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Neopets Phase

Man... What's more early internet nostalgiacore that Neopets? The two are rarely to never seen apart! It was my first introduction to I guess... "Social media", if that term even applies to it? I made my first account back in 2007, when I was around 10 years old and in 4th grade.

I had two accounts, the one I made with my real age, and another where I was totally a 14 year old grown up, when I was impatient to wait 3 years until I was old enough to access the boards and other features that were locked away from children below 13. I definitely wasn't lying about my age, shhh

I fantasized about being able to make my own screenies petpage, and cute profiles for all of my pets with their stories and have my own adoptables section and maybe be able to interact with other people from the community at the time. Truth be told, I lacked all the social skills and self-awareness to succeed in any of that, but that didn't matter to me. I was just happy to be drawing my pets and coming up with stories for them.

My Neopets

I had quite a few Neopets and alt accounts, but there were a select number of them who I drew a lot more than the others. In a way, these can be regarded as my first OCs hahaha

VerdinhaGRRRR the Christmas Grarrl

VerdinhaGRRRR, whose name directly translates to "GreenieGrrrr", was my OG, my babygirl, the love of my life and one of my first Grarrls. All my Neopets were siblings, and Verdinha was the middle sister, with my baby Grarrl being the oldest sibling because even as a 10 year old gremlin, I thought the irony of that was funny. A lot of aspects from her design were taken from Sonic characters.

In some pictures that aren't posted here, Verdinha was eventually given a pair of fairy wings as well, so she was kind of this magical fairy dinosaur sort of creature. I do have plans to redesign her for Drimare Universe, but I have yet to find a design I enjoy.

2007-2009 Art

Some of the earliest art of Verdinha in all of its jpeg glory. The skull tail accessory was a weird detail because for some reason I felt like my cutesy holiday themed dinosaur OC needed a goth vibe to her LOL


Requests and Gift Art

I had a lot more of these but they were all lost to time since I never actually saved them anywhere :( These were the only ones I managed to recover.


2009-2011 and occasional redraws

In Neopets, there were actually two versions of Verdinha. There's the original VerdinhaGRRRR from 2007, who was from my old account and was apparently abandoned and adopted by some rando, and VerdinhaGRRRRR (That's 5 Rs instead of 4) from 2011 who exists in a remade account that I still have access to this day :)


Story Excerpt

Below is a weird unfinished snippet I found in her old petpage. No, I am not correcting the bad grammar lol

Welcome

(Or not)

After passing by millions of valleys on Terror montain, you end up in front of a small cave, you think "What am I doing here?!" you want to come back but curiosity takes over you, "It won't hurt if I just take a peak..."

You enter the cave and sudently a strange feeling takes over you, the kind of feeling of thinking that you're being watched... You ignore it when you notice that the cave is starting to look more like an house.

After wandering around it, touching things and stealing food from the fridge, suddently you hear an high pitched scream coming from the ceiling to the end of the cave, you sweared you just saw something small flying over there.

There's a small moment of silence and you start hearing steps coming at you, now you're in deep trouble, you hide behind an ice sculpture nearby and look to see who was coming...

~'I SWEAR I SAW SOMEONE IN HERE!'

~'Are you sure you aren't seeing things again?'

You look at those pets, while listening to their conversation, a small striped Pteri and a... winged christmas Grarrl? So the thing you saw flying was the Pteri.. no wonder, those things are fast as heck.

Now that they're distracted, you think it's a good time to escape, you try to run away, but you forgot that the floor was made of ice and you slip right in front of them, leaving them dumbfounded, when the Pteri screamed:

~'HEY THAT'S THE PERSON I SAW!'

They sure don't look happy to see you stalking their house, you should explain yourself...

~'I... I'm sorry I got lost and I... found this cave and since you've got a lot of furniture, I thought it was abandoned and...'

~'ENOUGH' The Grarrl screamed 'You entered our house without permission! You must be a thief!'

Without you noticing it both of them grab you... Oh you shouldn't have entered that cave in the first place... They putted you in a chair and the Grarrl looked at you angry

~'Who are you?' she asked

~'I'm Y/N... Can I go now?'

The Pteri comented ~'This person looks nice~ I'm ItsieBitie, but you can call me Itsie, or Bitie, whatever you prefer ^^'

The Grarrl glared at her ~'Itsie! This person isn't trustable!'

You decide to take another chanse ~'I'm just a visitor, I didn't came to steal anything'

The Grarrl looked at you with a confused look, just what you wanted, you once read in a book, that Grarrls are very hard headed and they could easly be conviced. ~'Visitor?' she asked

~'Y-Yes'

She smiled ~'OH I'VE NEVER RECIEVED A VISITOR BEFORE' She hugged you thigtly almost crushing you(What did you expect from a Grarrl's hug?). ~'Oh I'm sorry about that, allow me to introduce myself... My name's Verdinha, and this is my little sister(Kinda) Itsie. I can show you this place, so that then you can know everything about us, mostly me, come!' She grabbed your hand. (Luckly she won't crush it) You should probably follow her... If you're lucky you'll come back alive and with no broken bones~

Good luck

ItsieBitie the Striped Pteri

Originally named Piupiuamarelinha (Roughly translates to "ChirpChirpYellowey") in an older account and then remade in a new account with the name ItsieBittie. She was a Pteri and the younger sister type, basically this tiny bird in a family of dinosaurs. Although her design did little to reflect this, she was a Gamer and a "Girls can play video games too!!" type, since that kind of narrative was a lot more common back then LOL

This came to be because I used to ship her with the Neopets Games Master character AAA. It was very much a one side crush she had on him, but he never paid her any mind.

