Every now and again, the Little Troubles team organizes a gift exchange for participating artists. It works just like a secret santa, and this time it was themed around Summer vacation. We each submitted our Summer experiences, past or current, which acted as the prompt for the art we'd get from our assigned artists. That art would then be made into cards to be printed as part of the game's set.

You can see more about the game over at littletroubles.com.

My assigned recipient was Plant Panda, whose prompt talked about the deserts near their parents house that they loved to explore, enjoying the plant life found there. I decided to play with the idea of a literal "Baby Saguaro," which poor little Plant fell afoul of just because of their curiosity.

As I later found out, they seem to have a knack for getting pricked by the cacti they care for, so the pieces were truer to life than I was expecting.

It also turned out that some other artists had to drop out of the exchange, which left Melly Moona without anyone to make their gift art. Basil kindly offered a bounty for someone to fill the gap, and not wanting to leave her with nothing, I went for it.

Her Summer experience was a long road trip, where she got to stay in and see various places. Seemed to make sense to me that long stretches of road would cause anxiety for someone who might struggle with potty breaks, which led to this idea.

She said that this is how she looks during car rides, so I'll definitely chalk this one up as a win as well.

And here's the set I got! BottleBear treated me and Garnet to an absolutely precious set of scenes that about perfectly summed up my experiences lately. I submitted Garnet's reference sheet along with my request because she was involved in many of my adventures this Summer, but I expected (and specified) that her inclusion was optional, and only nice-to-have.

Either way - and needless to say - I was extremely happy with what Bottle cooked up for us, and it gave us lots of cozy, sweet feelings to enjoy together. I especially enjoyed how he played with my bun-to-pup transition in both illustrations, and love how adorable I look snuggled up to her.

These were posted with permission, and you can find BottleBear over on SubscribeStar as well as many other places besides. Please do check him out.

For my participation in the first two sets of Little Troubles, I got to join a self insert regression piece for the third set, Roll for Regression.

Several other artists contributed art of their own characters as part of a before-and-after adventuring scene, and for mine it made perfect sense to include Chocolate as an Illusionist Sorcerer. As part of the design process, I based the adult armor and staff off of actual items from Guild Wars to start with; then infantilised the kit for the second part, which was a lot of fun. The way the illusion special effects turned out inspired what her class would be after being regressed, which I just made up.

From Femme Fatale Mesmer; to Padded Little Bubblemancer.

They might look fairly harmless next to the mind magic, but even so I wouldn't let those bubbles get too close.

You know, just in case.

A couple of weekends ago, I took a bunch of quick-fire commissions in lieu of the work I would've gotten had I been able to attend CFz. Here's a collection of the sfw commissions I got done at the start of the session.

Nik and Ink (happily and coincidentally acronyms of one another) both asked me for something casual and/or relaxed for their commissions. That meant two very different things for both of them, so while I went for a fairly commonplace, albeit tailor-made scene with Nik, Ink's predilections demanded something perhaps a little more... Unique.

Sigma asked me to make a gift for their partner and a friend of theirs who's been supplying them with loads of baking recipes to keep them entertained during the lockdown. They then asked me to add another fun little reference cause that's exactly what their partner would do in the situation.

Earlier this week, I finally took the plunge back into working on my own original content. Unsurprisingly, it involved a good amount of padding.

Following some buzz surrounding the new Ratchet and Clank game, I just had to get my grubby mitts on the new lombax character revealed in the trailer shown a little while back.

The character looks decidedly feminine, but they possess a tail; and according to prior games and the series' wiki, only male lombaxes have tails. After some theory-crafting, and the lead designers neither confirming nor denying them being trans after questioning, I figured I'd run with it and have some fun.

The next target was from an older game, called "Dillon's Dead-Heat Breakers." This is Penny, a cute, sleepy-eyed wolf who runs an arcade. Much like any gamer who takes her hobby seriously, she'll take any fair advantage she can get. She's certainly not bashful about it!

I don't think I've felt as driven to draw something (ha) that popped into my head as I did tonight - I started work on this just about an hour and a half ago, and I knew I had to share it as soon as I was done.

Huge shout-out to Deex aka DrBagPhD for linking me to the absolute banger that inspired this piece. Gotta love my lanky boy Waluigi.

That was so much fun.