Got a hankering to do more Rule 34 pics, aka dirty fan art of cartoon characters, so I'm taking suggestions. Let me know what you'd like to see and if you have any specific requests for them!

Two Caveats though:

1. I'm just looking for ideas, so I'm under no obligation to actually do any suggestion.

2. The character(s) must be full adults (18+) in their official source material.

Thanks!

I just started using DeviantArt Subscriptions, which I will start using in place of Patreon.

https://www.deviantart.com/paul-lucas/subscriptions 

I am going to be phasing out using Patreon, though I may keep the account there as a kind of tipping jar if my patrons there want to keep using it for convenience's sake. But I'll also be removing most of my work there (essentially any adult material, which is like 95% of my content there.)

The good news for me and creators like myself is that DA changed the rules of its subscription service, allowing much more adult material as long as it's behind a tiered pay wall. This made the difference for me as it allows my fans to get access to things that will hopefully be worth the few bucks they want to throw my way.

The first Tier is a TIPPING JAR, with a minimum of $1 a month. If you simply want to help out and don't want to spend much, this will hopefully be good for you. 

The second Tier for $3 a month is the PREVIEW TIER, where I'll be posting many of my Works In Progress. This will include not only art sketches, inks, and flat colors, but also first drafts of stories in the works and things like that. If you want to see how the creative sausage is made, this is for you. There will be some adult content, but some mainstream stuff too.

The $5 a month tier is the ADULT CONTENT TIER.  This will include everything in the previous tier as well as stuff exclusive to it. Most of the stuff I posted to Patreon will go here, and will include a lot of XXX-rated material. If enough people start contributing here, I will definitely do more of this kind of work. Stuff here will eventually be posted elsewhere to more adult-friendly sites like Fur Affinity and Newgrounds, but will be exclusive to DA subscribers first anywhere from a month to more than a year, depending on circumstances.

To start with I'm going to be posting art that I wasn't able to post to DA before because of their content restrictions, but will move on to newer original stuff after that.

There will eventually be other tiers. I am planning on a $10 tier that will feature exclusive content that will only ever be available to paying fans, either here or on other pay sites like OnlyFans, which I am planning on looking into. But I don't actually want to start that yet until I get my account there (or wherever I end up) running too so I can post to them simultaneously to avoid some hassle.

Beyond that I'll have to see. if there's more beyond that it will depend on how this endeavor goes. Plus I am still planning on posting to regular old DeviantArt like I always have been.

So check it out if you want. Plus I'm more than happy to hear suggestions for things you might want to see in the paid tiers. Thanks! = )

Joined the social media network Mastodon. You can find me here:

https://mastodon.social/home

@plucas1@mastodon.social

I'll follow back any follows, and it will give you a a social media alternative to following my stuff and updates that doesn't depend on how much of a fascist dbag Musk Melon is feeling on a particular day. Plus I've been seeing some great creatives on there I'll boost and link to when I can! = )

Mastodon is decentralized, and is spread out over dozens (hundreds?) of servers worldwide. Mastodon.social is the one that I believe has the most interconnection with other servers, but even if you are on a server not directly connected to it, supposedly I can still follow you and vice versa as long as we exchange direct follow links.

Anyway, I am liking things on Mastodon so far, much mellower and friendlier than Twitter nowadays. Even if you don't follow me you should still give it a shot if you'd like.

So I'm thinking of dumping Patreon for a better service. Patreon is starting to get pissy about invasive ID verification that I'm very ambivalent about.

For those unaware, Mastercard has imposed BS restrictions where creators of adult material on services that use Mastercard has to submit photos of BOTH government-issued ID and a selfie for facial recognition software. This is complete unnecessary. Sites like Patreon already have my tax info and my bank info, both of which I have to be 18+ to even possess, so what is the point of this extra step? If that info is good enough for the IRS and banking institutions to verify my age and ID, it should be good enough for them.  I have the feeling this is a lot less about "protecting minors" and a lot more about dipshit company executives buying into Fox News' moral panic du jour, and/or a scam to harvest more invasive personal data for company profit.

