Acro's Art Blog

I’m feeling nostalgic for an old fandom of mine, I spent a good 2-3 hours yesterday talking Transformers with Logan and now they are on the brain once more. So I wandered into some certain tags and found content? Recent-ish content even?? In tags that used to be sparse and ghost-town-like?

And so I am reposting some things since I can.

These pieces are anywhere from 4 to 7-ish years old but goddammit I am still fond of most of them. I did go touch up a few bc I’m allowed to do that with my own art.

haha here is a disclaimer of sorts for my take on these two bc I still feel some sense of self-consciousness for thinking the way I do vs. the fandom at large, I remember the vagueposting and raging that drove me away

figuring out how exactly I want my beetle girl’s face/jaw to work, featuring a sketch where I couldn’t get the eyes to cooperate so it’s just a half-assed eyeless thing over there

I’ve also decided her name is Nerice now

I don’t care if I’m one of the minority that is happy about this and I also don’t care if it turns out to just be platonic, just let my nerds be okay and care about each other

makeover!!!

Mobius - my Brainstorm/Nautica child - I felt was in need of a slight redesign, so I did just that while also trying out some pencil brushes in Manga Studio to see how it compared to me sketching traditionally and coloring said sketches digitally. 

they’re still a huge know-it-all and give zero shits for whatever the hell their gender is or what pronouns you refer to them with.  

Mobius is very friendly and chattery, but their tone has them come off as someone who has taken it upon themselves to educate all the dumb people in the world - aka everyone but them. sometimes they are genuinely shocked that others don’t know certain things that they’ve learned just from having scientist parents and being ridiculously book-smart, and their surprise can come off as condescending. they mean well and are just genuinely excited about knowing things and telling others about the cool stuff they’ve learned. 

a polished doodle of some bug ‘n birb nerds

I have been sitting on these two for several months if not a year now and only now have I actually attempted to do colors. On note doodles no less. :y

So yeah I’m garbage and have made ambiguously-fantasy AU versions of Brainstorm and Nautica. Nautica’s some kind of beetle thing and Brainstorm is some sort of hooved, horned, feathery thing. Basically I just took the gem design I did for him and tweaked it. 

I forgot to give bug!Nautica her second set of arms in my note doodle I chose to color, rip 

(which kinda might be because last time I tried to draw her was almost six months ago (which is slapped into the third doodle set there))

a chunk of not-NiGHTS doodles also from my notes, since I apparently am far more likely to doodle there than in an actual sketchbook anymore. they’re all over the place content-wise. mostly non-fandom but there’s a bug!Nautica, what started as gem!Whirl but might just be a weird organic version at this point, and a very smol Dragonfly doodle, so it’s not entirely non-fandom.

I’m sick of messing with this I guess it’s time to post

So I started this before this LL#9 came out, and then the issue came out and I realized my little fanart piece was no longer relevant, because it was Brainstorm comforting a distraught Nautica after the revival failed, as I thought the comic would go. Nautica doesn't even feel sad about Skids anymore so my idea of Brainstorm being a shoulder to lean on in learning to cope with grief has gone out the window. 

But I wanted to finish this still? So new headcanon to keep it relevant to what’s going on in canon.

Mengel did say that disconnecting from the device prematurely could cause permanent damage, but didn't say what. Nautica herself broke out of it to save Velocity. Maybe it was technically done with one process and it didn’t do any harm, but chances are it wasn’t.

Maybe sometimes Nautica randomly falls into moods where she gets sad and feels like she's missing someone - but not anyone in particular, as her brain just randomly attempts to fire those circuits but can't complete it and only trigger the sad, lonely feeling. Maybe sometimes there are flickers of that grief specifically being attached to Skids’ death, but when they are gone she can't recall the correlation.

Brainstorm is somewhere between mad at her and jealous of her - angry because she erased her feelings and made it so that bond with Skids never meant anything to her; what if had been anyone else in the amica group? What if it had been him? But he’s also jealous in a strange way because he at times wishes he could get rid of the pain he feels over grief for Quark.

But more than anything he hates seeing her deal with the after effects. He watched Chromedome go through essentially the same cycle again and again (which he was clearly not okay with as evidenced by his monologue right after the Overlord incident), and he'll be damned if he lets his amica fall into the same cycle. When she falls into the moods, he's there and it's a bittersweet sort of comfort.

idk if I’ll finish this before the next issue of LL but preview in the meantime??? because my art blog has been very dead, and Logan’s heading out today to stay for the next two weeks

more angst based around the recent events in Lost Light and my nerd babies. having a bonding moment over the pain of losing loved ones and going to drastic measures to bring them back and not succeeding. not that I know if Nautica’s gonna be successful or not but I doubt it’ll be anything good regardless of the outcome

Nautica joins Brainstorm in the “I went to ridiculous lengths to cheat the death of loved ones” club!

hi my name is Acro and I still love these nerds together despite canon implications for other things. so what do I do to combat guilt for headcanoning? I make my own content, I guess, since it's a relative rarepair to see at this point even from a platonic perspective

I wanted to do something of some of my Gemformers but I seem to have forgotten how to draw them a little..? So I just did a small stylized thing, and unfortunately resorted to some very generic poses. Turquoiuse and Ametrine probably up to no good with some project. Do not use, copy, edit, or repost this art without my express permission. Not for use in ANY roleplays.

I absolutely did not draw these the day the full preview came out, and I have definitely not been sitting on the two different versions that would or would not be posted dependent on how the rest of the issue played out. Buuut looks like I’m posting both of them anyways.

Do not use, copy, edit, or repost this art without my express permission. Not for use in ANY roleplays.

[ spoiler talk under the cut ]

Fusion of Turquoise and Ametrine - Iolite! Initially I was going to make Iolite have a taur build, but I couldn’t for the life of me get it drawn correctly. So two-legged build it was. I also got lazy and didn’t give them fingers on the first set of hands.

Iolite is a very rambunctious know-it-all that seems to laugh at literally anything and everything. They are very self confident, and very capable in fashioning makeshift gem tech from apparent scraps. They have a habit of yammering out loud to themselves, while working as well as while not immediately engaged in conversation. And it’s almost always in an upbeat, excitable tone. 

Do not use, copy, edit, or repost this art without my express permission. Not for use in ANY roleplays.

Tablet came in today - so I scanned and colored a few doodles done figuring out how Turquoise’s mouth looks under his mask. I’m still getting used to the new tablet - it’s too sensitive regardless of how I mess with the pressure. The sensitivity only affects the beginning of the stroke, but halfway through it goes right back to being really sensitive...? idk. 

Bonus Ametrine playing with his face fluff. 

Do not use, copy, edit, or repost this art without my express permission. Not for use in ANY roleplays.

I HATE HAVING TO DO EVERYTHING DIGITAL WITH A MOUSE. 

aka my tablet died on the 4th of May and my new one won’t be here until the 9th, and of course it was right when I was starting to map out colors for these two dorks

Okay so long story short, I went and turned Brainstorm and Nautica into gems, so that in case things go to hell in a handbasket in MTMTE, I can at least still have these two. I don’t consider these the finalized designs, on account of being tablet-less and only able to do so much as far as digital coloring without wanting to murder something. They’re pretty close, but not quite there.

Brainstorm is Turquoise, a faun-like gem, and has limb enhancers even though technically he doesn’t really need them. He’s a gem weapons specialist known for making things just because he can. Lots of things seen as novelties because they’re just eccentric enough to not be immediate go-to weapons, are his doing. Nautica is Ametrine and maintains larger pieces of gem tech, like ships and communication hubs and such. She has gem-technology “wings” that help her have a greater range of places she can actually reach, and a communicator on the side of her head that projects a visor with tech readouts when needed.

Of the two I think Ametrine might undergo more notable visual changes, since while I like this design, she just doesn’t quite feel... done. Don’t know why, and for all I know it might just take a few days for my mind to settle down over it, which has happened before with other designs I’ve churned out. And if changes happen, then I can consider future designs regenerations and this one an earlier form.

Do not use, copy, edit, or repost this art without my express permission. Not for use in ANY roleplays.

Do not use, copy, edit, or repost this art without my express permission. Not for use in ANY roleplays.

Apparently my solution to distracting my own brain from sabotaging my nerd OTP is to doodle fluff of said OTP. 

I JUST WANT TO HOPE, BRAIN. WHY AM I NOT ALLOWED.

[me rambling to myself under the read more tag, feel free to overlook]