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Happy Halloween, Sparklers!

I cannot magically teleport candy from me to you over the internet, so instead please accept this art and an accompanying Time Lapse for a treat!

If anyone remembers the Spooky Brush Pack I uploaded waaaayyy back in September, [Jeez, that feels like such a long time ago!], this...is not exactly what I was planning to do with them myself. It's close—the concept is very similar. But my original idea was a much big undertaking and time simply got away from me.

That said, I'm still not going to say precisely what the bigger plan is/was because I am still planning on seeing it through, and for those of you who read this description and don't manage to figure it out yourself, I'd like to keep it as much of a surprise as possible.

For the here and now: This is Voodoo , a funky little black cat that was made by Varner Studios for their KinderGoth Plush line , which was an extension of their Bleeding Edge Goths Brand.

Over roughly the last year, I've developed a minor obsession with Bleeding Edge Goths. They're a pretty interesting obscure toy line, amplified by the passing similarities to Monster High, which you may or may not have already noticed without me having to point it out to you. Either way, once you see the similarities it's probably of little wonder to you why I developed an interest in the Brand; I may not draw much Monster High stuff these days, but it's originally what brought me to DeviantArt and has been a significant part of my life for years.

Even that wasn't true though, if literally everything else was the same but there was no comparison to Monster High to be made, I think I would've ended up attracted to BEGoths anyway—there is a dark sort of charm to the Brand I find positively magnetic.

Anyway; As I said, this drawing wasn't in my original plans once I decided I did with to bring BEGoths into my art. So how did we get here, then?

Well, like a lot of artists, I like to draw something special for Halloween each year. The content varies, but my go-to for that [and Holiday-specific art in general] usually defaults to cats. I like cats, I have a somewhat set style for how to draw them, and they're usually not too hard to tailor a cat drawing to a specific theme.

I did briefly consider re-drawing either my pretty rushed Halloween art from last year or even Spoopy Kitty , who marked a turning point in my ability to draw cats, but I was really hoping for something a little more special than just a re-draw. [I probably will still end up redrawing both of those at some point; Now just wasn't the time.]

Somewhere in my pondering, I remembered Voodoo exists. He(?)'s a pretty spooky-looking cat that would fit right in for Halloween. I hadn't planned to draw him for that bigger project originally, which is kind of a shame because he probably is my favorite of the KinderGoths plushies solely because he's a cat. So I thought I could do this much smaller scale version of what I'd had in mind—I'd get to use the special brushes I made, get a taste of how the concept was going to work in a finished piece, Voodoo would get some time in the spotlight, and I'd have an appropriate cat drawing for Halloween. Hard to argue with how well that all lines up, if you ask me.

That brings me to two other points: 1. Why did I bring up Monster High? and 2. Yes, it's a cat, but it doesn't really match my normal cat style, does it?

Simply put, I decided to draw Voodoo is the same style as the pets each Monster High student has. In all the years I've known about Monster High, I've never made what I would consider a "good honest effort" to draw one of the pets. I have technically drawn Monster High pets before, but they were...very lackluster efforts, to put it mildly. My focus in the past was always on the humanoid characters, not the animals. [Sorta for good reason; Even when Monster High first appeared, in "G1" as we're calling it now, the pets were rarely little more than set dressing for the dolls. There was never a whole lot of encouragement to focus on them.]

This idea was reinforced when I realized Frankie's pet..."dog"...Watzit has a very similar patchwork design to Voodoo. It's not 1:1, but it's close enough I opted to model Voodoo more after him than after the one actual pet cat Monster High gave us, Clawdeen's Crescent . But I did use make a lot of necessary changes to the head using Crescent for reference, and then to make the pose slightly more dynamic and really hammer home the Cat part, I used this other picture of Crescent as reference to create that raised paw with exposed claws.

I was largely one my own for the tail and most of the details that really define this as Voodoo, though. The tail I based on this image of the Voodoo plush since I figured, again, having it nice and wiggly like that would add some needed dynamicism.