So I'm looking into similar services that will allow adult material without the invasive ID requirements (like DeviantArt subscriptions) or, if I do have to undergo a similar process, at least it would be with a service that will allow a lot more creative freedom, like Fanvue or OnlyFans. Not that I'm planning on drawing wall to wall orgies or anything (though that would probably get me a lot more subscribers, lol) but having the option to dip into more X-rated material once in a while would be nice.

If anyone has any opinions on this or what service alternatives I can use, please let me know. Thanks!

Two days ago I had to put my cat to sleep. She was never supposed to be my cat, but I looked after and loved her just the same. She was almost 15 years old, as close as we could tell.

Her name was Gary, or Miss Gary, sometimes. A long-hair calico, and quite a pretty cat. My nephew named her way back when he was seven and really into Spongebob at the time. She was a stray discovered in my parents' neighbor's garage after having her first litter of kittens. After a few months, and after her kittens were given away to good homes, my parents took her in. My mother was allergic, though, so Miss Gary became a porch cat. They set up a shelter for her on their decent-sized porch, took her to the vet to spay her, and gave her food and water every day. During cold days, she's go into the crawl space under the house and hung out in the furnace-heated cellar, but that was rare and she by far preferred to be outside whenever she could. The porch became her forever home.

When I moved back to my aging parents' hometown to help take care of them, I eventually ended up taking care of Gary as well after a while, especially after my father passed. At the time she was a very shy cat. Not mean by any measure, but her status as a stray made her very suspicious of people. It took her a while to warm up to me, but once she did she was very affectionate. Almost every time I'd come to the house, she would be right at the curb to greet me, wanting pets, purring and bonking her head on my leg when I'd scritch her just the way she wanted.

Gary was a good mouser, especially when younger. I don't think she ever caught a bird (though I did see her try) but she helped keep the yard free of rodents and bugs as she could. She began opening up to other people, making a friend of some of the neighbors and especially the mailman, eating up his pets whenever he passed by. She's make a nest in the shrubbery in the front and sleep away hot summer days in the shade. Miss Gary did get lost once for three months, thanks to my rather not-so-bright sister, but thankfully we got her back eventually without any harm to her. She was napping happily in her old spots within the day.

The last year, though, she began to wear down. She didn't groom herself so much, and I had to check in on her a lot more besides just feeding and petting her every day. She developed a tumor, but in the end there was nothing we could do for her. She was purring as I pet her right until the sedative the vet gave her began to kick in, and I stayed with her to the very end while he gave her the last shot.

Gary was the epitome of a good, sweet cat, and she will be missed.

I just joined the new art archive site Inkblot. Link:

https://inkblot.art/profile/paul-lucas

The site came up in a thread on Twitter on where to post art now that Twitter is starting to circle the drain thanks to its new Chief Trump Cultist, Elon Musk, and I thought I'd give it a try. It's relatively new, and full disclosure, it is still a bit buggy in places, but I think it has potential.

I'll be loading up a lot of my old artwork there slowly (like one a day) along with newer pieces as I get them done. Hopefully it will prove worth it in the long term. i wouldn't mind another quality artist-friendly community online.

Just found out I have COVId 19, and have had it for at least 2 days. Nothing really awful so far, just a fever for a few hours and then an ongoing runny nose. Feels like a few bouts of food poisoining I've had over the years, and in fact that's what I thought it was at first. Gonna make an appointment with the doc but otherwise I have to isolate myself for about 10 days. Whatever shall a grumpy introvert do? Guess I'll write and draw and play video games as much as I can. Oh, the horror....

I’ve had to take a break from creative stuff for nearly a week because of the pain from an infected tooth, but it’s now being treated and will be yanked at the end of the month. So to help me get back into my writing groove I thought I’d spit out some quick thoughts on some recent animations I’ve had a chance to watch.

Even before my recent bout with oral tragedies, I hadn’t been watching much of anything new, animated or otherwise. Just wasn’t in that mood, I guess. Lately I’ve much rather be listening to music or playing Don’t Starve with what free time I have, but I have managed to squeeze in some stuff here and there.

