maintain a certain level of distance and professionalism with “Liz,” but there are times when I wish to be more of a hobbyist, more casual and whimsical (and, let’s be honest – feel allowed to show more excitement about whichever fandoms I’m into at the moment) – which I don’t feel comfortable doing when I am “Liz.” Because even though I do art professionally, at heart, one of my favorite things about art is how it helps you discover people who share genuine love over the things you’re passionate about too – whether that is fandom or original art and stories. Since I use both names interchangeably, I think my accounts have been trying to present both ways, and not fully succeeding at either.
So! This year, after thinking about it for too long (and a wholehearted thank-you-and-apologies to friends and fellow artists I’ve reached out to ramble about this and seek out their advice and opinions – which have all been incredibly helpful!) – after thinking about it, I’ve finally settled on what I want to do about this, I’ll continue calling it, “discrepancy.”
The portfolio site (“LizLiu.com”) won’t be going anywhere, but I’m going to start using it more for my more fully-polished art. For my more hobbyist art and personal projects, I’m going to start doing them under “Landylachs.com” – thought that leaves the question of my social accounts, which are all under the Landy identity. I’m not fully certain what, if anything, I’ll change with those – right now, I’m leaning toward slowly transitioning them to being more casual, maybe, and I might gradually move all the socials from my portfolio site to the future Landy site, and have the portfolio site exist as its own, mainly self-contained thing.
Part of the reason for using this blog again, is I think writing this out helps me decide what I want to do, so this is part of that process. I’m trying to implement more things this year, instead of overly ruminating or overthinking it to myself. I think the rapid pace of social media adds to this rumination, causing me to constantly second-guess whether I want to even share anything at all, and then I end up keeping everything I’m excited by offline and not sharing anything online at all. This blog has been helping me slow down a bit, and decide which things I do want to share, and which things need more time to percolate and keep to myself until they’re ready. I’m excited so far!
Add-on Update: January 29, 2025
Adjusted navigation menu. Reduced the number of links for conciseness. (In preparation for future links, hopefully soon :) )
Add-on Update: January 30, 2025
Adjusted caption text to improve legibility. (Decreased letter-spacing and line-height)
Changed the “Recent Posts” layout to a list-style one for improved legibility.
Changed “Recent Posts” and “Blog Archive” pagination style to be more consistent with the main blog’s pagination style. (Note: Hover text is still incorrect, showing the blue-green link color instead of #fff as intended. Aim for fix in the future.)
My sylvari warrior from Guild Wars 2! Crop from the full painting.
I was inspired to paint after seeing the new mount option in Guild Wars 2! It’s a “roadrunner mount,” but I was very excited because it reminded me of a mount idea I had a while back:
Mount idea based off a “greater prairie chicken” from a while back!
This mount idea is based off a greater prairie chicken, which is one of my favorite chickens! They are beautiful creatures.
I tried to recreate my mount idea in-game using the dye system, and though I did not really succeed, I am happy with my turkey mount, haha:
My sylvari warrior with his turkey mount!
This screenshot is heavily edited, as I’m currently on a laptop with integrated graphics. GW2 runs surprisingly well on it, but I wasn’t able to find an area that lit the character models well enough for us to see them. I’ll post the original screenshot below!
Original screenshot! It’s fun to compare the two.
Anyway, here is what I ended up sketching!
It’s a bit of a chimeric melding of my greater prairie chicken mount idea, the GW2 roadrunner skin, and the greater prairie chicken itself. The painting manages to look nothing like either my sketch or the in-game mount, haha, but it was really fun to paint tonight.
Here’s how the rest of the painting looks.
And now for the thoughts about cynicism in today’s media entertainment!
Thoughts about cynicism in today’s modern shows
While painting the above tonight, my mind started to idly wander about general thoughts regarding media entertainment. We finished the season finale of The Boys earlier tonight, and I’m sure this what prompted tonight’s meandering thoughts.
The primary thought is this: I can’t get into shows that revel in celebrating the worst in humanity.
There is a certain cynicism that pervades many of today’s popular entertainment media. I suspect this is why many modern shows haven’t clicked with me. The ones I do enjoy seem to be fighting for a widespread audience (Cobra Kai being a welcome exception). My two other recent favorites, Person of Interest and Dark Matter, were both cancelled after only 3 or 4 seasons! (“Recent” by modern standards – both are several years old now.)
Let’s take Cobra Kai as an example. Cobra Kai introduces itself in a very deliberate way. In our current media climate of “dark and gritty, humanity is irredeemably evil,” you think it will go in a predictable way.
