888's Clan

I love horses, sheep, bovines, (most ungulates really), and mantises! I raised ghost mantises for a while. Of course, I also really like lions and tigers. I do just deeply enjoy most animals and I have a soft spot for working animals. I could probably ID most species of birds or dog breeds at a glance.



I've been scribbling on printer paper and in notebooks since I was six years old. I got my drawing tablet in 2017, but I only started really digitally drawing in 2019. I got a lot more active with it in 2021.

To start with, I was used to pencil and paper, so my sketches were really rough and scratchy. I wasn't good at lineart at all. I developed the habit of painting to mask these rough lines, focusing on strong colours and shapes. In 2022 I decided to start working on my lines, and they've gotten steadily better since.

I've always enjoyed drawing animals, dragons, and food. These days, I draw mostly my own original characters instead of fanart like the past 5 years.




It's like every other skin on site, you can resell it if you no longer want it. Keep in mind that I usually have copies of my public skins listed at print price, so you might have to price it a bit lower if you want it to sell faster.








I'm self taught. You don't really go to art school to learn how to draw, you go to art school to make industry connections and learn how to manage projects. It's easy enough to learn on your own, as long as you truly have the desire to improve yourself and have constant passion to create. There are times when I've felt so strongly about things that I felt like I was going to throw up unless I got it out of me and onto the page. To me, art is a form of communication.

But drawing is certainly only a hobby for me. In real life, I'm an engineer!




啊，谢谢！其实有挺多中国人在这个游戏上 （也可能是我个人的印象？）在 UMA artist 圈里面，大概 50%+ 在我的经验里都是中国人。有国内的还有国外移民的小孩儿。国内的不大说英文，要用翻译，可是在 QQ 和朋友圈上都找得到! 而且挺多看起来像只讲英文的人也其实是中国人。

一些我认识的中国人 :pointing：(Who also make skins!)

@MythicalViper @auroshen @stillhunt @43617 @Sucrose @eearz @nuue @crowvidae @Qiu @final

@Lomon @lafite @frfrfr @DDDfirefox @XinY @crogge





Just for funsies. There have been at least 3 festival skin mess-ups due to my username going from 888 to 9fox to 777ti8o687 and back around again, but I promise I wasn't trying to mess those up on purpose - I just want to take a 'break'. I don't think I've ever asked for the username on my skins to be changed. I've always been 888 and I want them to remain 888. But nosy people have asked for fest skins I've submitted as 9fox and 777ti8o687 to be changed :P

There is a little experimentation but not by me: 888 is currently being held by Aza who wants to get a skin submitted under their database but with 888 in the description. That skin is in special queue right now, we think? So I was supposed to be 888 again in early September but the skin isn't back. DELAYED. Get someone looking at special queue asap...



For my skins, the CSP default hard round brush at 6px. If you're using any other art program, your usual default pen tool with a lower taper setting should be able to replicate the same effect. For my regular art, Wrinkles Pen (free on CSP store) for lining + a homebrew painting brush for rendering.

You don't really need anything fancy for skins. Having something without a lot of texture and some pen pressure is enough. The majority of my lineart 'style' is attributable to my shapes and angles.



Dragon theme skin on top of dragon? Er, maybe? And thank you!



Good luck and yes please! You can tag my FR blog (@888-fr) if you do.



You need to get so sick in the head about something that the only way you can expel it out of your brain and mind is to draw about it. I'm so serious. 100% of the stuff I've made in the past few months is because I have a very specific vision that nobody else is seeing and I was the only person I felt who could bring it to life, AND it was important to me that everyone else understood what I was seeing too.

It's also good to seek feedback from friends and strangers. Without the self-discipline of a monk, it's easy to get discouraged. Try posting for smaller fandoms if you're starting out, and putting your art online. I assume you draw Flight Rising stuff since you're on this site, right? Posting in the Flight Rising tag on Tumblr is a great way to make friends and get people engaging with what you make. It's a good type of encouragement and positive reinforcement.






