Thoughts on the Aftyn Center posts
I finally finished and posted the whole Aftyn Center story. It’s been a real journey! When I started drawing as a teenager, comic books were my guiding light. It was a dream to draw my own stories. Obviously in this case I didn’t do anything as bold as drawing it as a comic, but putting visuals to my words was quite a thrill and a real learning experience. I intend to keep doing it! But, because the story posts don’t give me a place to write up thoughts on the pictures, I am making a separate post to talk about them. I do have thoughts!
But first, if you haven’t read the story, you should. This post will contain spoilers.
To kick things off, we have this image — OG Aftyn welcoming you to the Aftyn Center. Story-wise, it felt a little weird to introduce this tale of a bunch of Aftyn characters by starting with one of my own. I added the Office Girl to balance the sides because there were simply more succubi than humans. Originally I had added two human characters, but Cat Aftyn wound up filling that gap.
As the first image to accompany my story, this one carried a lot of weight. It had to look like Aftyn. It had to establish a style I could keep going through the whole series. And it had to catch your eye. Each of those was a special challenge. The pose and outfit are from imagination — there was a doll that inspired some of lines on the suit. For her face, I went through several iterations, several references, and each was a failure. I just couldn’t get a likeness to settle at this size. Eventually I drew a larger version that I was able to use as a guide for this simplified face. Her hair style is taken from the Parlor of relaxation video. Because I am quite poor at visualizing 3D spaces, the building is taken from a photograph of a nearby office center.
Once I had the basics established, I tried to work on a style. I think because of the comic book thought pattern, I committed to inking early, but beyond that I didn’t have any concrete thoughts. Should it be all ink? Should I color it? I went through a few iterations before landing on the ink plus brush shading version.
Eventually I landed on a hybrid of the dry brush shading with blending to soften the edges over a subtle layer of the ink shade marks. All of the marks are hand-drawn to give the world a soft, organic look.
For the second image, I set myself up for a real challenge, putting three figures in the scene at once. As soon as you have multiple people in a scene, you open up questions about composition, relative sizes, an environment to put them all into context, and so on. On all these scores, I’d call this particular image a failure. Not just because of the utter breakdown of my sense of perspective, but also because two of the figures are much less interesting than Nurse Aftyn.
I knew Nurse Aftyn needed to be the star of this image. Her falling on her butt and giving our protagonist a glimpse of her panties is probably the most crucial moment of chapter one, since she’s the real hero of our story. (Side note: I wrote chapters one and two before the return of Nurse Aftyn in May 2021. That was a fortuitous coincidence!) You may have even spotted me trying to work out these poses ahead of time.
Aside from her feet and the fact she doesn’t look particularly pained, I think Nurse Aftyn looks pretty good here. The scrub dress looks decent, if a little loose. In earlier iterations I was trying to also show a bit of her bra, but could never make that fit right. Cat Aftyn’s pose looks fine, but her face doesn’t look like she’s in the same world as anyone else. Cat Aftyn and Dr Rosey, the dental hygienist, are canonically in the wrong place! The incident with Nurse Aftyn bumping into you takes place in the optometrist’s office before either of them get introduced. But I was more interested in drawing their outfits, so here they are.
I keep going back and forth on the succubi group shot. There are parts I like, but then I’ll fixate on parts I don’t. It was important to give Dangerous a bit of a star turn, given her importance to the story. Her lace bra is quite eye-catching, and works well. Her facial pose never gave the intimidation factor I was looking for, though, her shoulders are too broad, and her midriff is too narrow. Playful is fun, but the pose is uninspiring. Bratty simply does not look like herself.
Facial likeness failures are kind of a running theme through all of these. The more I have to draw her face from imagination, the less it’s going to look like her. I simply don’t have her modeled well enough in my head to pull off a recognizable face in arbitrary poses. I figure I’ll get there in time, though. I can feel those brain muscles forming, and I keep getting more analytical about figuring out my shortcomings there.