The show shatters this expectation. (At least, it did for me.) Instead of taking the predictable route of a villainous, irredeemable main character – as he is introduced – the show invites us to ponder the idea of bettering ourselves. And in doing so – at least this is my interpretation – possibly even bettering the world.
It allows us to contemplate this in a way media like Westworld, Game of Thrones, Black Mirror, The Boys, or The Witcher feel like they want to choke out this desire in its audience. They arguably disavow the notion of any good in humanity. They also seem to disavow the idea that people might be redeemable, and might become better versions of their past selves.
These shows appear to desire bludgeoning their audience under the premise that humanity has little to no positive qualities, and that humans are overwhelmingly, irredeemably flawed creatures.
Humans are unquestionably flawed – it is those flaws that probably inspire the majority of our literary history (at least the most interesting works!). Our flaws – and our striving to conquer them – seem to be a central part of what it means to be human.
Possibly I’m an overly optimistic Star Trek fan, but as long as we aren’t naive about or excuse these flaws, I don’t see negatives to aspiring to be our best selves.
Wow! It’s been five years since my last post to my sketchblog. Are blogs still a thing? Do I even know anyone who still keeps a blog?
I don’t think I do!
I’m kind of drawn to the relative anonymity this blog must have now. I loved blogging, and the only reason I stopped was because posting would take too much time with each entry. That, and also because social media basically replaced casual/personal blogging.
I think I’ll try writing some entries here though! I miss writing in general. I’ve been doing more personal writing lately, and it’s been great fun developing stories and themes.
But first, let’s update this blog with some recent work.
I’m not even sure which artwork I should post here first – where to begin after five years! This post will likely be a little haphazard, but let’s embrace it for the time being – I can always do more concise follow-up posts later on.
Vaknaa rough painting – trying out different designs for her.
Let’s start with something I posted earlier today on social media – a rough painting of Vaknaa! Vaknaa is now one of my older characters. She is the same character in my last post from 2015.
I’ve been playing around with her design lately, though I’ve tried tinkering with it in all the years since 2015. I’ve always wanted her design to combine human and avian features, but I was never completely happy with the designs I came up with so far – I’m not sure if I’ll keep this current design of her, but it’s been a lot of fun to paint with in the meantime!
I should post some of those other designs here sometime – there are a lot of designs I haven’t posted anywhere because they don’t seem like things I particularly want to share on social media, but they’d probably be suited to a personal blog like this.
I’ve made a few other sketches of this design this week – actually, I think I’ll post them here now. It’s interesting how used to I’ve become with social media – things I’ve become used to adhering to, like staggering posts as to not potentially annoy anyone with too frequent updates.
It’s kind of freeing to not have to consider that at all with a blog like this, since this is mainly just for my enjoyment, as I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to have traffic to a blog nowadays.
Anyway, more artwork!
Vaknaa – rough sketch.
Rough sketch of Vaknaa – I’ve been playing around with a much looser, possibly more expressive style lately. It’s been really enjoyable so far, which is a little surprising for me, because traditionally I’ve been told my artwork can be on the tight side, sometimes too much.
Vaknaa – rough sketch, ‘Smoke.”
These were all painted this week, mainly as either warm-up paintings or break paintings. I’ve enjoyed painting them, and want to explore more paintings in this style!
Recap from 2015 – 2020
Now that we have some artwork here, I thought it might be fun to do a brief recap of what the past five years have been like. I’ll probably put these thoughts under a cut.
Some fan art of Sheik’s Hyrule Warriors design from about a month ago! Made a process video of it, and uploaded it to YouTube:
It always kind of amazes me how much I enjoy video editing when it’s just for fun, and not for work/a job.
I’m making some hastily put together ref sheets for an art secret santa event, and finding it really fun to type out some of the character info. I’d like to make nice ref sheets for some of my characters, but who knows when I’ll have time to do that, so the actual ref images are taken from finished or mostly finished paintings, and some random or old drawings I have lying around, many which I haven’t posted to anywhere because they’re poor quality. But in terms of being useful as a reference, they’re are probably adequate. Or the best I have right now, in any case. Desperate times call for desperate measures, haha.
But it’s cool, because I mostly keep any written character info and character sketches separate (text document vs PSD file), and this is one of the few times where I’m seeing the text info alongside some images. How I’ve painted seems to have fluctuated a lot, and it’s kind of neat to be able to see that all in one reference sheet. It’s probably just interesting to me.
A crop of Spectros from a wip before linking some music videos for a new band I started listening to!