TURNING RED

Let me start off by saying that the idiots — and I mean IDIOTS — who were condemning this movie before they even saw it, or were so desperate for criticism that they resorted to its lack of mentioning 9/11 as a condemnation, deserve all the derision they got and so much more. It’s okay to not like a movie, and there are all kinds of reasons why you may not. But to attack it for such transparently dumb bullshit because you have some petty political agenda to push is pretty inexcusable.

But that aside, this turned out to be a thoroughly well-crafted and entertaining movie. What I thought might be a simplistic furry take on the Hulk actually turned out to be a charming, moving, and very funny tale of generational trauma and the pains of growing up. Meilin Lee, a 13-year-old girl in Toronto, finds out that at a certain age the females of her family gain the ability to turn back and forth into giant super-strong red pandas. But before she can sign up for the Avengers, she also learns that the transformation is triggered by any strong emotion, very bad news indeed for a pubescent girl crushing on boys and fangirling over the pop band 4*TOWN.

This sets her on a collision course with her loving but overprotective and controlling mother Ming, who had issues with the panda herself. The heart of the film is about mothers and daughters, and about Mei and Ming’s relationship in particular. Both the ups and downs are handled well and believably even given the fantasy elements present. The film is based heavily on director Domee Shi's’ own childhood in Toronto in 2002, and the verisimilitude that brings really shows.

Some people don’t like the film’s use of the CalArts style of character design, but that approach’s dynamic simplicity is put to good effect here especially for the humor and visual expressiveness of the characters. I especially liked Mei’s group of surprisingly supportive and positive friends, and of course the doofy but quiet and capable dad. All of them had a lot of their nuanced personalities conveyed through visuals as much as through the dialog. The film’s climax at the concert also turned out to be surprisingly epic as well. TURNING RED is definitely worth a watch if you haven’t seen it yet.

HILDA AND THE MOUNTAIN KING

And here we have another girl about the same age as Mei, but dealing with an even more traumatic involuntary transformation. This movie is a capper to the first two seasons of the superlative HILDA series, and I think might have been intended as a series finale before the upcoming third season was approved.

The HILDA series follows the exploits of an eleven-year-old girl and self-proclaimed ‘adventurer.’ It’s set in a pastiche of the modern world and various elements of (loosely interpreted) scandinavian mythology, where dealing with trolls and elves and such can be an everyday occurence.

In the movie, Hilda wakes up in the body of a troll in the middle of troll homeland inside the mountain. Suddenly able to talk and understand them, she learns a devastating secret hidden in her hometown of the human-inhabited Trollberg. She has to race to head off a potential war between the two races before disaster strikes while trying to find a way to turn back human as well.

This movie is an absolute banger and fires on all cylinders. Story, character, animation, production, quality world-building, and more. The only negative is that some parts of the story might be hard to follow for those who haven’t seen the series or read the books. All of the secondary characters get a chance to shine as well, especially Johanna, Hilda’s mum, who we saw in the season 2 finale is not afraid to fight trolls head-on for her daughter, and shows equal courage and tenacity here in her quest to get Hilda back. This is even more of a must-see than TURNING RED, especially if you’ve watched the series as well.

THE LEGEND OF VOX MACHINA

This is a 12-episode animated series on Amazon Prime based on a Critical Role campaign. For those unaware, Critical Role is an online D&D group that livestreams their sessions. Even though I love playing TTRPGs, I find watching other groups play deathly boring. But since CR’s DM and players are composed of voice actors and the like, they can be fairly entertaining and have helped them become pretty popular.

This animated series began as a kickstarter. They originally intended to raise enough to make a ten-minute animated short, but the kickstarter raised so much (like $12 Million) that they were able to turn it into a full-length season of half-hour shows.

I enjoyed the series a lot, but I will also admit that it can be a mixed bag. On one hand, there are a lot of interesting characters and situations. I especially like Percy the gun-wielding Warlock and the adorkable druid Kayleth. It was also neat to see a lot of the elements in the game brought to life through narrative and visuals instead of dry game mechanics. There are whole vids on Youtube that breaks down each episode into what spells/magic/skills/saving throws from the game are used when.

