flags always interested me. I have an entire folder on my pc of flags that I think are neat.
throwing around some ideas for flags of regions, nations, families, companies, what have you. just seeing what works and what doesn’t.
a lot of these are ripoffs of real-life flags. if an artist tells you they come up with all of their own ideas, stay away from them because they are a bold-faced liar. 🙂 The true creativity comes from spinning those ideas with your own twist.
Every single person worships something. Every person who has ever lived has worshiped something. It may not be a deity, it may not be as part of a religion. I may worship money, I may worship myself, I may worship any variety of “higher powers” or philosophies, but the point remains. I can’t “not worship anything” no matter how hard I try. It is an innate desire of every human.
We will become like what we worship in the same way as we are what we eat. It is only natural. We become like those we interact with, and we humans are creatures of habit. It will happen without us realizing it.
Reading about history, it can be tempting to judge those who live in the past or are from alien cultures as somehow unenlightened or uneducated compared to us for worshiping totems of stone or gold. I propose that the specifics depend on peer pressure more than anything. It is common to direct our worship to the same object as those around you – since all people are sheep. Even me. Even you.
According to the Bible, an idol is anything that you value or trust more than God. It doesn’t have to be a statue or a golden cow or what have you. Money is an obvious example, but an idol can be time or it can be status, it can be power… it really can be anything. An “enlightened” modern man is in exactly the same boat as some ancient druid burning herbs to the mother spirit.
The Bible particularly stresses that idols are terrible not only because God is the only worthy object of worship, but that it is bad for ourselves too. Since you become like what you worship, worshiping anything less than true perfection is a fast track to a nasty road.
I have ideas for a multitude of different time periods in mind for the comic world. as I mentioned earlier in the thread, technology doesn’t progress in the same pattern in Motherland as it did in our world. they invent certain things sooner, some later, some never. some things that we may even think impossible may be old hat to them.
all this to say that certain designs you’ll see may be anachronistic to us, but that is also kind of the point. (they invented the laser without inventing radar first? the audacity!) still, I try to make things feasible to the best of my ability — it wouldn’t make much sense if they invented AI without inventing computers, etc.
i love scifi, but some scifi can be so boring and drab. i’m trying to spice up the practical with the penache. never underestimate mankind’s ability for bling. why should space travel be dreary? get some african pattens up in there.
we’ll see how many of these designs I actually use. most are just a jumping off point to see what I like and what I don’t. I want the style and world of motherland to be unique, but unique should be minimized if it isn’t relatable. I won’t stress too much if it occasionally wears its inspiration on its sleeve.
an alien world calls for some alien animals. or “animals”. whatever they are. no reason it has to fit into our constructed plant/animal/fungus/etc categories.
some winners, some not so much. some of them have showed up already, like the weird jellyfish plant thing and the spore vines. the varieties of horses will probably show up again. the others we will have to see. trying to not let myself be limited by earth life, it is quite difficult. there is a reason why people often default to what they know.
I never quite know how alien to make the motherlanders. they should be alien enough to challenge cultural expectations and force you to relate to someone different than yourself, but they shouldn’t be so alien as to be unrelatable. there can be quite of a grey area.
there was a time where the comic characters looked much more alien. even though I liked the exotic factor, I ended up toning it down for a few reasons, the main one being I did not want to kneecap their relatability. even now there are many people who are turned off from this comic by the single fact that the characters are not visibly human, but like I said before, the reason for that is to force you to learn about cultures/people that might seem alien to you. I would hazard a guess that people who are immediately turned off by appearance may need to introspect a bit about their priorities.
the most recent example of this conundrum was my constant wrestling of whether I wanted them to be plantigrade or digitigrade (“human-feet” or “dog-feet”). it isn’t a huge deal either way, but i spent more time wrestling with the design than i’d like to admit. You can see me not committing in the early parts of ch2 if you look. in the end I settled more or less on plantigrade (human-feet), again because it made the silhouette seem more human. I could play with figure poses in a more natural way. drawing someone run when they have dog feet looks a bit “off”.
and sometimes it just looks better to leave it a bit vague. don’t let the rules of the design get in the way of what the panel needs.
As some may have noticed, I don’t like drawing backgrounds. They drive me nuts and bore me to tears. it’s not so much that I can’t, I just don’t care. In particular, I hate interiors.
But I knew that the next chapter would take place primarily indoors. So I did some thinking and came up with a house based on a kiva that meant I wouldn’t have to draw as many angles and could go with my trademark vague background swooshes. Much less painful.
I actually did come up with a floor plan, which I actually more or less stuck to for once. but like wiser artists than me say, don’t let reference get in the way of what works in the panel. I need to follow my own advice.
the pit in the middle is built over a geothermal vent, which can be covered up if needed. I think that the vent also goes to the (unseen) outhouse to make for some less chilly dumps. The entire region has an abundance of these vents and they will show up again. Silne and her husband probably made it themselves years ago. I think you could make it with two people without too much difficulty since you’re basically just digging a pit.
Many people lived/live in these types of dwellings. They are pretty common in motherland along with tents.
GLADIATORS!! more or less.
not sure they’ll actually be called gladiators, but that’s basically what they are. I have some fun ideas and some unique (?) twists I’m looking forward to whenever I show them.
i’m cool making style choices that might seem anachronistic to us. turns out golf visors would be perfect for antelope ears. even if i doubt they would be familiar with a good 18 holes of the king’s game
there’s no reason that a baseball cap in our own history couldn’t have been invented way before it was. someone of a completely alien culture would decorate a cap much differently than us I’m sure.
Legends of old and tales of tomorrow. what frightens is that most legends have some truth to them.
something i’ve enjoyed doing as of late are these little thumbnail exercises.
heroes of old, tales true and exaggerated. gives me ideas for possible scenarios in the comic world at times and i enjoy the process. some of them may show up in the future. 🙂 more thumbnail collages to come!