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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 :
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

mmmPI wrote: Sat Aug 02, 2025 8:54 pmNow 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!

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.

eugenekay wrote: Sat Aug 02, 2025 9:19 pm

mmmPI wrote: Sat Aug 02, 2025 8:54 pmNow 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.

Dr.Cola wrote: Sat Aug 02, 2025 9:29 pm 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 ?

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 !