I'm touched by that aw! I do have synesthesia somewhat, but I also have a very vivid imagination! I have the synesthesia where letters/numbers/words are colors. Music and audio don't show up in my head that way, but because of my imagination I often will envision little movies/pmvs/etc in my head with ocs or whatever to music, which def connects me to it a lot more!!

omg so glad u like the puptrip!! that one's close 2 my heart u-u (and glad ur liking sun sprain too!!!!!!)

the puptrip was inspired by icky feelings i was having when everyone i knew started getting into drugs and i was just standing there like uhhhhh GKHJDFH LOL like that's the short of it. I felt curious about the "bad" stuff i never did as a teenager, but also wanted my distance from it / had interest in "childish" stuff still (plushies, nintendo games, etc). Junie going to a bizarre human-like swanky place was my sort of way of coping with everyone around me changing like that. It was weird being the only person in my circle who wasnt invited out to smoke pot bc they all knew I didn't want to lmao
Also I wanted to make a story about where lost pets go!!!

I think my favorite characters to draw and write were Dan and Amaranth. They were pretty easy to draw (always a blessing in a comic that visually complex) and their dialogue was always fun!!

I figured out I was otherkin mostly through acceptance. Once you figure out what otherkin means you just kinda have to talk to yourself and ask "am i, or am i not?" and not judge/push away whatever truths pop up. Also read Otherqueer by Eddy Atoms (on patreon for $2 here ) - it's a personal zine about Eddy's experience being otherkin & queer and how it's important for us to live it outwardly instead of just inside/online. If it resonates with u maybe you'll find it easier to have that talk with yourself!
I thought a lot about how much I absolutely hate my human form, but it felt less like dysmorphia and more like sm else. if i had a "beautiful" face and body i'd still be mad. if i were a dog/wolf/creature thing or one of my fursonas i'd feel so much more normal. and when i lived outwardly as an animal / am spoken to as if i am / respected as an animal with a human's mind it's the most affirming calming feeling ever.

I have definitely not unlearned shame but I'm trying my best. I'd be lost without my therapist (get a queer therapist if u can find one i promise it's worth the trouble). Journaling and being vulnerable also helps a lot, working on ways to forgive yourself for being the strange being you are. I have a long way to go tbh so I don't feel great giving out "advice" except to keep trying to accept how u feel / live & love just what you want anyway T_T oh and don't stop being yourself for another person. if they don't like the real you get out of their life. you'll be better off free than with people who dont really like you

The closest thing i can describe meeting Wolf to was like when u realize you're trans / queer / sm like that. Just a very soft sudden "oh!" type of thing, and then realizing everything in your past makes so much more sense, feeling happy and excited to exist, like that!!! he and i are one in the same, we both communicate to each other just through internal dialogues, sometimes brought outward, sometimes he controls my body as im talking out loud, other times the opposite, we just are 2 dogs who share this weird human vessel u_u <3

III HAVE NO TIPS LMAO you can 1000% find a ton of top surgery vlogs n blogs n stuff that are way more detailed and helpful than anything i could offer atm!! my hormone doc / primary care doc recommended a clinician to me that i signed up with, i needed a note from my therapist (no diagnosis, just a therapist's note or note from my doc, therapist was quicker to get). Literally all I needed was to just say I wanted my tits gone and they were like ok dope (i live in seattle so i cant speak for how docs in other places will handle hearing that sort of thing but </3 u know)

& i do pkmn types mostly through the ocs lore/themeing! i envision what sorta moves theyd have / what theyre associated with and go from there u.u For megas I think of what the natural "further push" would look like for a given oc. Kinda letting out their inner selves!

Originally i made Kell as a self-insert for a friend's world where Wackery and Bizareness would turn people in a certain mall into freaky creatures (that's why he has my name, too!). After playing around with that I sorta deviated and made some lore revolving around my own interest in liminal spaces and abandoned malls and the memories of places as they once were, or the sadness of missing a place/time / wanting to go back to a certain time / a time you never got to experience. Also lately playing into the memory of smell, textures, and temperatures of places and things.

