Pen and paper thumbnail

[mmmPI]

I couldn't help but notice no-one on the mod portal seem to have used a pen and paper drawing for their thumbnail, yet it sound such a brilliant idea that was suggested to me twice today, so i thought why not try it myself !

I have made several mods that adds music, so if i want to best represent the beautifulness i thought it would be hard to draw the music, but a 5 minute brainstorm with another user allowed me to realize that i could just draw a speaker since that's where the music come from and since all my mods adds some form of sound i can just use the same thumbnail for every mod. ( ok it's a bit confusing but feel free to suggest better idea, it's not easy ).

Now i'm still unsure it show all the care put into it because of the use of the pen and paper, to me it just look like a quick doodle, and i wanted some feedback before i replace all my thumbnails by this new one :

pen and paper.png (101.56 KiB) Viewed 1383 times

What do you think ? the old ones are visible if you click the link in my signature =)

I can propose my pen and paper artist service for free if anyone is interested, i can make similar doodle in about 5 second, and i have some sarcasm already inside me that i can provide for free to goes alongside the drawings

[eugenekay]

Now i'm still unsure it show all the care put into it because of the use of the pen and paper, to me it just look like a quick doodle, and i wanted some feedback before i replace all my thumbnails by this new one :

I like it. I was immediately reminded of early XKCD, which were scanned from Paper.

Good Luck with drawing more icons!

[Dr.Cola]

You are trying to be sarcastic but it genuinely looks nice and fits with what the mod is about.
Even simple icons can tell a lot than an overly complex AI generated crap.

[mmmPI]

Now i'm still unsure it show all the care put into it because of the use of the pen and paper, to me it just look like a quick doodle, and i wanted some feedback before i replace all my thumbnails by this new one :

I like it. I was immediately reminded of early XKCD, which were scanned from Paper.

Good Luck with drawing more icons!

I don't need to draw the others, i can give this one to an AI and ask it to draw other icons with the same style ,that's low effort, but seriously the initial doodle too so i don't think that's a problem

It won't be stealing anyone's style either, just mine

And it shows i am an artist as i used pen and paper

It's just limited because i made dozen of mods that adds music or instruments, and i cannot use a speaker for all the mods, that would miss the point.

You are trying to be sarcastic but it genuinely looks nice and fits with what the mod is about.
Even simple icons can tell a lot than an overly complex AI generated crap.

I can understand you need simple drawing to understand the meaning of things

How can you tell it's not a ai generated drawing of a hand drawn speaker ?

[mmmPI]

mmmpen and monkey.png (204.31 KiB) Viewed 1286 times

I proudly introduce to you my new pen and paper drawing called : "mc monkey mimicking pedantic individuals" , or "mmmpi" for short , or "mmmpi point monkey" in the not-long, not-short either form, for those people that can never decide between 2 extreme.

It took a lot of time to get the smile right, much more effort than previous doodle, i like to think of it as an allegory of irony, whose raised finger is pointing upward toward the realization that art is a process and not reductible to the form of its output. That's also why it's called mimicking pedantry ( note the classy trench coat this is a gentleman monkey ! ) Its nose is shaped like a heart because that's how gorilla nose are, and also because it was made with love it was emphasized a little. He possess the magnificent Factorio Chainz around his neck because he's the captain of his own spaceship, and he's ready to tell you about a very important point you are totally unaware of, and if you do not listen he's gonna play the cha-cha slide on the spaceship arcade machine again and you gonna have to do the whole dance again.

I draw this pen and paper drawing using various AI and no actual pen or paper, hopefully you can't tell from the hand because i added the missing fingers on gimp manually ( haha) , but i was too lazy to redo the chainz, i instead focused onto making a fake hand writing on the top left, and tilting the image and skew perspective slightly to make it look like it could have been scanned from a drawing book whose page are curvy, this after turning some AI generated image into pen and paper style using other program ( both convolution related algorithm ! ) maybe a few other details i thought of while toying around with the software and parameter of the transform, and things like scale of white ,trying to best match the pen and paper style.

Now i want to make a song to go along with lyrics and all maybe the intro could be the noise of a pen screeching on a paper in irregular pattern like when writing, and it would progressively turn into rythmic, and then the monkey would say something like : "you can hear the sound of paper, but you can't draw the feeling of a sound" and there would be a techno drop and maybe the paper screeching would start again in the background tchrri trchii trchi - trchii trrchii trchii - trchii trchii trchii , and then a voice over, lower, would enumerate lots of simplistic one-liner, like " i do not limit my chests", "and the screeching noise would answer , like someone is striking what was just read from a list because it's wrong. That would be along the lines of what i did already in my mods but usually i only make the thumbnail after the music so that would be a first, thanks for the inspiration !

[mmmPI]

Hey i wasn't done with the brilliant pen and paper idea, i made another doodle :

doodle.JPG (41.95 KiB) Viewed 1174 times

And then i used it to make a video, to illustrate a song for a new mod:


The mod add this songs as ambient music when on a space platform. https://mods.factorio.com/mod/PI-CHAD ( there's even a screenshot of the song in the programmable speaker list )

This time no AI were used for the video clip ( albeit the same cannot be said about the sound ) , but i think next time i'll try to use an AI to animate the doodle so it starts moving. The video should have sound of better quality than the one from the mod portal, but it's still not like in the game, which is still not the "best" possible.

