Nothing Gold Can Stay - Phoebe's Facelift!

Some of you may have been wondering, "dang where are those Nothing Gold updates? Isn't that one supposed to update once a week?" For some behind-the-scenes of what's been going on, I've been sitting on some sketches for upcoming pages and generally just... dreading them, a bit. As much as I like Phoebe's initial design, I was suffering a sort of "death-by-a-thousand-papercuts" effect due to how many aspects there were to it. With elements of her design such as the prongs on her antlers, the angles of her face shape, layers of feathers on her wings, toe markings, and the literal fluff on many of her joints all competing for attention... it just made for a lot of bits that could quickly get lost between sketching, lining, and coloring. I bet you didn't even notice the one time I forgot to give her ears because they were lost in her design constantly.

(This was edited after public release lmao)

 I think this is especially evident when comparing a typical sketch involving Phoebe with a panel from OBT:

One of my goals for Nothing Gold is to have slightly more complex character designs, but the sheer busy-ness of Phoebe's design just didn't translate super well into comic form. All of the tweaks made in this new design have actually streamlined the process exponentially. One might think that these pages took me weeks to put together- but the reality is the edits were all done in under 24 hours (just ask stream chat)! Drawing pages with Phoebe on them used to take a day of work alone just to line- let alone sketching or coloring. It's much easier to parse these little changes in a sketch, and I hope it makes for a cleaner reading experience, too.

... And now to ramble about the other benefit for this redesign! In changing Phoebe's design, I've also tweaked the concept overall for the species of dragon she belongs to. Many current Nothing Gold dragons follow a design philosophy of "animal type with a fantastical spin"- such as this little guy called the Meowllusk dragon!

Where before Phoebe's species (which will soon be revealed as something called Coroknight... unless I change that before release) was just generally kind-of-mammals-but-generally-dragon-shaped-but-they-have-big-antlers, they now lean more towards goats and sheep with antlers that temporarily "grow" when using strong combat magic. And some varieties might need occasional shearing- I just think it's a cute idea haha

So yeah, that's my little ramble! The edited pages are included in this post so you can peek at what's changed, and work on the comic will be resuming shortly- along with a couple of doodles I did while working on things hehe