Author | Lightnews

Karin van Zon ☀️

@karinvanzon.bsky.social

240 followers 270 following 240 posts

🇳🇱 Digital artist trying to get into ink and watercolour. 🌳 Mossy forest enthousiast, love all things Tolkien, the magical and the weird, cats, and hoping to make some art friends here!

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Karin van Zon ☀️ @karinvanzon.bsky.social · Feb 8

I should make a pinned post or something.

Hi everyone! I'm Karin, and I love to draw trees, moss, and fantasy art. My goals for this year are to do more traditional art (mostly ink and watercolor) and more Tolkien art!

#art

A digital drawing of moss covered rocks with a bird on top of them.

A digital drawing of the hobbits underneath Old Man Willow. Merry and Pippin are sleeping between the roots, while Frodo is sitting on a root with his feet in the water.

An ink drawing of the exterior of a hobbit hole.

An ink and watercolour drawing of a tree stump with moss and mushrooms on it.

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Karin van Zon ☀️ @karinvanzon.bsky.social · Mar 22

Never enough moss! 💚

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Karin van Zon ☀️ @karinvanzon.bsky.social · Mar 20

The white one is Roxy, and tabby is Ravi! I love them to bits <3

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Karin van Zon ☀️ @karinvanzon.bsky.social · Mar 20

What a sweetie! 😻

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Karin van Zon ☀️ @karinvanzon.bsky.social · Mar 20

No cheating last photo of the pet.

A photo of a tabby cat with white spots lying on a couch outside. He's being pet by a man sitting beside him.

A photo of a white cat lying on a ledge in the sun. Her paws are hanging over the edge.

Reposted by Karin van Zon ☀️

Femke Nijsse @femkenijsse.bsky.social · Mar 15

🌍 We're all familiar with climate tipping points — like ice loss and rainforest dieback — but what if we can harness similar self-reinforcing feedbacks in climate action. Which techs to choose and how to change international cooperation? 🧵

👉 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... @thebulletin.org

How to leverage positive tipping points for climate action

Negative tipping points for the Earth’s climate system are approaching fast, adding further urgency to climate action. But well-designed climate action may be able to trigger its counterpart: benef...

www.tandfonline.com

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Karin van Zon ☀️ @karinvanzon.bsky.social · Mar 11

Mmm what helps me is really deciding what is important for a piece and what isn't. Like nailing the facial expression is important, but doing intricate detail on the hair often isn't going to make it break an artwork. So there I can save time by doing more of an impression of hair instead of detail.

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Karin van Zon ☀️ @karinvanzon.bsky.social · Mar 10

Shadow and Bone trilogie omdat ik het einde nooit op Netflix ga kunnen zien...

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Karin van Zon ☀️ @karinvanzon.bsky.social · Mar 10

Hell yeah! 💪

Karin van Zon ☀️ @karinvanzon.bsky.social · Mar 10

Music is from Kevin Macleod

"Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 in G, Movement I (Allegro), BWV 1049" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

incompetech – Music and also Graph Paper

incompetech.com

Karin van Zon ☀️ @karinvanzon.bsky.social · Mar 10

We could implement all these things in our current game ofc, but I think we'd rather start on something new and apply all the things we learned there :) On to the next game @bjornvandesand.bsky.social !

Karin van Zon ☀️ @karinvanzon.bsky.social · Mar 10

The main thing that stood out to me in making this is how many UX things I take for granted in games. How to make it clear which items can be interacted with and not? Doors openings should be visible on both sides? Lots to learn!

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Karin van Zon ☀️ @karinvanzon.bsky.social · Mar 10

We originally decided to see how far we could get in a weekend (of course, it ended up taking far, far longer in the end) so I settled on a quite simple artstyle with an easy workflow and very minimal animation. Animation was done with a combination of rigging in Godot and spritesheets.

An illustration of the playable character of our game, Cat the Great.

An illustration of a noble cat character from our game.

An illustration of a noblewoman cat character from our game.

An illustration of the general cat character from our game.

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Karin van Zon ☀️ @karinvanzon.bsky.social · Mar 10

The concept of this game came from our love of the series the Great, combined with these fancy portraits I made of our kitties at some point. Add in lots of cat puns, and Cat the Great was born! I did all art, animation, and gamedesign, while Bjorn did all the programming and dialogue.

A photoshopped classical painting of a white cat wearing fancy Elizabethan clothes, and wearing a crown.

A photoshopped classical painting of a tabby cat wearing an admiral's uniform.

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Karin van Zon ☀️ @karinvanzon.bsky.social · Mar 10

So a while back me and my partner @bjornvandesand decided to try and learn gamedev together, and what better way to do that than to try and make a very small game? It's very short, and very imperfect, but we had a lot of fun and learned a lot!

#gamedev #indiegamedev #godotengine

Bjorn van de Sand @handle.invalid · Mar 10

@karinvanzon.bsky.social and I just released our first game dev project: Cat the Great. A short adventure style game about a cat plotting a coup.

It's unpolished, but we're happy to share:
tarmon-gaidon.com/hosting/CatT... (Windows x64)

Outro is nsfw (violence)

#GodotEngine #GameDev #IndieGameDev

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Karin van Zon ☀️ @karinvanzon.bsky.social · Mar 3

🌳

Karin van Zon ☀️ @karinvanzon.bsky.social · Mar 1

I absolutely have done that on discord

Karin van Zon ☀️ @karinvanzon.bsky.social · Mar 1

They are so precious 🖤

Karin van Zon ☀️ @karinvanzon.bsky.social · Mar 1

No more doomscrolling today, just #cats

#caturday #catsofbluesky #roxyandravi

A white cat lying on her side with her head tilted towards the camera.

A tabby cat with white spots lying on his back in the sun, on top of a blanket.

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Karin van Zon ☀️ @karinvanzon.bsky.social · Mar 1

It looks great!

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Reposted by Karin van Zon ☀️

Rachel Deering @racheldeering.bsky.social · Feb 27

Goodnight.
🖼️ The Trolls,Tolkien.

Fire in Forest glades trolls peering out from behind trees, great plumes of white smoke come off the fire, there is a barrel next to the fire. Illustration.

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Karin van Zon ☀️ @karinvanzon.bsky.social · Feb 28

But surely you can publish a chapter or two for your friends? 🖤

Karin van Zon ☀️ @karinvanzon.bsky.social · Feb 28

Oof...so much for not talking politics on the internet. But thank you Zelensky for not giving in to those assholes in the US. You have our support in the EU.

Karin van Zon ☀️ @karinvanzon.bsky.social · Feb 26

I love the way you use colour 💚

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Karin van Zon ☀️ @karinvanzon.bsky.social · Feb 25

I love the Cor Blok paintings, they're such an original take on Middle Earth. And so did Tolkien, as he bought two of them :)

Karin van Zon ☀️ @karinvanzon.bsky.social · Feb 25

The Artist - Cor Blok's illustrations were on the front of the first Dutch LotR paperbacks from 1965. They were the first LotR edition I read, as my mom owned them, and seeing this art always fills me with nostalgia.

#tolkien #tolkientrewsday

The cover art for the Dutch Fellowship of the Ring by artist Cor Blok.

The cover art for the Dutch The Two Towers by artist Cor Blok.

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