"Heyo, Marik here! I shared some behind-the-scenes trivia with people, who thought I may as well compile it all in one place, so here we are. I'll try to keep the descriptions shorter than on my Discord server's version of this album - not because I value your time, but because Wrap-It-Up-chan is already glaring at me."

"The dragon invited me to design the mascot for JADSEYA, tho eventually I wormed myself into making way more art assets than that. Since the event's theme wasn't set yet, I thought it might as well spring from the mascot, so I gave each girl some attributes that the show would take on if she was chosen.

Looking back at it, I think I would have liked to make Trophy Waifu-chan more clearly dragon-themed, but I certainly would not have given up on the liquid gold idea just to avoid Piss-chan jokes. If you people love piss so much, urine luck, 'cause you can nominate this lady for 2024's "Best New Chan" category.

#propaganda-early
#propaganda-often"

"The boss loves bunny girls, but he loves the women in his life even more, so he ended up being outvoted on his favorite mascot idea. Hard to argue with Kate's fashion sense."

"The last mascot idea wasn't something I liked or I thought Joe would like, but I think it's valuable to also give wildcards a shot. The dress ended up being recycled for *someone's* wedding..."

"Fully rendered mascot. Thank you Latty for catching me almost writing "jadsEEya". Those Joe puns have it in them..."

"I used stills from "Ocean's Thirteen" as placeholders to get a first feel for the colors and atmosphere I wanted to use. If the bunny girl had won, maybe we wouldn't have even switched out the casino theme for Chinese New Year's."

"The background was very important to me since it would be

- very time-consuming
- show up frequently
- convey a lot of the feel to the rest of the crew.

I left space for both vtubers on screen since I didn't know how they were going to be used yet. My involvement in the team kinda crept up on me, so I didn't think about asking for an early group chat invite to talk out the details ahead of time."

"I clustered the detail around the middle, so that when the awards would show up and overlay the center, the screen would never end up looking too busy."

"The dragon vtuber ended up solo on screen more than I thought. In anticipation of something like that, I had floated the idea of a "Mike Wazowski character" that balances the view while the Guest Vtuber is absent, and is occluded when the guest vtuber is present, to preserve the overall level of detail.

Due to hazardous amounts of Witcher Haze I ended up streamlining the process dropped this pitch."

"Closeup of Geralt with his iron and silver hairpins and Missile from Ghost Trick"

"Closeup of Tama from AI Somnium Files 2, because there is noooo way I'm working on a Chinese New Year themed event without drawing a cute girl in a qipao."

"One of the backgrounds I pitched was an Armored Core VI mech and a 13 Sentinels mech fist-bumping, but I think this wave was a pretty cute alternative."

"unblurred version of the mech where you can better see the Beacoi decal, the Joms decal, and the tiny martini glass."

"Irene originally wanted each of the 27 award girls to wear different accessories or clothes that matched the award. Brainstorming ideas with that restraint seemed difficult, and pop-out graphics could fill out more screen space to switch up the background, so I opted for that solution instead."

"This is how I designed each award background, with enough space to fit in both vtubers at the same time (again, since I didn't know how the guest vtuber would end up being used)."

"Originally, this layout was pitched as an alternative. Joe liked both versions, tho he didn't specify a use case for this second version. I dug them up when the editing crew still needed something to introduce the nominees with."

"Joe is a professional, serious youtuber and streamer, so he has no real branding beyond some free placeholder art - so when homepagemaster Latty needed a favicon, I made up this dragon eye J on the spot. Probably looks a bit too serious.

An optional job for the website was to make icons for the awards, so this was the moment Irene and I brainstormed ideas for them.

Thanks to some Photoshop magic I basically only had to draw the shape for these icons, and the texture and stroke were applied automatically, which was a huge timesaver."

"That time saver setup came in handy many times throughout the project.

For example, halfway through the stream the team started talking about a break segment, so I was able to whip up this graphic in a few seconds (ended up not being needed)."

"And now for a guided tour of the 27 awards, starting with my favorite. The mascot even got to wear an article of clothing like in the original pitch.

Some of these graphics are asymmetrical so they look good with or without guest vtuber to the left. In this example, the guest would have completely covered up the superwolf."

"Irene's idea for this was an 8-bit version of the mascot, but I went with something simpler instead - maybe too simple.

You can see some gold detailing here, which is more Photoshop magic. It's a "glue" brush tinted yellow instead of white. Never actually used it to paint "glue", but I think its quality was acceptable for these details."

"I grabbed Irene's idea for scrolling chat messages and added an ancient troll graphic for more "banter" flavor."

"ez pun, ez life"

"I thought it was cute to design little gamepad crosses that also incorporate musical notes, but I think in retrospect it didn't come out very clearly. I think Irene had the better idea with saxophants."

"One of the earlier awards I drew where the graphics still had more of a "liquid red ink" style."