She has been reincarnated into my OC Bitrice :)
Link to her page on my Wiki since I have yet to make OC pages here.

2007-2011 Art


Story Excerpt

An unfinished snippet that was going to be added to her page.

You look around as you find yourself in front of what appears to be a regular NeoHome like any other.

Curiosity strikes you when your knocking gets no response, but yet you can hear voices inside. Disregarding any sort of common sense, you open the door with the power of convenience and walk into the house.

It seems quite tidy, decorated with shades of purple and blue, but before you're able to take in any more details, you hear a voice once more and you look for the source. A closed purple door seems to be the culprit, and as you walk towards it, you knock and open the door, revealing a dark room with a figure sat at the desk, the light of a monitor barely lighting her face.

"CLOSE THE DOOR, MISTLETOE, I'M STREAMING!"

A female squeaks out, but as she turns to face you, she lets out a chirp mixed with a scream "H-HEY YOU'RE NOT...!" falling off her chair, you notice light feathers that she let out, and as she quickly turns on the light, you finally notice.

It's a Pteri, with pale lavender feathers and pink striped markings, headphones hanging off the desk as the game she was playing kept running.

You both spend a few minutes simply staring at eachother, and she eyes both sides.

"...We cool? You're not here to steal anything, are you?"

You shake your head and she slowly gets up and reaches for the computer, typing something, closing the game, then posting a few things on Chirper and PetBook.

After an awkward moment of silence, she looks back at you.

"Were you trying to visit my... PetPage? Urgh, it's a mess, I wasn't expecting any visitors to come over! You see, I'm a very busy girl, I don't have the time for such things!"

She sighs and looks up thoughtfully. You take this time to inspect her room, the periwinkle walls are adorned with various posters of what you assume to be kid's shows, games and other interests.

"Right! So I should tell you a bit about myself, right? Gimme a sec then."

Misc Pets

I also had a few other pets that I drew, but unlike Bittie or Verdinha, most of their art isn't scanned and just sits in old folders around my room.

I had four main pets, Verdinha, Bittie, and then T_Rex_Dino_8 who was my first Grarrl who I painted as a Baby, and as a character was this adult stuck in a kid's body.

And then there was Trexcoolgrarl (Naming wasn't my strong suit as you can tell lol) who was an Electric Grarrl, he was kind of an extra anxious manchild younger sibling type, it was never too clear, I just liked his colours :)

I also had some extra pets in alt accounts like a Blue Hissy (Which were rare and I always wanted one aaaa) but she never became an actual character and was kind of just there LOL


Adoptables

No self-respecting petpage was complete without one of these bad boys. I was often stressed out over the lack of Grarrl and Pteri adoptables so I felt that I had to put matters into my own hands... Artistic skill was an afterthought.

Grarrl Adoptables


2008

I grabbed my mouse, MS Paint, my child-like awe and wonder, and proceeded to get to work.
Feel free to use these on your pages, it's what baby Jay would have wanted.


2009

It did not take me long to realize that my 2008 Grarrls looked like absolute ass. I knew better now, I was finally getting into grown up digital art programs like GIMP and Sumo Paint. These were drawn during the cusp of my anime phase, being an early attempt at a "Chibi" style.

You guys!!! Did you know that if you use a bevel effect on your art, it's basically the same thing as doing regular shading? If there's one thing I haven't grown out of is to try and come up with excuses never to shade anything I draw.


2011

Take a wild guess as to when my anime phase came. If anyone wants weird anime anthro dinosaurs, then I'm your guy! If I recall, these were made around the time I had received my first drawing tablet. For some reason I thought this weird hybrid of pixel art mixed with digital illustration was the way to go?? These are atrocious at best, but I cannot help but have an semi-ironic, semi-genuine love for them.


Pteri Adoptables


2011

Took a while but eventually I learned that cropping images was an option. Pteris were my second favourite type of Neopet even if I only had a single one of them. Ironically, she's still being used an OC to this day. These were intended to go on her page, but I never made that many of them since my interest in Neopets had been fading out for a while.


Kaoanis


2007? 2008?

Exploring the website, I came across this tutorial for how to draw "kaoanis", as well as how to animate them as gifs. The bright neon backgrounds were because I could never figure how to get the transparency to work, so they kind of just ended up looking like this hahaha

Screenies (2007-2008)

Back in the day, I used to spend hours looking through petpages dedicated to screenies and so badly wish I could make my own.
Just something about drawing my own characters and having them react to situations and each having their own backstories and everything... it just really spoke to me.

I had just learned how to take screenshots and would draw directly on them with Paint.
I hadn't figured out how to crop images, so I just posted the entire screenshots with all of my desktop being completely visible. Looking back, I was a bit embarrassed, but seeing it now, it's like a strange time capsule :)

I'm European Portuguese, but most of the portuguese speaking community in Neopets was from Brazil, so most of my screenies were written with attempts at brazilian slang I was picking up from the boards and other screenies artists.

Reading these gives me psychic damage so I'll refrain from translating them : ^)
I was about 9-10 years old when these were made.


Bonus art I found that I very much remember drawing in 2007 :)

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