The eyes were also...unique. I'm not really sure why Voodoo's eyes are like that other than "because it looks cool," especially the not-swirl one. It would look normal if it wasn't divided in half by that line.

I also struggled a little with the mouth/nose area. The Voodoo plush doesn't look happy like Crescent in any pictures I've seen, and his mouth doesn't hang open like Watzit's, either. And I didn't want him to look too distressed since this is supposed to be a fun drawing for Halloween after all. Oh, and let's not forget the plush also has, believe it or not, a shiny silver nose ring.

Then, as noted in the video there were two things I felt were worth including but I'm still not entirely sure about their execution. Firstly, the one visible shoulder seam. I've only seen a couple of pictures like this one where you can see shoulder seams on Voodoo at all, and I'm not sure why. I did find a promotional image that seems to feature a Voodoo prototype that was altered, but even it doesn't include the white shoulder stitching as far as I can tell. [The differences I do see is the swirl in the eye is red instead of yellow and the spikes on the collar are gray/silver instead of red, if anybody cares.]

Ultimately, I included that seam since it gives Voodoo a little more character; But I did opt to make it less noticeable, more like the stitching around his muzzle.

The other thing is that tiny orange-checked patch on his thigh. You can see by this image that...

...IT IS ON THE WRONG SIDE.

I swear to you Sparklers, that's not where I thought that sentence was going. I really truly did not realize until just now, typing this, that the patch is supposed to be on the entire other side of the cat.

...What I was going to say before that horrible realization, is that [ignoring it's on the wrong side now] I wasn't sure the patch should be visible from this angle; In the photos it looks more like it's on Voodoo's flank/hip, not so much the top part of the leg. But I guess it doesn't really matter now since it's on the wrong side anyway.

*Sigh*. Not much fixing it now since I already rendered the Time Lapse video and everything. If that wasn't true and I had more time, I might go in and flip the whole thing over and switch his eyes to fix it, but not tonight. Tonight I'm just going to roll with the punches and trying to ignore it—I have far too much else to do and I'm already behind schedule as it is.

I guess though my conclusion about the patch would remain the same though: It's such a specific little quirk that even in the wrong place, it felt worth including.

I must say though, and I put this on-screen in the video too; I had a lot more fun with this than I was expecting. Even with the decisions I had to making, the sketching and line work were still pretty easy, and coloring was kind of a breeze, even counting the shading. The most difficult part was deciding if the bulk of Voodoo's fur should be a flat black-black with a gray outline, or nearly-black gray with proper black outlines. I don't remember if this made it into the video or not, but I did try both. Both do work, but for as much as I liked the pop of the gray outline, it bothered me more that there was no way to shade the jet black, so it looked awfully flat not the everything else.

The caveat there is his collar got the jet-black treatment; Watzit's does and they're basically identical, plus it's a much smaller area so the lack of shading is a lot less noticeable.

Probably the biggest struggle I had was with his whiskers. In every picture I've seen of Voodoo, they're a chaotic mess. But Crescent, who as I mentioned is I believe the only pet cat Monster High granted us, doesn't even have whiskers, so I couldn't just copy the placement and them make them messy; I had to figure out the placement all on my own.

And if you're wondering, "What whiskers?" That's evidence of the other problem. Voodoo's whiskers are also black, without question. On the plush, they pop a bit more since his muzzle is dark gray and the whiskers are more of a plastic material that's shiny in contrast to the cloth of his fur. Here though, they do just blend in a whole awful lot because the placement on his face that makes the most sense/looks the most comfortable from a design perspective is moreso around the muzzle than on top, and since I'm sticking to the MH art style, there isn't really a way to shade the whiskers to look more plastic-y.

I did consider changing the whiskers to white, but I just couldn't do it. It doesn't match the plush, and in most cases it wouldn't be to true to real black cats either—They too usually have black whiskers that just blend right in.

And then on top of that, when I was adding the whiskers in the line art phase, I didn't yet know just how much they were going to blend in, so I paid arguably too much attention them, trying to strike the right balance between placement, natural flow, and how askew they were. Had I realized how not-visible they'd be, I probably would've spent half as much time on them.

