noo-dll: I’m not sure how to introduce myself … for starters, my username noo-dll is a pun with the file extension for dynamic link libraries (.dll). You know, no one has ever laughed at it or told me “ohhh, I get it”. I’ve always thought it was funny!! Anyways, I have a website called zonaplankton.net that has some stuff in it.

In my head, websites have always been a thing that people just do, so I sort of unceremoniously went at it… the TL;DR is that I started making zona.plankton back in 2021 as a way to archive all of my online stuff, dropped it out of laziness, and went back at it a whole year later and worked for a couple months, ‘til the first version came out… I had known about Neocities for a few years before I launched mine and I always thought it was cool, so I think I knew from the start that I would be hosting it there. I like going through the Activity page and checking out random pages on the weekend nowadays.

noo-dll: Thank you very much. I’ve been interested in it since I was a kid. I think most kids have at least a passing interest in art, music – drawing, especially… it’s just so easy if you have a pencil and paper on you through half of your day! Most people I meet tell me they can barely draw a stick figure, but if you egg them on to do something on a sheet of paper, it feels surprisingly personal. Every once in a while, a friend will spontaneously draw a silly face, heart, flower on my sketchbook and I think to myself “you were definitely drawing this in the corner of your school books”. That kind of art is really charming. I just realized I didn’t answer your question at all.

In my case, I think my cousins deserve most of the credit for me sticking with it. They were extremely supportive to me as a kid. They were considerably older than me, enough to work and go to college, but liking Sonic and Vocaloid was still more relatable to them than it was to my parents, obviously. They would always check out whatever I was doing, listen to me go on and on about my ideas or whatever…

I lost motivation in art in my teens, mostly because being a teenager sucked. I was barely doing anything. Up until 2020, if you took any drawing from the previous 5 year period, there’d be no discernible difference between them. I got out of that rut once I learned how to encourage myself or something, and I picked drawing back up again in December 2019. I took it really seriously. I would just draw all day and practice, read art books, study the fundamentals. It was the most fun I ever had up until that point in my life.

noo-dll: Thank you! My process varies a lot. I’m a little more selective than I used to be with full illustrations due to my limited time, so there’s always a backlog around. Whatever I decide to finish is usually what I’m the most interested in doing at the moment.

I’m always writing down ideas, sketching little thumbnails when I can, picking color variations, then I let them simmer for a bit… just absorbing it and checking if there could be any further developments. I have ideas that have been sitting on my files for up to a year, but I’m patient with them. You know, John Singer Sargent did dozens and dozens of sketches in preparation for the Madame X portrait. It’s sort of like that, except mine is Madame Y, as in Y Do I Even Bother (◕‿◕✿)

Some illustrations are still on a whim though, and obviously I don’t plan anything sketchbook-related. I guess the short answer is that I’m always experimenting with the process, but all variations come from what feels the most natural.

For the covers, I have the luxury of the deadline always being at the end of the month, so I’ll brainstorm them for as long as I can, which usually means I’ll do 60% of it in the beginning of the month and panic during the last 5 days. If I have a technically demanding idea, or am particularly busy, I need to watch myself so I can get it done in time!

Since they’re all variations on the concept of a magazine cover, it helps that there’s a certain method to it too. Even if I’m stumped on a concept, I know I’ll include the website’s name, URL, update number… if I’ll make them legible or not is a whole other deal.

noo-dll: The funny thing is I’ve been stuck recently!! I’ve spent the past few months focusing on other stuff that I really sucked at (writing, for example), so it hasn’t left me with a lot of time to study art like usual. I’ve been trying to remedy this during the second half of the year, though.

I’m not someone that particularly cares about having a unique style or flair, which is why everything I post is always so visually incongruous with whatever came before, but I’ll always pay (at least some) attention to the fundamentals. Perspective, anatomy, composition, color, value, gesture – the internet is filled with great resources for all of them; I’m more of a book/.pdf guy, in this case. The Internet Archive is a lifesaver and has most of the books I’ll mention. Probably in the top 3 best websites list.

People make fun of the idea of learning bone and muscle structures to draw anime girls, and it does sound pretty funny, but everything happens inside a spectrum of abstraction. As a kid, it took me years to realize that those “anger marks” that popped on character’s heads were playing on forehead veins. It’s a visual language, so the more you learn, the wider your vocabulary, and this allows you to experiment with intent.

A few of the books I’ve studied that have brought a lot of value to me:

• Bridgman’s Constructive Anatomy, which I’ve copied pretty extensively and it helped me internalize some general anatomy stuff (should probably get back to it soon).

• Complete Guide To Drawing From Life is another book of his that I really like.

• Sketching and Rendering in Pencil by Arthur L. Guptill is really interesting if you want to improve your linework.

• Sometimes I’ll be stuck on a certain material while painting and Scott Robertson’s How to Render comes in handy.

• I’m a moron and have NEVER learned how to execute proper perspective, though I’ve been reading Space Drawing: Perspective by Dong Ho Kim lately and it’s on a much more intuitive level than the other perspective material I’ve gotten through.

Also, just plainly study the art you like. I’ve copied so many Yoh Yoshinari drawings in my sketchbook; Masaaki Yuasa, Kim Jung Gi, Katsuya Terada etc. Whatever art you like, that speaks to you… even art that you DON’T like, honestly – I’ve tried my hand at studying art I thought looked off to try and fix it. If you focus on what you’re copying and try to recreate the artist’s thought process, you learn so much!

