Zesty

I was feeling silly one day and so I made some more sabre-toothed limes.

The sublime was very, very silly. The awful pun amused me though.

The miner was one that I really should have come up with as a part of the original batch. I thought it would be a simple job, just plopping a helmet on a regular lime. It didn't look right though. Hence the coal-blacking. The smears were borrowed from one of my black & white icons. That's a use for the icons I hadn't considered - a library of useful shapes.

The mummy is awful. It looks like it's been attacked with a roll of toilet paper. You can tell I had no big plan for a bandage pattern going in.

The chewing gum is also silly. Won't make much sense unless you know that lime-and-chili-flavoured chewing gum is an item in KoL. It was one of the very few lime-related things in the game that didn't get an entry in the old batch, so it was a shoe-in for generation 2.

The punk is just random. Lime with a mohawk seemed a good start for something. I like the shaved head look though. Lip piercing is unsatisfying. The outlining is overwhelming I think. Also the pink hair would probably look better as a dark green or green/blue.

Lime-in-a-box is not randomness; it's a reference to randomness. KoL has a lemon-in-a-box amongst its enemies. Conveniently I'd already drawn an LitB for another project so I just replaced the lemon with a lime. Job done. Won't fit neatly into a grid should i complie these though.

The batlime I mentioned previously as a temptation. Decided it was worth doing after all.

BRICKO lime was fun. One of the more worthwhile ideas. A reference to a recently added item that lets you summon BRICKO bricks. Tried to ape the art style. The fangs were an indulgence, but they're based on an actual Lego brick so that's fine.

El Vibrato lime is a new favourite. The El Vibrato monsters have a really cool look within the constraints of KoL's style, but I reckon they'd also work great outside of it. Implies a lot of detail. The blue knight-rider lights are taken from an item description. I reckon this lime sits in the sweet spot between faithfulness and looking good on its own.

Gimacite is another I'm happy with. hard, black and shiny. Based it on the sabre-toothed limestone initially, then started meddling.

The lantern's glow isn't quite right, but I didn't want to use gradients.

Limeling's based on the slimeling. But limes don't have eyes, so it gets little limes on stalks instead. I thought this would be a stretch, but it's an obvious riff to look at it and the pun justifies a lot.

I don't have much interesting to say about these four. The class limes are significant I usppose. Not sure if I'll do the other four - the muscle classes have by far the most identifiable headware.

Trivia: I looked at a real seal skull for reference for the seal-clubber's hat, but it didn't look sealish enough. I compromised between it and the in-game icon then added a bone muzzle to seal it up.

The candied lime was almost a crystalised lime - that was I could put a lime in a sweet wrapper and call it a candied lime. The name suits this better though. I could always do a sherbert lime. Pleased with the texture, though I keep wanting to fiddle with it more.

Entirely too much fun was had making the lime green ranger. Never actually a Power Rangers fan, but aping the style was a riot. I wanted to do more. I think that tactical use of white lines is what I'm most pleased with here, though the fanged mouthpiece is also neat.

Werelime was an idea I had during the first batch, but couldn't pull off. Even now that I'm more experienced with inkscape, it was a bother getting it looking right. To start with it looked more like a porculime (mental note: do a porculime) or a puffer-lime. or maybe just a mudkip.

Pinata was fiddly and hasn't turned out perfect, but it's identifiable.

Meat lime was difficult. The fat marbling alone wasn't working, but I didn't want to drown it in detail. The dark creases sell it think, though the highlights on the fat also contribute.

All in all the second generation of limes has a lot more detail than the first. Which is nice. I'm stretching. Right now I feel I'm all out of inspiration, but that's what I thought at the end of the first batch and here I am twenty-two limes later.

I had oodles of fun making these.

Citrus explosion

Here's the rest of the limes. Seventy seven. Well, seventy-six, counting the n'est pas une lime. Even less if you count the skewered/sliced limes proportionally. And past that awkward questions arise about whether if the snow lime isn't really a lime, why is the plexiglass one? So let's just call it seventy-seven and leave it at that.

Limes of note:

Limebat - KoL features a variety of very silly bats. Limebat is conspicuous by its absence. Until now!

Mariachi lime - Should I have given him a moustache? An enormous moustache seems appropriate, but the sombrero seems enough. Not all of them can be OTT.

Lime in a coconut - Very silly. Very very silly. Fun.

Ninja/bandit - The bandit is probably the crappest of the limes. See, the "joke" is that he's just the ninja lime with the mask inverted. Which probably amuses nobody but me, since everyone just said he looked like a ninja turtle. He became more and more acceptable to me as I added more limes to distract from him.

