SHADOW OF THE NEON

Last Updated: 9/16/2023

So some of my friends and I went on a another trip to Organism, and, naturally, took a lot of very good photos. (Can I call them photos? I usually say "photos" when referring to pictures I take with my friends in VRChat but I guess they could technically be considered screenshots.)

Neon and Cream watch as the panel of judges determine Chase's fate.
Cream and Neon hang out on a ledge overlooking the floors beneath them.
Cray injects Neon with pink.
Everyone sits at a ice-cold bus stop bench in the winter night.
Cream and Neon take a tiny selfie under a bench.
The gang poses for a photo under a tree.

You probably notice that Neon and I are very small and barely even show up in some of the pics lol. In the third area of the map, near the top of the tower, I managed to get a photo that worked well with the size differences and was even kind of cool??? These couple, in particular, I found very funny and inspiring, where Neon takes a battle stance against the giants who tower over him, Wiru and Cray:

Neon takes a stance to battle the giants standing before him.
Neon takes a stance to battle the giants standing before him.

And so, of course, I had to make a sketch out of it. Which turned into a full piece. I had no idea how to pick colors tho since I do everything in pencil-and-paper and I never thought too deep about color in my texture editing so I required my darling wife's help to figure out the very good colors. Here's a WIP of the piece:

Sketch with incomplete coloring of a drawing of the screenshot.

This turned into something pretty cool in the end!

SHADOW OF THE NEON.

Wallpaper version >:)

SHADOW OF THE NEON WALLPAPER.

I totally stole the idea from spider-verse to use chromatic abberation in place of depth of field to keep things sharp while still drawing focus to the foreground (the base colors help with that too). It took like THREE HOURS or something to get it working though. I had to merge all the background layers into one and then separate them into the red, green, and blue layers so I could move them acccordingly for the effect. Except the layer separation just didn't work?? I followed like 5 different tutorials and tried duplicating the image and colorizing it to red, green, and blue to cheat my way to it but the colorizing it blue was making things purple and red like it wasn't actually replacing the layer??? Finally I got a tutorial that still worked in modern versions of GIMP and made the cool effect for the background. Am I just stupid? Maybe. Guess I'll find out if my tutorial-finding stat has improved next time I need to do chromatic abberation because I've since forgotten how I did it! (╥_╥)

After the first one turned out so well, I did a couple more sketches based on other pics we took that day. This one is taken from a group photo that I made into a piece of Camp in front of tetris blocks, referencing the time he crashed a game on stream by duplicating too many.

A group photo in front of a yellow tile wall.
Camp stands defiantly in front of falling tetris blocks.

I have another sketch and may update this post later but that's all I have for this trip right now!