Terrace came from childhood fascination with cookies and ice cream / specifically one image i'd envision, plus a few random elements like carrying magic wands and toy screwdrivers (my two favorite toys as a toddler that i remember holding). Its name comes from the town I grew up in <3

Pavilion comes from the pavilion i grew up going to for swim lessons / kindergarten / have some bday parties / do some summer activities at etc. there's so many strong vivid sensory memories with that that tie into fun (swimming, parties, the vending machines with chips and the one next to it with ice cream that'd make ur feet cold when you'd walk up to it) but also a lot of discomfort, especially for the trans undiagnosed autistic kid i was (locker rooms and seeing naked people, feeling exposed, loud noises, high temperature differences, the weird musty hot tub area with orange lighting and always full of big hairy old people, finding hair and band-aids and other yucky floaters in the pool, chlorine, etc etc etc i could go on for hours). All those are reflected in Pavilion. It's a way for me to reflect on what a weird place/time it was.

Always happy to talk about my comic!! T_T!!!!!!!!

I first made Beat in autumn of 2021 after I'd moved into my own apartment. I knew I wanted to make a comic about him and a love interest, and it took a lot of figuring out before I really got going on it (started making pages around may '22). But yeah!!! I made Beat in my bedroom desk at my old apartment in Seatac on a warm august day <3

There is 0% concrete in sun sprain and my general comic process my god... if i set stuff in stone i get iritable, I come up with stuff as I go (if only a very loose idea of where i'm going - for example all i had for chapter 2 that i knew i wanted to do was "they reunite & they kiss at the end of it" and that's IT. the details of which changed DOZENS of times over, not to mention everything inbetween!! n.n)

I mostly got inspired by music I like (oberhofer, miya folick, dan deacon, etc - i have a playlist available thru kelda's cove <3 ) and just vibes i was wanting to explore / things ive gone through or dealt with that i decided to pull from. as for art, i mostly rely on my main inspos, but comic books like This One Summer and Blankets def have a hand in the sort of wistful / slow gait through the story, especially the former. Definitely read it if you like graphic novels!!!

I'M HONORED THAT BEAT IS ONE OF UR COMFORT CHARACTERS! T__T <3 <3 that touches me so much!!!!

oh man that's a great question ummmmmm!!!!!! I really love the feeling I get when I'm stuck on a scene and I finally figure out what to do with it. I'll read it back and catch myself smiling. I also love when I feel like the characters have life in them, it's like a "holy shit i did it i made life" feeling, it's so great!!!

Thank you!! first of all DON'T WORRY - sun sprain's style is intentionally inconsistent. I went into it telling myself if I tried to stick to one style I WOULD give up on the comic. So I knew I had to use lots of mediums / dozens of styles. It keeps it fresh for me, and it allows me to get deeper into the emotion of a given scene reflected through the medium (rougher looks for rougher times, low colors for bleakness like when they're in the coffee shop about to part ways again, stuff like that that brings the hidden emotions out of hiding). I 1000% recommend it for artists who have trouble finishing big projects. The best piece of advice I heard about comic making was that your comic changes WITH you, and you have to let it. Trying to keep one look or one style or have all these rules about "I set this up it's set in stone" is what kills comics. Nothing is ever set in stone. So far, both chapters are miles off the tracks I had down when I was drawing the first page, and I love the comic even more for it. I'm struggling now with the same deal, feeling "trapped" in my strictness and trying to deviate and find out where i WANT the story to go!!

as for ur actual questions now~

1. God I wish it didn't but they take anywhere from 4-10+ hours (usually around 5-6 for standard detail, 2-3 if it's got fewer colors). I consider a page "done enough" when I look at it and it feels ok. If something feels off, I usually leave it alone for a few days or weeks and come back to it later. I finish SS pages out of order, and I piece them all together / fill in the gaps over time. When all the pages of a chapter are "done", I take a few days off, and then it's edit day - I sit down with a notepad and read the chapter start to finish, and I write down every single tiny detail I want to fix, everything from spelling mistakes to changing entire faces to look more true-to-vision / parts of the body to be more proportional to changing an expression ever so slightly to be just right (a screenshot of my notelist from chapter 2), and then I go back and fix it all!!! I'll do a few more of these until I start to become a crazy perfectionist and then I just tell myself "ok it's time to settle for 'good enough'". Usually a month after I post the pages I look back on it and dismiss any of the tiny little "errors" i kept noticing. Sometimes you just need to step back and relax.

