Homestuck.XYZ 2.0

Let's talk about some of the art Hussie's done outside of MSPA. Like stuff from his blog and Whistles. I love the fuck outta Hussie's style.

Here's some Homestuck kids to start:

This Terezi drawing is great, and I wish Hussie did more homestuck art in this style.

I'll contribute with this John, and hand you guys an album of Andrew's sketches. More people should study his art!
https://imgur.com/a/o38iI

burnt2ashleys wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 16, 2019 3:53 pm

I'll contribute with this John, and hand you guys an album of Andrew's sketches. More people should study his art!
https://imgur.com/a/o38iI

I'm looking at the album and some of these are so good and adorable I can't help but smile!

Okay now I have to see him draw some of the hiveswap trolls, that would be so cool

I’m a big fan of how he renders bodies in a somewhat mannequin like style and those Jack Noir and PI images are absolutely precious. The quality of line fluctuates in a neat way too, and there are a lot of things about his style (like creating the torso before attaching shoulders and arms, and starting the legs at the extreme ends of the hips of the character) that have undoubtedly influenced my own work.

Oh hey remember AIDS?

GO READ AND IT DON'T STOP Y'ALL.

The severe lack of hussnasty in later parts of the comic kinda hurts. Not that we can't have professional artwork but classic hero mode/hussnasty was Homestuck perfection.

Hussie's more polished art always bothered me because he's definitely a cartoonist by nature and stylizes people like cartoons, but a lot of his art has this very strange form of depth to it, where it seems like he will design a character to have the very flat "symbolic representation of a character" look, but then his art will render them like they exist very literally in the space, and it's bizarre! And I guess it works for when the work itself is bizarre, but the bizarreness of Homestuck isn't the bizarreness of Whistles, by any means, and I don't think it works as well for Homestuck.

It's gonna inevitably draw comparisons to Xamag's art for Homestuck^2 - with Homestuck panels it's really clear that Hussie isn't drawing the characters "literally" - they're abstract symbols of characters, distinguished by shapes rather than depictions of their forms, ie, how does the spiral in Roxy's hair work, or troll horns, which just jut out of a character's head. It's very easy to look at Dirk in Homestuck proper and see "this is a symbolic representation of that character, the true form of which exists in my head and is substituted in from what I know this character to look like", vs Xamag, where characters are lit dramatically, and things that are normally abstracted are given depth - Dirk's glasses are the most obvious citation here, which creates a feeling less like "this is an abstraction of what's happening" and more like "this is what it really looks like".

Dude's line art game is on point though.

That's how I feel.

Hussie's abstracted art style is probably one of my favorite parts of it in Classic Hero Mode. The rough and dynamic edges that imply motion, the appealing, angular way that arms are drawn, the gorgeous way he implies detail in the silhouette of a form like Jack Noir's hand or a character's face, and god DAMN do the characters fit the mood of their scenes extremely well.