They oughta call me GrayOffHoliday the way I be missing these deadlines 🙏

Happy Halloween n’ all that 🎃

and only a whole month late too!

You wouldn't think a 10 page poem about a stick figure child would have so much concept art behind it but the style I fleshed out was so fun for me to draw I ended up making a ton of it. Overall from concept to final Gertrude took about 2 weeks on and off, for the longest time I've wanted to do something in a Burtony stick-figure style so when I finally started doodling designs I liked I really went in on drawing.

Starting off we got a series of initial doodles from mid march, I think a day or two before I got images with dates on 'em.

Here's the very first Gert complete with a lankier build, rounder shapes and ears

Surrounding her are some drawings of some unused doodle monsters and what would end up becoming Dracula in the final thing.

Afterward I refined Gertrude a little more, pretty much close to the final thing but still on the taller side and was still rather rounded. As you can see Party Hat McMonster Man McGeeson is now Dracula and I've explored a background style for her bedroom.

Then I just went to town on monster designs, most of them I wish I'd have used in the final thing 'cus we got some cool lookin weirdos here. As you can see I initially envisioned them to be meaner looking but this was before Marty and his posse came to mind. What I had planned initially, idk, I just wanted to draw some crude doodle monsters. I really like the Fly-Man in particular.

Gertrude is almost final but this was right before I started coming up with some rules for her expressions. In the final thing I'd avoid round shapes as much as possible, going for pointy squiggles and triangles an such, with no tongue either to further simplify the design. I usually despise watering down a design and simplifying it but in the case of Gertrude I really wanted to hone in on making it look like school doodles a pissy middle schooler would draw in the margins of their notebook. I also explored some stick figure hand poses, as well as a logo for the title, opting to cut out the "lil'" 'cus it sounds stupid. Gertrude's name itself has actually been well established before even her design was, I just thought it would be funny to give a cute little kid design such a crotchety old hag name, so this entire project was pretty much sparked from "...Heh."

(Dated March 15th)

Here we got an early look for the house. The house is no different but the cliff is way less crooked lookin' which is is a no-no for expressionist styles.

(Dated March 16th)

Once I went digital I started honing in on making everything look bold and sketchy. Here I started exploring the Marty side of things, designed a couple monsters, and started making designs for Gertrude's very well kept and mentally sound mother.

(Dated March 17th)

Nothing much to say about this one, I just wanted to try out the vignette thing going on in the final "book". as well as try out the font. I feel the vignette adds to the scrappy look I wanted to go for and makes the panels appear more isolated, so while writing wise I don't think I handled my themes as well as I wanted, I feel like I got something going on visually.

(Dated March 18th)

Here we have a near-final design for the Mother next to Gert for size comparison. Looking back she's definitely more disheveled looking, with her hair to the sides of her head and being more hunched. I don't know where in the process she became more upright but I'll admit there has more of a silhouette going on here. A victim of the-clean up process I suppose

Here we have a layout for her bedroom which served zero importance or purpose for the final thing. Got a little too into building up this world, but hey maybe for the future...?

(Dated March 18th)

Here's a mockup for the cover art, final logo is pretty much untouched while Gertrude herself got way more of a makeover. I know I want the style to be crude but this was a bit *too* much so for a cover. This was before artwork began on the story itself anyway, the final cover was made after all that was done.

(Dated March 23rd)

I was in the middle of writing out the final story when I realized I didn't have a design for the Ghoul. I went and did this and when the time came to draw him in the final thing he still got a facelift to make him more goofy looking than he already was. He ended up being my favorite of the monster designs and the one I find myself doodling most often when bored.

Doodled out some of Marty's friends to finalize their art style with Gertrude in the center to highlight the shift in said style and tone. Final dudes were way more abstract and less overtly gruesome than Mr. Man on the left there which I'm happy with.

And here we have kind of an abridged version of one of the final panels in the story, just wanted to get more of a feel for Marty's lovely friends.