As long as you’re curious or seeking to learn, there will always be some progress. How much progress there is will depend on how much you’re willing to spend time to focus on studying and executing it. For every good drawing I’ve made, there’s been at the very least 1000 bad ones building up to it. Sometimes I get intimidated by a pose or angle and try to slip my way out of it, but giving those ideas a shot is how you truly develop your abilities. So you have to always remind yourself to just go at it.

noo-dll:There’s so many I don’t even know what to say!

There’s an obvious Newgrounds undercurrent through everything that I do. I could sit here all day talking about how much I like Caravaggio and Michelangelo or whatever (and I do), but I have so much more in common with Brawl Taunts than with those guys. In my opinion, Newgrounds is the best website on the internet. dreaminerryday was a huge catalyst for me to start learning art back in 2019. Just a stellar illustrator, there’s so much personality in those drawings…

Currently, my biggest online inspirations are probably from ok_tieno, cyanomele, dagobahs08, derrek, JJJ4Y0_O… there’s lots more, obviously, but are the ones that come to mind right now. It sounds embarrassing, but I love their art so much, I feel it way deep in my chest.

Truthfully, the trite answer would be that I’m inspired by everything, but I’m more interested in recommending artists that I like than talking about how ] people should care about floor grout and paper cuts or whatever, because I feel like most people have that sort of awareness. You’re supposed to take it all in. Life, I mean. I only like those artists as much as I do because of how they communicate the way they perceive things, how I relate to it and all that balderdash.

noo-dll: All the Earthbound references make me laugh now because I didn’t beat the game until way later. I’m a poser at so many things, you know.

I started making music in 2016. I was 12 and needed music for an RPG Maker game I was trying to make. I found out about Beepbox while searching online and started composing short little songs there. The first song I ever did was “ happy problems” on “wavebits”. I gave up on the game a few weeks later, obviously, because I was a 12 year old making an RPG Maker game, but I took a liking to music and kept at it. I moved to FL Studio a while after that.

If you want to contextualize those early records, lo-fi hip hop was big on SoundCloud in the early 10s (it probably still is). I loved it at the time. I liked wonky (the genre) too. My tastes shifted towards ambient and experimental stuff after a while. I got an acoustic guitar in late 2019, and that was huge… “neuezone” came right after. Obviously a lot of influence from Jandek and NEU! (down to the name), but there were also a lot of James Ferraro, Ween, Salami Rose Joe Louis, Faust, Elliott Smith, Les Rallizes Dénudés etc… Pretty sure there’s a few Joy Division solos somewhere in there. Also, sometime during the making of that one, a friend gifted me Hylics on Steam – that soundtrack gave me a lot of confidence.

I have too many inspirations in music. I just listen to whatever… if we’re talking about the most impactful, I guess the ones that changed me the most were Jan Jelinek, NEU!, Jandek, Fellini… not in any order.

I haven’t released a proper (solo) record in 5 years. I feel kinda bad about it because that early music feels so distant from what I’m doing now! I’ve learned a lot since. There will be some new stuff in a bit. It took a lot of years for the songs to be listenable, and now we’re in the period where I’m also trying to make them good. It’s pretty damn hard…!

noo-dll: Thank you! I feel like not a lot has changed, but my perspective is a little distorted – I get to stare all day at the long-term stuff I haven’t finished, so it’s hard to get a fresh point of view. If I could remove myself from that, I think it has just slowly matured (like I have)… It’s nowhere near where I think it’ll go, though. It’s hard to get myself to stop looking forward when it comes to this topic, so I don’t know how to answer your question!!

noo-dll: I’m currently working on the biggest thing I’ve ever done and it has a fixed date to it. I’m used to stumbling over deadlines, but I really took it to heart recently, and I think the monthly updates have proved (in some vague sense) that I can definitely be on time when I put my mind to it… I don’t think a lot of people are going to care for it, but someone might. I don’t want to say what it is or when it’s out (for da pressure) but, if it’s not done by the deadline… actually, I don’t think that’s possible. If it was, I would evaporate into a thin mist.

Besides that, I think more music should be coming out this year, definitely more art, some pretty good website updates… just keep an eye out :^P

noo-dll: I’ve been enjoying running with a friend recently. I go out every few Fridays or on the weekend to a bar or something… I like going outside, but I sort of do the minimum here. I like talking to people too, and do it often, but I’m not sure I’ve been getting any better at it.

If I’m not at my job or doing this stuff, I’m probably watching something, listening to music, reading, trying to play videogames, staring at the wall. I don’t like multitasking, honestly, so I dedicate a lot of individual time to everything.

noo-dll: **Harmful Park** is amazing. I played it like three times in a row back in March. It’s a cute ‘em up for the PSX that got translated a while back. The music is so fun, the gameplay is great (I thought the default difficulty setting was pretty easy though, so after cruising for the first time I recommend cranking it up a bit in the settings), but what I really love are the visuals and gags… the pixel art is so gorgeous. There are so many things happening in the background, you’ll miss half of it in the first playthrough. The theme park setting is such a great idea! I doubt I’m really selling it to anyone, so I recommend checking out a gameplay video of it. It’s pretty short, you could beat it in a lunch break.

noo-dll: Hehe, it’s a lame answer but it was a Flower, Sun and Rain quote all along. Both phrases in the about page’s marquee are from Sumio Mondo – Catherine is Sumio’s universal solving briefcase, essentially. A lot of the text on those marquees are quotes from things I like, actually.

Even so, there are certainly secrets lurking on the website… I don’t want to spoil it, but be wary of strangely-colored links in one of the old blogposts … (≖_≖ ) they’ll take you somewhere south of plankton town, that’s for sure.