In stark contrast though, I did not spend much time on the background...because it was pretty much already made. Obviously, I had the brushes and they just required prospering sizing & placement, but even the purple portion I already had done. I made it in preparation for the bigger plans I keep referring to. A lot of the BEGoths packaging uses this swirling purple motif in the same way—That as the primary background with the skulls on top. I did however mimic the skull & bone placement from the Character Cards some of the toys came with since I thought that would work better for this little square drawing.

There is an argument to be made for using the skulls more so that Voodoo would pop against their whiteness, but there is a kind of appeal in how he blends in more here—It feels a little more mysterious, I think.

Either way, this has gotten me [again, as noted on-screen in the video] even more excited to eventually follow through with those bigger plans, even if I don't know when exactly I'll get around to it.

Well, realistically I know what I probably should do is start working on them slowly in the background now so maybe I'll have everything finished by next October. But me being me, that's almost definitely not how things will shake down.

My point is though I do still plan on seeing through my original idea, I just can't make any promises on when you'll get to see it. And also that this was a pretty little Halloween project—Yesterday and Today, getting it ready has proved a lot of work, but worth it in the end.

I hope this proves as much of a treat for you all as it has for me—I'm at a weird place where I'm too old to trick or treat and I don't really know anyone that throws Halloween parties, and we live just far enough outside of town we don't even get trick-or-treaters at my house, so Halloween is unfortunately just not as thrilling for me as it used to be. Making fun little projects like this is one way I can liven it back up.

Whether you're in a situation like mine though, or still young enough to trick-or-treat, or you get to be the life of several Halloween parties, I hope you all do have a Happy Halloween indeed, and you'll now excuse me because I've still got one last Inktober to do...

Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings
Bleeding Edge Goths, KinderGoths, and associated concepts © Varner Studios

Where to find me & my artwork:
My Website | My Book | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble |   Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram

Description
My Website | My Book | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi (Now with Membership Tiers for as little as $1 a Month!) | dA Print Shop | RedBubble |   Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram

Happy Halloween, Sparklers!

I cannot magically teleport candy from me to you over the internet, so instead please accept this art and an accompanying Time Lapse for a treat!

If anyone remembers the Spooky Brush Pack I uploaded waaaayyy back in September, [Jeez, that feels like such a long time ago!], this...is not exactly what I was planning to do with them myself. It's close—the concept is very similar. But my original idea was a much big undertaking and time simply got away from me.

That said, I'm still not going to say precisely what the bigger plan is/was because I am still planning on seeing it through, and for those of you who read this description and don't manage to figure it out yourself, I'd like to keep it as much of a surprise as possible.

For the here and now: This is Voodoo , a funky little black cat that was made by Varner Studios for their KinderGoth Plush line , which was an extension of their Bleeding Edge Goths Brand.

Over roughly the last year, I've developed a minor obsession with Bleeding Edge Goths. They're a pretty interesting obscure toy line, amplified by the passing similarities to Monster High, which you may or may not have already noticed without me having to point it out to you. Either way, once you see the similarities it's probably of little wonder to you why I developed an interest in the Brand; I may not draw much Monster High stuff these days, but it's originally what brought me to DeviantArt and has been a significant part of my life for years.

Even that wasn't true though, if literally everything else was the same but there was no comparison to Monster High to be made, I think I would've ended up attracted to BEGoths anyway—there is a dark sort of charm to the Brand I find positively magnetic.

Anyway; As I said, this drawing wasn't in my original plans once I decided I did with to bring BEGoths into my art. So how did we get here, then?

Well, like a lot of artists, I like to draw something special for Halloween each year. The content varies, but my go-to for that [and Holiday-specific art in general] usually defaults to cats. I like cats, I have a somewhat set style for how to draw them, and they're usually not too hard to tailor a cat drawing to a specific theme.