The Angelic Imposter gets straight-up sexy. I was very happy, writing the story, with the idea that her pasties were blasphemous crosses and that’s what gave away her demonic nature. It was a fun turn. The torso part of her pose I took from someone else entirely and adapted for Aftyn. That put me in a position of having to imagine her nearly naked, but as you probably know, that’s a challenge I enjoy. The legs are from imagination. They look pretty good, but those feet! Terrible! I worked on those over and over and at some point just gave up. I am bad at drawing feet! The face I must have referenced; it looks solid. Up to this point in the posting cycle, this was probably the image I am most proud of.
This picture, the start of chapter three, took me a long time. The concept was that I would get the Ghost girl, Dr Rose, and the book she knocks over all in the same frame. I simply could not make that composition work. Eventually I settled on this, with a focus on Dr Rose and the Ghost girl coming through the wall. Dr Rose, incidentally, is not pulled from any of the videos. My concept of her was that she is just Aftyn herself, the human behind the characters. That’s why I included the detail about buying the building in 2017 — the year Aftyn started making ASMR content.
The poses and the environment here are both completely invented by me. I found references for the faces, but otherwise all details are from my imagination. It is a work I’m pretty proud of, for all the obvious roughness. The shadows on the walls really help ground it. I probably did a better job here imagining the impact of the light than ever before, and I’m sure this is my best environment in perspective to date.
Dr Rose’s open robe look, which is such a tiny detail in the story, it so sexy in my head with that little hint of nipple, I knew I had to capture it here. I do think her neck looks a little off, but otherwise, I really like her figure, including the hair and face. The Ghost girl’s body came together reasonably fast, but getting her face to settle into a reasonable likeness took bloody forever. I kept scrapping and changing her face, at least five times.
You may see on this one the inking style has changed. I’m no longer using the very clean “syrup” pen for inking. That’s a product of the last two images, still to come. I lost confidence in the inks + shading presentation for the Intrigued succubus and Nurse Aftyn pictures and reworked this one to use the rougher line style. It wound up looking like a hybrid of the two.
Ah, the Intrigued succubus! I love this character so much! I think more than Aftyn herself does, truth be told. As noted above, I had written the first two chapters of my story before the Intrigued succubus or revisited Nurse Aftyn videos dropped. That presented an interesting challenge story-wise, but the succubi sneaking her in as a cheat felt like the perfect way to involve her. She was a joy to write and later on to draw.
This image is cobbled together from a bunch of different references and imagination, but I am very happy how it all came together. Her face is from one shot, her upper torso from another, hips from a third. The legs and arms are from my imagination. The wing texture looks credibly like feathers without being a mass of details. The tightness and shininess of her lingerie come through clearly. Her mouth and hair are strictly from imagination, and I think both look pretty good. All of the shading is from me; I think I did a better job picturing the impact of lighting on this figure than I ever have before. I even managed to communicate Aftyn’s strong abdominal muscles!
This was a triumph. With all those subtle details, you can probably see why I didn’t think going to inks was going to help with this picture. That forced my hand to change the style for the rest of the chapter.
How do you follow that up? Well, Nurse Aftyn already had my heart, so I was pretty sure she was going to win. Despite the similarity to a recent pose I drew, this pose is largely taken from reference in the Nurse Aftyn video. Against my custom, I have added clothing, including the scrub dress and lacy bra. (Not going to lie: that is an incredibly sexy video, and one of my favorites in her catalog.)
I love it! I think my additions — the arm, the scrubs, the bra, the shading — all look quite solid. I could quibble with the size of her thumb or the shadow on the top edge of her shoulder, but I love it all. It’s got an even rougher shading style than the one before, but I am finding myself really gelling with the patchiness. The clarity of details on her panties and the lace pattern on the bra are convincing. I even like the folds on the fabric, something I have a lot of trouble with. And remember, the whole dress is imagined!
Her butt looks wonderful! The tights are perfect. Her face, although it took me a long time to get, eventually settled into what I think is the best likeness in the entire series. I love this drawing, and I am happy and proud it is the capstone for my story.