Today I stumbled onto a sale at my university bookstore where there happened to be coloured fountain pens. They might not be that hard to find, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to have a bright pink one.
I then pretty immediately drew what I wanted to get done on the fifth (and fourth, and…). It’s a start to a revamp of Red!
Some vaguely-related drawing pages I’ve been sitting on for too long waiting to finish, and finally got off my butt to finish and scan this weekend.
The vvagra! Finally. I’ve been sitting on this creature half-designed for like ever and finally here is a proportional drawing I can call canon.
Ok I finally gave them a name after all this time
The person who unified Aeterna is named Nall Ssingalain.
Their ‘family name’ means “none”; it’s supposed to be cognate with “null”. (I imagine it was already a regular word too and when being poetic Aeterna might well write “all or nall”. :p) It was a very untraditional choice up to their time that they chose to reflect their ideology of non-affinity with any faction or clan, though probably recurs in some small frequency in the modern era as people who identify with them do the same.
Wow okay
While redesigning the leijonœrns I got a little stuck
Then I looked at the fucking shower curtain and saw the perfect head shape
I fixed up my uninspired start of a drawing from earlier today with the new head shape and this is like my favourite fantasy creature ever
It’s just a griffin with a pointy horn-beak and reversed front limbs but man is it cool
Some miscellaneous creatures that didn’t quite work.
Shadow has been a character I’ve been consistently ambivalent about, and I’ve had thoughts of either dropping or revamping him a bunch. Remembering another (throwaway) character I’d created once with a vaguely interesting appearance and the fact I didn’t exactly have an Esteemed character on the main cast I tried to revamp him to be Esteemed, and it looked pretty cool honestly, but after a little while I scrapped that idea, realising that nope, I just wasn’t realising what the main idea of Esteem was before so there actually was one already, and also that this design was a little lacklustre in being too “standardly awesome”. So I’m back to square one with him, but at least this misstep made me appreciate him a bit more.
A couple of “traditional” medieval creatures, which I’m not sure if I’ll use or not. One was an “ermine” with a heraldic “ermine” pattern, the other was a very literal take on a leucrota (from Pliny the Elder’s description).
Leijonœrns. Or, serious attempts at them that didn’t quite work. Originally I wanted them to look a lot like hexarts (see: sideways one, stuff at the top), but more recently (many months after I’d drawn the sideways one) I decided it would be more interesting to give them shoulder arms and ground wings and make them visually different from hexarts, and do similar with the other six-limbed creatures. I’m probably going to stick with that, though it’s the only thing I solidly liked about these.
Ok, this is kind of a big one. We’re talking practically two months, so there’s a lot of stuff that happened in that time.
A bunch of this stuff is also kind of both scraps and good stuff at the same time, too, so I’ll make separate posts to further explain things where that applies.
My friends and I had for a short while had a patchwork roleplay over Skype, which I made a number of doodles for. Anyway, this was one in which I drew two different forms Yanha assumed in the roleplay.
You know, I think part of the reason I made up the word leijonœrn (or, rather, repurposed it for Stablehand; it was originally a Tyrian thing) is just that I hate the fact I never know which spelling to use for the “regular” word for those fantastic lionbirdthings.
I shall call you… the Ambuloptera
Neh, there’s already Nycopteryx. Everything is going to be named after clawed wings if I keep this up.
Oh gosh, bestiaries were like, the best thing ever…
The pard:
(he looks so smug too)
The reindeer, aka the colour-changing camo antelope:
I think this was supposed to be a reindeer anyway? Actually I’m not sure. All I know is Latin dictionaries today say “tarandrus” means reindeer and it’s used in their scientific name too.
Oh gods what even is this thing
And then there are the griffins
It’s like they have quadrupedal pterosaur wings but they’re also bird wings with legs on them and I don’t even…?
I kinda want to work that weird anatomy into some kind of leijonœrn subgroup to be honest.
I lied. These flags are taking forever so I’m posting the sketches now, as well as a mostly unrelated page where I mostly drew mystery beings’ feet.
The “final” designs, or the ones I’m vectorising right now at least, are just the left column and the first and last flags in the second column (they’re supposed to be one flag; the first one is just the foreground of that flag so I could draw/trace it easier). All the others are scrapped ideas!
I’m not going to explain any more right now because Sangkara is for that.