2. I have zero schedule / zero planning. I never pre-write. It NEVER WORKS FOR ME!!! The most I will ever pre-write is when I have an idea for one patch of dialogue or something and I'll write it down before I forget, but even then there's typically some edits before finalization! I might make a voice memo to myself wailing about a concept for a scene, but it changes 4 or 5 times in dozens of ways before I get to it. I can't even sketch out a full page most of the time without making half a dozen changes. I build as I go, and when it feels right to me it feels RIGHT!!! "You feel it in your nerve endings" as I've heard once, and it's true. Another great piece of advice I heard was "you're a writer, you know how plot works, the plot will find itself. you tell stories and view stories every day, youll figure it out if you start making your characters do stuff". That's true too. There's so many western ideas of how to write and HOW to make a narrative, everything from the hero's journey to story circles, it's all bullshit and it doesn't NEED to be followed like everyone says. There's so many story and film styles out there that deviate, especially non-hollywood. Never pay for a writing course, follow your guts, get down deep into what you want to make and you'll enjoy the process a thousand times more (and people notice when youre having fun vs not having fun with a story you're making. plot is for NERDS!!! just make something you like WHEN you like!)

3. Kinda answered partially above I guess lmao! I feel the urge to work on sun sprain and I decide to try and do something. Most of my ideas for scenes are bolts from the blue with slight editing. Listening to music helps chug me along (i got that PMV brain) when I'm feeling stumped. It's sort of a mixture of brute force and no force at all, and when I get it right and it feels right, I keep it and continue!

4. I'm so glad you like my comics ur very sweet! <3 I guess my advice would be to not be afraid to scrap an old idea and come up with something new. I'd been planning a comic about sea beasts since 2016 and was planning to produce it, but I was longing to make something new with new characters, and I ended up coming up with Beat and Brad. Sun Sprain was originally going to be a very loosely-made short story but it ended up becoming literally the most precious thing in my life right now. If I kept that rigidity with what it originally was, I wouldn't be the same and it wouldn't be the way it is today. Let change come, and embrace what you wanna do now before it's too late. trust yourself please that's all i can say <33 your comic will tell u things about yourself that you didn't realize before you even realize what's happening. It's a valuable relationship but it requires that you put your vulnerability into it. Hope that makes sense xoxo

Never apologize for rambling i mean hell look at me ^^^ LOL <3 thank u for asking, i hope you find your rhythm with storytelling!!

aw im glad u like my little guys!!!

Smothered's name comes from an Oberhofer album I love, and the original design was made late at night while I didn't have a very clear image of what Smud would look like in my head. I associate the album with certain things / looks, but the album art looks very different (lots of pinks/purples/warm colors). I tried to mix the two and didn't like it. The next morning I decided to go for more of MY association with the album (rain, sun, bubbles, blue/white/gold) and it was the right decision :-]

For light, thats a rly good question wow :'-] hmm I guess I just like how light looks irl a lot, I love sunlight and concert lighting and how different types of light bounces around / lands on stuff / the relationship between light and shadow. I don't think of adding "shading" to my drawings, but rather adding "lighting", and the shade appears naturally u.u <3 I love messing around with effects and colors to get textures/temperatures across in my art (especially in sun sprain)

Oh yeah I've def been crafty forever!!! I don't like sticking to one thing / one brand of marker / shit like that. I just have a bunch of random barely-organized supplies (I know where everything is and that's all you need) and I just fuck around and think "oh i could glue holo leather together to make a pendant / i could paint on it with acrylic too / i bet i could use this random plastic thing to make something cool" stuff like that. I found some old jewel cd cases and blank cds in my family's computer hub when I lived with them that nobody had touched in a decade so I started making CD badges out of those!

As much as I adore music and musicians and I'm fascinated by them, I think I'd wanna be a poet or writer if I weren't into drawing (unimaginable o_o). I've tried to get into music-making before but it never really stuck with me, I much prefer to enjoy it and listen to it than try and figure it out. I'm not very musically adept / predisposed and I'm not very patient with learning LOL - I've played instruments before and can read music decently enough (i know what the notes mean n stuff but I'm FAR from looking at a composition and being able to hear it just by looking at the notes - if you took me to a piano and told me to play a C I'd have no idea where to begin) but I'm strictly a music admirer, far from a musician myself. I've been a writer all my life and I'm dabbling into poetry right now and both of those are much more for me! 