(Dated March 25th)

I'll be honest I'm as perplexed as she is because I don't remember why I drew this. Could have just been for fun.

(Dated March 28th)

I believe by this point I was finally sketching out the story itself. I wanted to get some more Marty friends in there, though what the purpose of the left drawing is, I can't remember. It does look cool though.

Everything after here's pretty much history, though months later I did some doodles with an *actual* pen that I quite liked so here's those:

(Dated June 26th)

Overall I'm probably way more attached to this silly little poem than I should be, the writing isn't what it strives to be and it's very short, but I'm really happy with the world I created and the fun little friends I've made for our imaginative young family here. A lot of work went into it, though most of it was unnecessary, but that goes to show how much fun it was to create this tiny project. I've made and worked on many things in the past but It's mostly been fan projects, this is special in that It's the first original thing I've started and finished that I can call my own.

Shoutout to Doug TenNapel (MANY things I enjoy), Don Hertzfeldt (World of Tomorrow among other things), Amy Winfrey (Making Fiends), Lewis Trondheim (Kaput and Zosky, an obscure little show with a charming crude style going for it) and Jhonen Vasquez (Obvious) for their work that's given me much inspiration for this project here. There's way more inspiration that went into this than just Burton and the notable works of these people really molded what I've wanted to bring into fruition since I was a teen. I'd like to come back to this in some capacity someday but that's going to have to come to me. Meanwhile, I'm really glad that at the time of posting this Gertrude is the third most viewed piece in my log, it's quite a feat for something that doesn't ride off the coat tails of another franchise. Thanks for that, and Happy Halloween.

Don't mean to milk this thing but you'd be surprised at how much went into this little not-even minute of animation

Had to conceptualize stuff as I went on, it was a bit of a pisstake going in. I randomly recorded Wilfre's dialogue from before the final boss and went "I should animate this" on a whim. Most people interpret Wilfre's staff as a ruby due to Heather's pendent or a flame due to how it animates. According to wiki and context, it's a brush but I still took inspiration from the Eternal Flame because the funny swirl just works with the style. I added the stripes in some attempt to make it look more like bristles. It's a simple look but I'm pretty happy with the interpretation.

I went and referenced and drew the whole window shattered in wilfre's lair so I knew exactly what I was coloring in. Was good for lazy me down the road 'cus I just copied the drawing on the left and skewed it to where it needed to be. Cheating but free consistency.

References for Yan's TNC Wilfre were rather limited but the design is so simple that it wasn't very hard to wing. The arrow jazz you see are patterns to help me grasp how the hell I was gonna animate Wilfre's shadowy effect and later the stripes that go down his face when he charges up. In the game when he charged up his smoke effect got more violent and he started flashing like so:

I wasn't about to deviate from the pattern I had set so I decided to get a little creative.

I made this gif when testing out how I was gonna do an effect that evokes the same idea but was easier for my smooth brain to animate. I took inspiration from a really quick animation Mari does in the opening FMV of TNC where she gets glowy (not shown in the raw animation) and she gets scratchy looking shading which doesn't show up in the FMV due to the compression and bloom added to the rendering. I thought about Wilfre flashing in the charge setup but he wasn't on screen long enough for it to be gradual and I didn't want him to start flashing immediately because I simply didn't like how it looked in regards to how I was doing things.

Here's the chicken scratch storyboards for this as well in case that's something that tickles your fancy. Pretty unorganized and I didn't write out all the dialogue but the magic of animating something all by yourself is you know what you want so you don't gotta worry about how pretty the storyboards are as long as the final thing looks good.

I can't upload clips directly to a news post so the animatic is a no-go but they aren't much to write home about anyway. Same thing but crude no lip sync and no smoke effect.

Probably silly to make a post like this for something so short but I've never animated something to this caliber before so it was a journey to get made.

Closing message, I hope to Christ Pencil2d gets an update soon and thanks P-Bot for putting Drawn to Life content on the front page for a day

nobody draws the game design bruhi feel dirty posting doodles to the portal lol