I've been scribbling on printer paper and in notebooks since I was six years old. I got my drawing tablet in 2017, but I only started really digitally drawing in 2019. I got a lot more active with it in 2020.

To start with, I was used to pencil and paper, so my sketches were really rough and scratchy. I wasn't good at lineart at all. I developed the habit of painting to mask these rough lines, focusing on strong colours and shapes. In 2022 I decided I had to start working on my linework for real. I've gotten better at them since.

I liked drawing dragons and animals as kids first and foremost, never actually got into media involving people that I wanted to draw until 2020. So I had to learn a lot of human anatomy from scratch. I never picked up any of those how to draw manga books, or had a cartoony/animal style from shows. Most of my own art style today is cobbled together from experimentation over 5 yrs and picking up what I liked a lot from other artists I admire.

Pokemon > Dimension 20 / Flight Rising > OCs



It's a combination of wanting skins for my own dragons and wanting really specific fandragons. That's it, really. A lot of my earliest skins are things that I made for OCs, or aesthetics I simply couldn't find for sale.



I think my skins in general are informed by my regular art, where I get a lot of the abstraction + focus on shapes and colour from.

For the artists that were my earliest FR skin inspirations: Goblincat, eearz, Uniformshark, rndzvs, and Straka were some artists who I looked at a lot. I'm glad that I'm friends with them all today!



We want to bring Cerdae back for sure! We're just all really busy this year... The plan was for this summer, but we will have to see when we're all available to generate a couple thousand adopts, event writeup, banners, and sheets. Plus we don't want to step on Tiger Treat's toes since tigers are really popular and we try to run that at least once a year.



Database & forum search both take numbers as ID instead of username. That's why it pulls up records for user rockinloud14 (user ID 888) instead of me... You'll need to use my ID, 670602. That's the only way you can look through my skin database as well.



I love body horror, gore, mecha/cyberpunk, animal anatomy alteration, and tasty-looking food skins. (It's not a coincidence that this is what I like drawing too.) I collect these even when I don't have a dragon to put them on! My skin hoard is a lot bigger than the amount of dragons wearing skins in my lair. I buy skins that are like an 'art piece', or too pretty to pass up. And I'll always buy anything that's a competently done cityscape, or well-rendered mecha - they're just so rarely made.

There's a few types of skins I actively collect. I'm always on the lookout for Gaoler M, Fathom F, Mist Koi and RELIC (cyberpunk, tealred and tealgreenblue) skins. Also, I commission anyone I can get my hands on for more skins for my gryphon (he's got 24 so far).

I like buying skins that remind me of media I'm a fan of, too. But these interests are esoteric, and usually the skins that scratch this itch aren't even made as a reference. So I can't easily define what I'm looking for there.



Yes! It is a sort of complicated process, but it is harder to describe than it is to do. A lot of it is instinctual now, since I've done it a lot. I start out with my 'base template' file, which contains a floating 310 x 340 px black rectangle with about 50px padding on each side. I take the merged layers of my skin (without lines/shadows clipped) and I put this as a clipping mask over that rectangle, so that it is entirely contained within the rectangle. I'll adjust, duplicate elements, flip, resize, liquify, or warp the skin with several layers until I am happy with the composition. Then I'll copy paste a layer with the elements that I want to go outside the square and don't clip this layer, so it sticks out.

It's hard to imagine with only a description, so I'll show an example here:





EEEK... so mean to me



Hmmm, I'd say it's not tinting your lines and shadows. A heartbreaking amount of new skins come through with grey lines and shadows at 100% opacity. It ruins how they look on site, and it's hard to get preorders for skins that look like that too.

The second biggest mistake I'd say is not outlining the parts of the skin that touch the dragon. This makes the skin look very muddy.




On Flight Rising? Mist or Bronze. In real life? Orange :)



借刀万岁万万岁 ！ ！

Thank you guys <3 These make me really happy.