Poisonous amazon sabre-toothed tree-lime - This is another one that's mainly funny to me. I just find the idea of Poisonous amazon tree-*s to be intrinsically funny. Like ducks. Or fridges. Poisonous amazon sabre-toothed tree-fridges are too funny to ever be depicted by human hands.

Anime lime - You try anime-ising something with no eyes. I think it came out ok considering, but I feel a little guilty including it because it's not terribly KoLish (already had a protagonist lime for that) and it looks incredibly lame when people try to parody anime-style and get it wrong. I keep looking back to this guy with scepticism, but I guess that mouth's passable.

Cubist lime - I'm pretty sure that anyone who actually groks cubism will think the same of my cubist lime as i think of most attempts to parody an anime/manga style.

Plexiglass lime - Probably my favourite. The plexiglass effect came together unexpectedly easily.

Brimstone lime - Necessary to complete the ascension rewards, but an arse and a half to do. Still not happy with it. I mean, the brimstone effect looks good to me. It seems a nice compromise between the KoL graphics for brimstone (glittery rock) and something that looks ok next to the plexi, but the shape of the lime is lost and the whole thing just seems flat. Not going back to this bastard any time soon though.

Harem lime - This was one of the OTT limes. Lots of detail, but it seemed kind of necessary to make her (or him!) properly haremish.

Giant lime - KoL giants are distinguished by having beards. Applying this to a lime amuses me. I guess that actually making him huge as well works against the joke, but it would be a bit weird otherwise.

Pygmy limes and assault squad - These are pretty faithful lime version of the KoL monsters. I probably shouldn't have double-dipped the pygmy thing for two limes, but a pygmy lime next to the giant lime seems obvious. And doing things like "pygmy lime", "pygmy lime assault squad" amuses me. I did it with the Hey Deze lime, Limebat and Hey Deze limebat further up too. I came this close to doing a batlime, but couldn't work out where in the order it should come for optimum hilarity.

Tiger lime - It made sense in my head, ok?

Lime mime - I like this guy. He's another "how do I do this with no eyes?" deal. The teardrop makes it. Eye makeup that doesn't require eyes. Without it he just looks like nothing in particular.

Lobotomised lime - This one nearly felt cheap to me. But the lime-juice drool came out nicely I think, and the pith-scar too (used same technique to improve igor's scars and when i did the comedian watchlime). So all in all I rather like him after all.

Key lime - Is that what key lime is? Some kind of jelly stuff made of lime that goes in pies? I'm not sure. Anyway - this is an interpretation of the KoL key lime joke.

Skewered/sliced lime - The skewered lime is an actual KoL item and so needed to be represented. In the process I made a lime cross-section. I liked the look of the sliced lime and wanted to include it just for that, but couldn't come up with an amusing name/caption. So in the end I just stuck it next to the skewered lime to sort of imply that that was what was left of the lime that segment was taken from.

Professor lime - Last one I added to the poster. Not terribly happy with it. Mortar boards tougher than expected.

Sabre-toothed salad salad - Salad is hilarious.

Lime crisis

I've gotten kind of distracted from my vector peeps lately. Perhaps I need a new angle of attack or just a new project to overthink.

Still, not doing veeps doesn't mean I've not been doing anything. I play Kingdom Of Loathing a lot, and one of its iconic images is the sabre-toothed lime. One day I drew a lime in inkscape (to fill up a blank spot in a KoL-related flowchart) and it grew on me. I felt like doing something vaguely interesting with it and I was bored, so I copied and pasted it a few times and started noodling with them.

This was the first batch. Kind of mediocre, though I like what I came up with for a lime skeleton though. I reckon that if sabre-toothed limes have skeletons, that's what they look like.

So, to say that they went down down well would be an understatement. So I did some more. There was no shortage of ideas. I mean you've seen this kind of thing before, right? A single image or character modded slightly and wittily captioned? I can't remember exactly where I've seen it done, probably overpriced university posters, but it's a known technique.

Anyway - I embraced that and started churning out limes. Which was great fun. They're easy to do, I'm working off a simple template with no post-vector colouring or texturing attempts. I'd had a fair bit of practice with inkscape recently (as demonstrated on this blog) and this was all the same techniques, so it went easier. Slightly different style and conventions so it was a bit of a change. In fact, because I wasn't making a deliberate effort to keep nodes to a minimum, it was actually easier than some of the veep stuff. The lime skeleton's teeth or the igor lime's stitches are examples of the kind of indulgence I allowed myself. Squidgy hats were another, though not seen here.

Fun times.

I ended up doing seventy-seven in all, plus some bonus. I'll pop them up here with commentary in lieu of doing anything new I think. It's fun to talk through this stuff.