But the individual episodes were also very uneven. The first two were kind of merely serviceable as introductions into the characters, and some character arcs in the latter Briarwood storyline were spotty and all over the place. You can really see a stark contrast between looser RPG-generated stories here and actually tightly-crafted narratives in other fantasy series, such as say RISING OF THE SHIELD HERO. RPG play is by necessity decentralized and chaotic while fictional storycrafting tends to be tightly focused and carefully constructed. Transferring one to the other doesn’t always work well. For example, the whole long sequence in one episode where the group deals with a room filling with acid could have been a fun and exciting encounter in a game, but as a narrative story element it mostly came across as dumb and unnecessary filler.

VOX MACHINA may be a worth a watch if you’re a fan of TTRPGs, D&D, or Critical Role. But as a purely fantasy narrative on its own it’s merely okay and doesn’t reach the heights of other top-quality fantasy series that have come out in the last decade or so. It is an enjoyable series but may not be everyone’s cup of tea.

NINJA SEX PARTY

I admit I’m late to the party — Ninja Sex Party, that is. Even though this band’s been around for 10+ years, I only ran across them recently. But better late than never.

NSP is a comedic rock group made of singer Dan Avidan and keyboardist Brian Wecht, whose stage alter-egos consist of Danny Sexbang, a doofy glam rocker, and Ninja Brian, a dour murdery ninja, respectively. They’re also part of the group Starbomb, frequently collaborate with TWRP, and Dan is co-host of the Game Grumps let’s play channel.

Despite the group’s comedic bent, they create some seriously awesome music as well. I’m talking about them here because in the last five years or so they have created some really outstanding animated music videos, all of which can be found on Youtube.

Probably their best both musically and animation-wise is STARLIGHT BRIGADE, which is a TWRP song they contributed to. The song is great and the animation is no less than stunning. There’s no other way to describe it other than simply epic. That video did Star Wars better in four minutes than the last four Star Wars movies did in 10+ hours.

Other notable animated videos include but are not limited to THE MYSTIC CRYSTAL (an 11-minute rock opera whose animated sequences are done in the style of Don Bluth’s DRAGON LAIR,) 6969 (a fun claymation epic where they time-travel to the future to rescue sex — lol really,) and MANSION PARTY (which is pure hilarious chaos.) Definitely worth a watch.

Been a while since I've done one of these. As some may already know, I am a big animation buff, and once in a while I give my thoughts on recent animation projects I may have seen. So here goes!

ENCANTO

The most recent animated feature offering from Disney, released to streaming right on Christmas Eve.

The family of a tragic matriarch in Columbia is blessed with magic, except for one granddaughter, Mirabel, who is just a normal human. Despite earning the disdain from a good portion of her family, Mirabel seems to be the one to save the family 'miracle' or may doom them all.

This movie is a pure delight. It an animated movie from Disney with songs by Lin Manuel Miranda. How could that go wrong? Visually, it's just stunning, with a bright and brilliant color palette, super-fluid quality animation, and lots of amazing visual designs and staging. In terms of sheer spectacle this is Disney animation at the top of its form.

Storywise it's also very strong, but maybe not at the level or emotional depth of say something like Coco or Wolfwalkers. I don't think it's designed to be, given how fluidly non-diegetic a lot of the singing and dancing numbers are. There's always a trade off with doing that. On one hand, it allows you to stage some amazing visual and audial spectacles that can wow the audience. On the other, doing so tends to lose a good portion of the verisimilitude, which can take away form a potential emotional impact. But I think it was tending more toward the lighter end of the emotional storytelling spectrum, and succeeds in still telling a compelling story. Definitely worth seeing.

And we don't talk about Bruno!