I find it lacks colors and is a bit sad and bland, but the song is not happy either and pretty uneventfull, it's a slow moving river without too much thrills, so in a way that kinda fits, albeit the later song will have more joy in them

[mmmPI]

Hey i noticed it's actually fairly easy to make whole video looking like pen and paper, so i used it to try and write something in factorio for it to look better than my handwriting but still be pen and paper



Does that qualify as art ?

[Tertius]

mmmpen and monkey.png

I proudly introduce to you my new pen and paper drawing called : "mc monkey mimicking pedantic individuals" , or "mmmpi" for short , or "mmmpi point monkey" in the not-long, not-short either form, for those people that can never decide between 2 extreme.

I'm sorry to be pedantic, but the monkey's pointing fist isn't anatomically possible. Your monkey resembles a gorilla, and gorillas cannot create a fist like this, because the thumb isn't in opposition to the other fingers as it is possible for a human.
A pointing fist of a gorilla would look like this [AI generated image]:

08-10-2025, 13-42-45.png (1.99 MiB) Viewed 1070 times

[mmmPI]

I'm sorry to be pedantic, but the monkey's pointing fist isn't anatomically possible. Your monkey resembles a gorilla, and gorillas cannot create a fist like this, because the thumb isn't in opposition to the other fingers as it is possible for a human.
A pointing fist of a gorilla would look like this [AI generated image]:

Oh but i can appreciate pedantery when it's used to elevate the level instead of pushing people down, almost only actually, don't be sorry !

I can see your AI generated gorilla shares some anatomic feature with my AI generated monkey, which may have lead you to think it is a gorilla or maybe it's the nose x), but when you look at the ears, they belong to a chimpanzee , gorilla i think all have tiny ears which would make it easier for headset. Therefore the hand is to be considered as potentially belonging to an imaginary primate specie more closely related to the human than the gorilla for which the thumb in opposition to the rest of the fingers wouldn't be the most shocking detail i can see on the hand. ( hint: your monkey has five fingers no matter from where you count them ).

I noticed the english or german version of the wiki page for Gorilla do not contain the same exact pictures, nor does the french version, which i'm linking there because i found it's the one with the most pictures of diverse sub-species of gorilla, like mountain gorilla, or plain gorilla, and east and west gorilla : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorille#E ... _actuelles, yours look like a realistic western river gorilla, judging from the reference pictures, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_River_gorilla but the fingers have hairs which i think isn't the case on those phalanx when they use knuckle walk :

(real picture)

closeup-gorilla-hands.jpg (110.75 KiB) Viewed 1050 times

https://www.trvst.world/biodiversity/gorilla-facts/

Documentation is important, the sense of details too but you can also always use "artistic license" , and cheat reality in your art, that was the case here

[mmmPI]

I wrote some lyrics yesterday in the train, with a pen and a paper, about the worms in Fulgora, while tapping a rythm with my finger on my knee, it took about 2 hours, but i wasn't really at it, typed in on computer when i came back, then tried for like 6 hours or so to have AI sing in in the proper rythm, while adding some "oww oh-oh awww OH ! OhOhh ! and changing the writings to more phonetics and how it is broken into different lanes , refining the prompt for it to try and sound like it had in mind when writing. I should probably have also used AI to make sure i didn't do english mistakes but i was doodling instead.

At some point there was 2 songs i liked even though it was not really like my idea, i stopped using AIs and started to refined one, remove part of the WoooooOoOot that i didn't like at the beginning to keep my favourites, shorten a bit the song removing an instrumental in the middle, extracted the stem with AI, rebuilt the song with additionnal vocal in the back with a bit more reverb to make it more "chorus" or "anthem" song, doubled the drums to improve the stereo effect using frequency filters like i saw on tutorials, and boosted a bit the bass to try and lessen the difference in the sound in game between zoom-in and out. ( about 2 hours ).

Adding a bit of extra time to make a video from the paper with the lyrics and the doodle that wouldnt alter the sound quality, and fit under 20 MB with "some fancy effect", it has 5 image per second and the resolution is made 386*520 further compressed with loss it would be half sized otherwise ( the size of a PEN AND PAPER THUMBNAIL) . Sound bit rate was kept 256 kps.

I know AI is bad and going to eradicate humanity and all that, but i don't have that many friend and even less than can sing like that for a silly song that i'd like to put in a mod to play in Vulcanus when you trigger a worm attack, i can do the taping in rythm myself, the energy , the cheering, the idea, the motivation but that ain't gonna make a song. I feel like i'm an amateur barber, no ones wants to have their hair cut by a beginner, and even less the beard, but you gotta practice somehow to improve in skill, so i'm practicing with AI material, not with lyrics someone would have practiced hours to pronounce in the right tones and mood and then hours again to record, but one still need feedback to improve so i'm also sharing my "work"

It could have been just the poen but i think it would be less funny, and i math it out, Factorio-style, the song is 4 minutes long, if i listen to it 240 times, it will be more than the around 16 hours that it took to make it. Although that's quite a selfish view, you can help too , if it makes you smile , just even a little, it wouldn't be wasted time