I did briefly consider re-drawing either my pretty rushed Halloween art from last year or even Spoopy Kitty , who marked a turning point in my ability to draw cats, but I was really hoping for something a little more special than just a re-draw. [I probably will still end up redrawing both of those at some point; Now just wasn't the time.]

Somewhere in my pondering, I remembered Voodoo exists. He(?)'s a pretty spooky-looking cat that would fit right in for Halloween. I hadn't planned to draw him for that bigger project originally, which is kind of a shame because he probably is my favorite of the KinderGoths plushies solely because he's a cat. So I thought I could do this much smaller scale version of what I'd had in mind—I'd get to use the special brushes I made, get a taste of how the concept was going to work in a finished piece, Voodoo would get some time in the spotlight, and I'd have an appropriate cat drawing for Halloween. Hard to argue with how well that all lines up, if you ask me.

That brings me to two other points: 1. Why did I bring up Monster High? and 2. Yes, it's a cat, but it doesn't really match my normal cat style, does it?

Simply put, I decided to draw Voodoo is the same style as the pets each Monster High student has. In all the years I've known about Monster High, I've never made what I would consider a "good honest effort" to draw one of the pets. I have technically drawn Monster High pets before, but they were...very lackluster efforts, to put it mildly. My focus in the past was always on the humanoid characters, not the animals. [Sorta for good reason; Even when Monster High first appeared, in "G1" as we're calling it now, the pets were rarely little more than set dressing for the dolls. There was never a whole lot of encouragement to focus on them.]

This idea was reinforced when I realized Frankie's pet..."dog"...Watzit has a very similar patchwork design to Voodoo. It's not 1:1, but it's close enough I opted to model Voodoo more after him than after the one actual pet cat Monster High gave us, Clawdeen's Crescent . But I did use make a lot of necessary changes to the head using Crescent for reference, and then to make the pose slightly more dynamic and really hammer home the Cat part, I used this other picture of Crescent as reference to create that raised paw with exposed claws.

I was largely one my own for the tail and most of the details that really define this as Voodoo, though. The tail I based on this image of the Voodoo plush since I figured, again, having it nice and wiggly like that would add some needed dynamicism.

The eyes were also...unique. I'm not really sure why Voodoo's eyes are like that other than "because it looks cool," especially the not-swirl one. It would look normal if it wasn't divided in half by that line.

I also struggled a little with the mouth/nose area. The Voodoo plush doesn't look happy like Crescent in any pictures I've seen, and his mouth doesn't hang open like Watzit's, either. And I didn't want him to look too distressed since this is supposed to be a fun drawing for Halloween after all. Oh, and let's not forget the plush also has, believe it or not, a shiny silver nose ring.

Then, as noted in the video there were two things I felt were worth including but I'm still not entirely sure about their execution. Firstly, the one visible shoulder seam. I've only seen a couple of pictures like this one where you can see shoulder seams on Voodoo at all, and I'm not sure why. I did find a promotional image that seems to feature a Voodoo prototype that was altered, but even it doesn't include the white shoulder stitching as far as I can tell. [The differences I do see is the swirl in the eye is red instead of yellow and the spikes on the collar are gray/silver instead of red, if anybody cares.]

Ultimately, I included that seam since it gives Voodoo a little more character; But I did opt to make it less noticeable, more like the stitching around his muzzle.

The other thing is that tiny orange-checked patch on his thigh. You can see by this image that...

...IT IS ON THE WRONG SIDE.

I swear to you Sparklers, that's not where I thought that sentence was going. I really truly did not realize until just now, typing this, that the patch is supposed to be on the entire other side of the cat.

...What I was going to say before that horrible realization, is that [ignoring it's on the wrong side now] I wasn't sure the patch should be visible from this angle; In the photos it looks more like it's on Voodoo's flank/hip, not so much the top part of the leg. But I guess it doesn't really matter now since it's on the wrong side anyway.

*Sigh*. Not much fixing it now since I already rendered the Time Lapse video and everything. If that wasn't true and I had more time, I might go in and flip the whole thing over and switch his eyes to fix it, but not tonight. Tonight I'm just going to roll with the punches and trying to ignore it—I have far too much else to do and I'm already behind schedule as it is.