DOGS IN SPACE

A great little surprise that seemed to come out of nowhere from Netflix, this is a ten-episode comedy series about, well, Dogs in space. The backstory is that Earth is dying from environmental neglect, so scientists genetically modified a few hundred dogs to be human-like and sent them into space in a town-sized starship to explore and seek out a new home for Earth's creatures. The series focuses around the usual band of sad-sack misfits who must figure out how to work together as a crew on one of the explorer subcraft.

Do you like light scifi adventure, a new spin on the Star Trek formula, and lots and lots of dog-based puns? Then you'll like Dogs In Space. The humor is usually not belly-busting, but each episode did leave me smiling throughout. The characters are quirky and actually very likable, even the kind-of villains, and you do feel for them. Apparently all the dogs were pets at one point, and even after a few years on the ship they still very much love their human owners and miss them dearly. This leads to some poignant plot lines among the hijinx, particularly since they haven't heard from Earth in all that time. Here's hoping we see a second season, as this series definitely deserves to keep going.

STAR TREK PRODIGY

Speaking of a new spin on the Star Trek formula, we have this new animated half-hour Star Trek series aimed squarely at a younger crowd, airing on Nickelodeon. Teen-age prisoners from a diverse number of species are trapped on a slave colony in an unknown section of the galaxy. An opportunity for escape comes when they stumble upon the apparently abandoned Federation starship the USS Protostar buried in a cave. A harrowing chase ensues across light years as they're hunted by their former captors.

This is as major a departure from the usual Star Trek fare as Lower Decks was, but in a completely different way. In fact, in many ways, it feels more like a Star Wars animated series than a Star Trek show, but given the show's quality so far that's not a bad thing. In fact, the central premise seems to be, 'what if Star Wars characters discovered a Star Trek ship?' And it is interesting seeing that instead of a Federation crew chasing after a MacGuffin, the Federation actually IS the MacGuffin here, as the kids try to figure out this alien, ultra-tech ship while fleeing for their lives, with the vague promise of the Federation, out there somewhere, that may provide them with a safe haven.

Visually, it's very well done, with good but not spectacular digital animation. Some of the visual designs seem a little off, and the fluidity is a bit janky in some action scenes. But it's mostly a great series to look at.

Only five episodes are currently available, with the other five of the first season coming after the first of the year in 2022. Here's hoping it keeps up the quality, and doesn't fall into the abysmal storytelling traps that Star Trek Discovery did.

OLIVE THE OTHER REINDEER

I try to watch this once a year around Christmas time. It is one of the great underrated TV Christmas specials, based on a children's book by J. Otto Seibold and first premiering in 1999. The story is that Olive, a dog with a heart of gold (is there any other kind though, really?) mishears Santa say he needs 'all of' the other reindeer when one of his sleigh-pullers breaks a leg. So she's off on an odyssey to the North Pole to fill in and save Christmas.

This cartoon gushes with pure whimsy and charm. There's puns everywhere, with great humor with the noble Olive and her shyster penguin companion Martini, as they meet very colorful characters on the way to the North Pole and try to foil a comically villainous mailman. It's just great stuff. But what people most remember about this special is its visual style, with greatly abstracted character designs that look like the love children of Picasso and Dr. Seuss. But in a good way! It has some of the stiffness one would expect of computer animation from the late-90s, but the visual designs are so stylized that for the most part it works well for the story even today.

The special is available freely on Youtube the last I checked, and probably elsewhere. Hope you check it out!

It's been about a month, so I think it's safe for me to say that may Patreon Page is active again, with me posting stuff there fairly consistently. Check it out! My patron tiers are super cheap! Kind of like me! =p

https://www.patreon.com/paullucas

I'm super grateful for the patrons who have been supporting my work through the site all along regardless of whether I posted stuff there or not. All that art and writing I do that people seem to like is thanks in no small part to them. It's part of the reason why I want to give them some more exclusive content when I can.

My basic plan at the moment is that the Patreon Page will mostly be home to sketches and inked pics plus story excerpts from WIP, as well as some exclusive color pics that will premiere there first about a month before I do the same on mainstream sites like DeviantArt or Twitter. There will be exceptions of course, and I'll just play things by ear.

Thanks!