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Drawing beyond the pandemic

By komicer, 7 Sep 2020

Drawing beyond the pandemic

By komicer, 7 Sep 2020

Before you know it, it has been more than half a year since the start of the pandemic. So many things happened and at the same time, nothing happened.

The pandemic internship

We took in an intern, Ariel from Singapore Polytechnic during these period. Her internship had been agreed upon before the pandemic and it ended up as quite an odd experience. Due to the current WFH policy, her entire internship was done remotely without any direct contact with the senior artists. She had done decently well and even got the opportunity to do a full commissioned illustration for a podcast. That was essentially the final exam for her!

However, a conclusion we came up with after she was done with the internship was that… a remote internship just doesn’t really cut it. In the end of the day, you just cannot replace the face-to-face interaction! As such, CDS will not be taking in new interns until further notice.

Business not-as-usual

The economic climate is not optimistic and there has been plenty of doom and gloom from businesses. Let alone, we are not considered an essential service. However, CDS won’t be throwing in the towel just yet. There are still illustration work coming in for us and as an artist studio, we will continue to do those.

Animal World War

Animal World War has been a project that we quite liked. Picking up from his experience drawing the Nashis for Files for Everybody, GSong did a number of war-time furry artworks for this game. The final artworks turned out to be quite good and we had a really good feeling about it.

While the Kickstarter didn’t succeed (it was SO CLOSE) this time, we are sure that there will be a round 2. At the same time, taking our experience with drawing furries… it seemed logical to dip our paws into the furry market. Presenting… our Furaffirnity account! It’s really bare bones at the moment but as we end up doing more furry art, we’ll post it over there! Perhaps we should even start doing some random adoptables once in a while…

Colorpedia

While it wasn’t our main cup of tea, writing tutorials isn’t unfamiliar to us since we have written a few for ImagineFX before. In a way, we have been a little reluctant to go into the more educational side of things. Even though we are aware of ‘conducting classes’ as a source of revenue. Actually teaching just isn’t what we want to do.

However, writing tutorials is a decent compromise between creating teaching materials and not-facing-people. When an opportunity came about for us to create some written tutorials, we decided to take it up. Poopiepuff handled most of the writing though we had a freelancer (Ian) helped us too.

It’s actually quite a bit of work but at the same time, we can generate some interesting new characters or assets for the team. Just look at this beautiful tentacle. The background actually came from Carrotia’s cover art.

After this experience, I think that we’ll probably be interested in doing more written tutorials for magazines or online publications. If it pays the bill, why not?!

Yaoi Crate

Our usual followers probably don’t normally associate Collateral Damage Studios and BL together. But aha! Did you forget that we once had a Black Label wing that released Hetalia doujins?

So when an opportunity came about to design a mascot for Yaoi Crate, we leapt. We have done plenty of mascots before but one for the BL fujoshis? This is a first and we want that.

Haruki was designed by Setsuri and we are really glad that he turned out quite popular. Popular enough to even get fanart!

What a boss. He’s definitely a seme.

So our BL experiment turned out better than expected and with this new found confidence, I’ll definitely like to get more opportunities for CDS to do BL-oriented artworks.

Lake Coloring

You can probably tell that there’s a certain thread going through this blog post. To survive, we are going into new directions and taking up projects that we would not normally be associated with. CDS is best known as an anime illustration studio but going forward, there might be less anime and more illustration.

I think that us casting a wider net on what we can offer can allow us to get work outside of our usual sources. That said, our core strength will always be anime (whether we like it or not!)

Here, we have a newly announced project from Desti. While she has done two colouring books (and a third internal one) under CDS, this is one that is definitely not anime-ish.

As she said in her interview with Lake Coloring,

I realised, your art is greatly marked by the anime culture and fierce female characters, but for Lake, you picked a totally different approach. Why is that?

When given the opportunity to draw for Lake Coloring, I considered how I can create something more fitting with the existing artworks already within the app. I wanted to create something that will be easy and fun for beginners to start trying their hands at coloring.

So to that end, we created a world of cute critters living a Sylvanian world with oddly sexy hedgehog (not Sonic) or a witchy owl. Beyond just , we think that it can potentially be quite suitable for children books too!

Reaching out to new grounds

It has been something that I’ve been interested in for a long time but with the onslaught of the pandemic, expanding into new genres of work has taken a new urgency for the team. While it is unlikely that the classic-anime-look will be dethroned as CDS’ defining art direction, we cannot afford to be defined only by that.

Furry art. Western comics. Children books. Horror. How-to-draw tutorials. We will slowly try to get a slice of that pie somehow. Of course, we’ll also try to give everything a little ‘CDS’ touch.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we’ll totally get out of anime. Anime art will still be the core of our works. Despite all the non-anime works shown so far, we’ve also got plenty of anime art that was unveiled recently.

Having come so far, we are really grateful to all our friends who have supported us and given us the opportunity to flex our illustration muscles. ! To you all, thank you for the commission and the review.

If you happen to chance upon our blog through a random Google search and you need some artworks done, just contact us! What are you waiting for? Our professional team of artists and illustrators will be happy to hear you lay down your vision and guide you through with our visuals.

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