"the website icon resembled an art snob (sunglasses + artist beret), which I could have slapped on the statue, but I thought this would fill out screen space better."

"This was one of the more elaborate graphics, and meant to be a companion piece with..."

"...this award, which ended up being cut. I can see why, even the graphics were recycled content!"

"Irene came through on this one with her idea of involving the Canadian flag. Maybe monkeys would have been good, too."

"Coming up with an idea for this one was a bit tricky since we already had graphics involving dragons and music notation."

"I think this one is the prettiest of the bunch. Coincidence? I think not!"

"Irene and I had no idea what to do for Best New Chan, but thankfully my homie Sandro Botticelli and his pic "The Birth of Venus" had my back.

Renaissance painters crawled so dragon VTubers could soar."

"Don't feel bad for not immediately recognizing this one, Joe. At least you weren't the guy in JADS who actually thought this character translates to "loss" in Chinese when I first sketched this joke years ago."

"Was tempted to reuse BOAT-chan from the original "ship lass" comic, but I thought this looked prettier."

"This was going to feature golden disks ("gone gold", get it?), but the yellow glue brush didn't look good for bigger graphics, and I didn't want to mess around with finding a gold stylization that fit the rest of the sketchy award graphics"

"Wasn't sure what to do for this one, tho I think a camera capturing a moment in time worked out okay."

"The idea for this one was a bit obvious, but sometimes simple works best.

Irene encouraged me to go down this direction, and Hypothetical Walrus included a cute vibrating motion to the "nominee version" of this award, so I'm happy with the result."

"I didn't want to incorporate the Twitch logo itself so Joe could still use this graphic when Twitch gets shut down in 2024."

"I had some very elaborate ideas for this one, like Chinese calligraphy sets and or a phoenix theme, but I think this compromise of a burning feather with a fiery trail worked pretty well."

"One of the early graphics where I wasn't making good use of the design space yet.

It took all of my willpower to not draw a pie."

"Another rare graphic where the mascot gets to wear a piece of clothing like in the original pitch. You can kinda see the glue brush starting to fail when it comes to the bigger ribbons here."

"Wasn't sure what to do for this one, but I think the heralding trumpets worked pretty alright."

"Directly used one of the icons I made for the website, 'cause I think that one just looked really nice from the get-go.

Please ignore White Line-chan at the right border of the picture."

"Also came with a joke version where even the mascot was too afraid to show up."

"What a short little title that makes it easy to fit into various layouts!! (:

Maybe the exclamation marks on the signs were a bit lazy."

"There was going to be more dragon in this picture, but there were already lots of dragons in Best Skill Moment and Best Laughing Moment, so I only included a clawfist."

"Lots of graphics could have represented Steins;Gate, but I think the gooey bananas best reflected the spirit of this award."

"And that's all the awards! The variants for the nominee announcements mostly just rearrange graphics, or in instances like here I redrew the shirt because it was too small to recycle directly."

"The VTubers were the last big thing I ended up producing for JADSEYA. Jelly helped with the software side of things when we realized that Joe thought the art team knew how to turn the png files into a vtuber, and I thought Joe had already thought about that. Whoops!

Irene suggested something like the first sketch for the guest, and I did the others in more Chinese New Year flavor:

- Jiangshi seemed funny to me because Western vampires need to be invited in
- Silhouetted Face was my favorite. The robes worked great as gender-neutral clothing I think. If I had known about the various speakers I would have implemented a couple different head silhouettes ahead of time
- Terracotta Dragon Warrior would have looked awesome, but it also would have been time-consuming, and we already had a lot of dragon imagery going on."

"Irene and I were basically on the same page about the Joe Vtuber from the start. No alterations necessary, except for a slightly bigger mouthflap after Joe gave the vtuber a whirl."

"The Guest VTuber also had mouthflaps since I didn't know whether the guests were going to be live or if the speeches were gonna be run through vtuber software."

"And that was all the JADSEYA stuff I made! Hope it was a little interesting! I think graphics aside, I'm mostly proud of how I stayed organized, even with the scope creep. I stayed within my deadlines, never felt lost, etc.

...oh right. There was one more mystery I wanted to unveil..."

"The reason I was able to prepare Trolley-chan wedding dress art ahead of time was because MoA spilled the beans (with my consent, after I was already part of the main group chat). He wanted my 2 cents on a video idea that would build on the winner for the BOAT award (tho the video ended up being cut)."

"So you can all thank Man of Answers for that moment where Joe decided to furiously make out with the anime girl version of the Half-Life 2 Trolley - right there on screen in front of over 3000 people.
Don't forget to lock in the wedding for Best Moment of 2024

#propaganda-early
#propaganda-often
#trolley-sweep-all-year-every-year"

"Thank you all for choosing her over the Eric meme option. I know that took restraint."