In May 2023 I participated in an exciting art project which went in my city. It was a contemporary art exhibition and surprisingly its curator loved my 18+ furry stuff and said it'd fit her project's concept very well and she'd like if I create an art piece with a similar idea with only condition: it shouldn't be gay and openly sexual. She is an open-minded person but she was afraid that people who live in my city are not progressive enough to be the same so it's better to be more careful. I was happy to get such a chance even with no gay condition and created a pretty epic thing which I still can't post though because I need to take a really good picture of it (not so good home photo of it was posted on my Twitter: https://twitter.com/BRacoondog/stat.....617089/photo/2), for now all I can share here is a digital concept which was like a draft version of the final physical piece.
It was the first time when I finally decided to create my own OCs instead of drawing R34 with existing media characters, ideas were floating in my head for a long time but I didn't have enough motivation to let them out. Well, this exhibition was a good chance for these ideas. In fact, I wanted to make a decorative portrait of one particular OC which was supposed to be an embodiment of everything I love about 80-90s style, generally Memphis, you know, simple geometric shapes and pastel colors kind of thing. Also this character should have impersonate the image of the most perfect the most wackiest and at the same time sexiest character according to my tastes. But while drawing him I felt so hyped and inspired that I drew whole 6 personal characters instead of 1.
These concepts are random, it all was mainly about playing with shape and color combinations which became characters, there's no backstory for them and they didn't even have names for a long time, except this cyan dog in a top right corner, he is that initial character which I wanted to draw and I knew how to name him long time before I drew him. His name is Zed Vector, kind of a reference to z axis and vector lines since initially he was supposed to be a CGI 3D creature, I expected his first depiction to be a 3D model but it takes forever to me to finally get back to modeling in Blender for me, so simple digital art was ahead of it.
Three more characters which I loved the most got their names few months later. Blue cat was called Kit Nightly, purple wolf in a green hat was called Jack Tallhead and dalmatian guy was called Mark Spothound. Yeah, some quirky witty names, typical corny stuff from 90s I love a lot to be honest. The rest two guys are nice too but still I didn't love them that much to give them names and think about drawing them again.
This work was very liberating for me, all these years I was doing almost nothing but just realistic pencil art. Sure thing it was enough to make me quite happy but still I wanted to try something else. I'm a big lover of 80-90s art style but the thing is this style was pretty much about simplicity and being bold while my art was very classic and traditional which doesn't really fit these criteria, so even when I was drawing straightforwardly 80-90s themed art something always felt off for me. Now it was the first time when I did something simple styled enough to call it more authentically 80s and I was very happy with that result. It opened me the way to many new inspiring ideas I drew with them later this year, mainly in pixel art, I'm not posting it all for now just because I'm a lazy ass and also I prefer to keep my pixel art Patreon-exclusive for few months and post it only after it gets old enough.