Mega evos came from pokemon of course, but also I just enjoy the idea of power-ups / more powerful/fully-realized forms for characters! I love giving things (movie characters, youtubers i like, random people, random stuff, etc) pokemon typing, including my ocs, so I thought it'd be fun to play with those aspects. I give them three types instead of just two cuz ermmm it's COOL!!!!! and that's it u-u <3 but yeah I sometimes don't think too hard on my ocs designs, so it's fun to see where the "natural evolution" of their design / pelt would go after I make them and build lore around them. Mega Sulkowsky was the first one I did, and I just looked at each bit of his pelt and thought "how can I associate this with who he is / what he's all about (rainbows, ice cream, sparkledogness, etc). It's rly fun for me!!

https://open.spotify.com/track/2ldmzcLJvYv4WHPrzGbBgq?si=5ee2b682bc8e42ea listenin 2 this rn (heart of chambers by beach house if u don't have spotify)

man idk!! i just kinda see where to wedge things in together like puzzle pieces, I'm not really sure how else to describe it! I see shapes where there aren't any and can replicate them pretty easily (kinda the opposite of aphantasia - I typically see things very clearly in my head)

The "want art" tag is mostly for my own reminder / ease of finding an oc to ask people to draw for commissions or trades, but you can absolutely use it to your advantage to see who I'm fixatin' on if you wanna draw fanart!! :'-]c I always adore fanart it's so sweet!!!

not a bother at all if u have more Qs!! n.n <3 felt like an interview it was fun!

MAN!!! idk ummm T_T capitalism? bills? GKJHDF the fact that id rather draw than ever go back into retail / I have no other credentials to my name aside from artstuff!!!!!! As for turnaround times i just draw fast, I've been drawing for over 20 years and I guess I've got the hand-eye coordination down lmao!!! >:'-0 <3 as for energy, i just rest / avoid work a lot lmao. if u think i have a schedule or good work ethic i really don't. not under current capitalistic eyes anyway. I love to rest and play and not work and then do a bunch of owed stuff in spurts, i used to try and make rigid schedules but i'd burn out 100% of the time x~x

as for the unique comm types (ur too sweet T_T) when i started getting more serious about doing art full-time i wanted to provide types of stuff that was interesting to make as well as interesting for people to get. i hate committing to one single type of thing for good, that's why my art changes so often and i dont really have one consistent style at any point. I like to think of new ideas that involve challenging myself a bit / playing with materials i'm interested in. I got the idea for bubblegum badges just by seeing that hot pink paper in a joann fabrics and being like omg thatd be fun for bubblegum. and the plushies were made from me wanting to get into plushmaking & also adoring the suzunari pokemon plushline (some of the very first pkmn plushies). I'd be SO BORED if all i did were icons/halfbodies/fullbodies and i think my audience would be too!!! >:-\ i wanna make fun shit u kno!!! u.u <3

nintendo art/graphics (mario, pokemon, zelda, nintendogs, & other stuff like fossil fighters // wii, ds, 3ds, gc, n64) and retro nintendo merch (specifically plushies <3) are a major influence. I'm also big into alternative furry art (gender.98, hournoon, eddy atoms). daltondoodles is a big inspo as well. lots of lil random ppl and places!!! my artist friends too they make me wanna draw so much shit so often

my big sister introduced it to me when I was around 6! knew it only for the anime and cards back when I was younger, soulsilver was my first game

I like pelts that have pictures in them / complex pelts that look like stuff. Anything straying from natural pelt patterns is fun as hell & I always love it!!! I like designing pretty eyes, soft paws, muscles, and cool pelt motifs. My favorites "aesthetics" as of right now are punk/alternative (more of the look of the subculture as opposed to "an aesthetic" - aesthetically i guess right now I'm really into drawing dreamy pelts, purples n blues, cloudy, wispy looks, demonic stuff/kinky stuff). I love canines, mustelids, and weird smooth-looking dragons ALWAYS

literally i just google "___ gif" or for the stimboards "___ stimboard" and pick faves n drop em in!!! theres so much to choose from u.u I don't think I ever go gif-first, but I might find one and be like ooh that's cool, I'll make something with that color scheme/vibe etc, but I don't do that too often! I'm glad u like them, they're fun to make!! i luv my little codeboxes u_u <3