I guess though my conclusion about the patch would remain the same though: It's such a specific little quirk that even in the wrong place, it felt worth including.

I must say though, and I put this on-screen in the video too; I had a lot more fun with this than I was expecting. Even with the decisions I had to making, the sketching and line work were still pretty easy, and coloring was kind of a breeze, even counting the shading. The most difficult part was deciding if the bulk of Voodoo's fur should be a flat black-black with a gray outline, or nearly-black gray with proper black outlines. I don't remember if this made it into the video or not, but I did try both. Both do work, but for as much as I liked the pop of the gray outline, it bothered me more that there was no way to shade the jet black, so it looked awfully flat not the everything else.

The caveat there is his collar got the jet-black treatment; Watzit's does and they're basically identical, plus it's a much smaller area so the lack of shading is a lot less noticeable.

Probably the biggest struggle I had was with his whiskers. In every picture I've seen of Voodoo, they're a chaotic mess. But Crescent, who as I mentioned is I believe the only pet cat Monster High granted us, doesn't even have whiskers, so I couldn't just copy the placement and them make them messy; I had to figure out the placement all on my own.

And if you're wondering, "What whiskers?" That's evidence of the other problem. Voodoo's whiskers are also black, without question. On the plush, they pop a bit more since his muzzle is dark gray and the whiskers are more of a plastic material that's shiny in contrast to the cloth of his fur. Here though, they do just blend in a whole awful lot because the placement on his face that makes the most sense/looks the most comfortable from a design perspective is moreso around the muzzle than on top, and since I'm sticking to the MH art style, there isn't really a way to shade the whiskers to look more plastic-y.

I did consider changing the whiskers to white, but I just couldn't do it. It doesn't match the plush, and in most cases it wouldn't be to true to real black cats either—They too usually have black whiskers that just blend right in.

And then on top of that, when I was adding the whiskers in the line art phase, I didn't yet know just how much they were going to blend in, so I paid arguably too much attention them, trying to strike the right balance between placement, natural flow, and how askew they were. Had I realized how not-visible they'd be, I probably would've spent half as much time on them.

In stark contrast though, I did not spend much time on the background...because it was pretty much already made. Obviously, I had the brushes and they just required prospering sizing & placement, but even the purple portion I already had done. I made it in preparation for the bigger plans I keep referring to. A lot of the BEGoths packaging uses this swirling purple motif in the same way—That as the primary background with the skulls on top. I did however mimic the skull & bone placement from the Character Cards some of the toys came with since I thought that would work better for this little square drawing.

There is an argument to be made for using the skulls more so that Voodoo would pop against their whiteness, but there is a kind of appeal in how he blends in more here—It feels a little more mysterious, I think.

Either way, this has gotten me [again, as noted on-screen in the video] even more excited to eventually follow through with those bigger plans, even if I don't know when exactly I'll get around to it.

Well, realistically I know what I probably should do is start working on them slowly in the background now so maybe I'll have everything finished by next October. But me being me, that's almost definitely not how things will shake down.

My point is though I do still plan on seeing through my original idea, I just can't make any promises on when you'll get to see it. And also that this was a pretty little Halloween project—Yesterday and Today, getting it ready has proved a lot of work, but worth it in the end.

I hope this proves as much of a treat for you all as it has for me—I'm at a weird place where I'm too old to trick or treat and I don't really know anyone that throws Halloween parties, and we live just far enough outside of town we don't even get trick-or-treaters at my house, so Halloween is unfortunately just not as thrilling for me as it used to be. Making fun little projects like this is one way I can liven it back up.

Whether you're in a situation like mine though, or still young enough to trick-or-treat, or you get to be the life of several Halloween parties, I hope you all do have a Happy Halloween indeed, and you'll now excuse me because I've still got one last Inktober to do...

Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings
Bleeding Edge Goths, KinderGoths, and associated concepts © Varner Studios

Where to find me & my artwork:
My Website | My Book | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble |   Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram