here's the image, but be warned it is 28.some mb

it's another big one! i'm going to talk about it now.


so, some of you may be aware of the existence of this bright man:


also known as "the man who will not stop until the whole world has been exposed to the yakuza franchise"
 or ian.

this man right here will occasionally give me suggestions of what to draw while he is extremely tired. it's really a coin flip as to whether or not what he's saying makes any sense, but sometimes the words bounce around in my head in just the right way and i get an idea that's at least vaguely related. sometimes this will result in a drawing that's not too out of the ordinary, but if there's ever some small detail in a drawing that doesn't quite make sense, there's a good chance it's from him.


"hey whatever you're drawing, add a duck" "absolutely"

so one day he says he's got another idea, and proceeds to give me two four-digit numbers. i try to ask what the significance is of these numbers, to no avail, and they're not completely random either because he's able to repeat them so i can write them down. i ask if it's supposed to be the resolution of an image, to which he responds "yes" in a way that makes me very sure that this is definitely not what was originally intended. this hunch is also helped by him giving me a third four-digit number, with which i have no idea what to do. i mention that this would probably be bigger than any digital drawing i had made so far, but i'm not against the idea.
we are both happy with this conclusion. now i just need something to fill up all that space, but in the meantime i leave the numbers in a txt file and keep drawing pictures of a reasonable size.

enter player two:


i don't know how to pronounce this name and it would feel rude to say it forwards

there i am, looking at things, when i see that there is a new collection of things to look through and i am going to look at them now. in the middle of appreciating these things, i am caught off guard by a wonderful surprise.


it's for me, oh my goodness

and so it is time for revenge. not ordinary revenge, but art revenge. in addition, since this seems to be more elaborate than i deserve, it only makes sense that i respond in kind. by that, i mean it is time for the big picture. here we go.

i've since realized that in terms of size, i've recieved art from this exact notebook before, but it is much too late to turn back now

the original concept was to make a large mountain-type scene and scatter characters around it, but i went into this without really thinking about it, and as soon as i started thinking about actually adding in said characters i realized it probably wasn't going to work. while having a bunch of layers of scenery is a great way to add depth to a picture, it also means that there are parts that are extremely far away, and anything you put in that area will be absolutely tiny. so after having worked on this picture for several days, i abandoned it for a while until i could come back and just restart the whole thing.


also not entirely happy with all the obelisks just jutting out all over the place

about a month passes...

seeing as characters not fitting in anywhere was the problem i was having before, the solution i have this time around is to draw the characters first, and then add the scene around them. well, kind of. i sketched out poses first and then arranged them while making an also very rough sketch of the environment. this was easy enough to do between other drawings, but eventually it got to the point where i had to Actually Draw The Picture.


looking back, there are a lot of hands reaching out to each other. if you send me any theories of what that means my reply will be "that's an interesting theory"

cue spending many days drawing this picture. most of the time was spent on the scenery, because that's what most of the picture consists of, but also because every day i'm sharing cropped pieces of the picture. even though i feel like it is obvious what it is i'm doing, to a certain extent i still want it to be a surprise. however, this does have the adverse effect of making me worried that somehow i'll have forgotten how to draw people by the time i get around to adding them in. this fear is soothed by the sketches i made beforehand and also turns out to be mostly unfounded. what a relief.

"what a relief" i type after putting in the basic colors and definitely before going back and realizing the fifteen adjustments i need to make because i remembered designs wrong and also before making randall's arm shorter four times to make it look at all acceptable. going back to double check that i was even drawing these correctly also refreshed my brain on all the designs i now feel bad about forgetting, which i just started hiding in various places to calm my mind down. some are more obvious than others.

one thing that did actually trip me up quite a bit was just how large the image was. usually when i'm drawing a picture, my brain can keep track of which things are important and which things can get abstracted, but working on a picture of this scale messed with that sort of economy of detail. too much detail in any one spot would draw attention, but i still wanted most of the image to be viewable at its native resolution. mostly this just ate up time as i tried to keep the balance between a consistent and readable texture, and not having a distinct enough texture to draw unwanted attention.


this looks terrible and i am absolutely not going to fix it

anyway, this was fun. i'm going to go finish yakuza kiwami now.

well i mean first i'm going to sleep but don't tell ian that