playing around drawing some ladies and good old dynamic possés so why not make one a kangaroo lizard
WHATCHU SOME KINDA KUNG FU WRESTLER?? WINDMILL KICK THAT NON-EXISTENT SUB BUTTON BOYEE (or lady)
WARNING: incoming karate chop
Tag: concept
The tragedies of colorblindness, part 2
the wife helps with color schemes a lot lmao. color helps but it’s not really my thing. doesn’t really excite me and i don’t think in color. kinda sucks cause I think it would help differentiating the characters but B&W lets you do things color can’t too. color can get a bit messy and miss the silhouettes and body language if you’re not careful. which I am not.
sometimes I just play around with doodles and color those though. but most of what i do is doodles anyway I guess. do what you like i suppose 🙂
If only we weren’t colorblind
some more outfit ideas.
mostly made-up but they have some inspiration from african and some middle eastern designs. i steal elements from things i like all the time just like pretty much every other artist on the planet.
again, trying to keep things practical but interesting. the daily climate is more extreme on their world than in ours since the days are longer. It gets hotter and colder since the sun faces towards and away from the planet more. a lot of their clothing is layered so they can take it off easily once it gets hotter. this of course varies depending on where they live and the seasons.
trying to think of what people would have the patience to wear in their daily lives. the rich people can afford more impractical stuff because no one is making them move. 🙂 poorer folks obviously wear less extragavant stuff but it’s by no means bland. poor people knew about the magic of the pattern in real life. bland middle age peasants who only wore brown is more true to hollywood than real life. ancient bling baby
color isn’t really my thing but theres no reason the motherlanders would style it up any less than we do. and theres no reason people in the past wouldn’t try to style it up just as much as folks do today. people don’t change.
It’s more practical than it looks
in the days before industrialization, women deserved some major props for their work especially when they had to carry loads themselves. in many places around the world they still do, and carrying supplies on their heads still is a common way to do this. I feel like this isn’t shown much in western media really even if it was common in the west too in ye olden days.
looks pretty rad too
(pothead lol)
apparently you can carry over 60% of your body weight on your head if you’re used to it. the more you know
Words about words
As mentioned previously, I spent a couple weeks before ch3 doodling the characters and trying to streamline them more before I had to draw them in motion. In hindsight I wish I did that more for ch2, but hopefully I learned my lesson.
Silne was based off of a sketch i did a couple years ago, and was originally going to be a specific different character. I ended up splitting Silne and this other character who I will still likely use. It wasn’t the right time yet. Though I don’t mention verbally it in the story, you can tell by the two sets of tattoos that she has that she was once married.
The story itself was one of the earlier ones I came up with and remained mostly unchanged, though of course I tweaked some details as I went. It was originally going to have much less of Arbo, the old man, but previous chapters focused quite heavily on two characters and I wanted to branch out just a little bit. I still think I enjoy working with few characters rather than a gigantic cast, at least in a per-chapter basis.
The armor of the rene took a little bit to get down too, since I wanted to show similarities with the armor in ch1 (for both Allano and Rene) without making them identical. they likely wouldn’t have much standardization between troops if this was real life, but you also want to make it recognizable to the reader. The allanos have armors similar to malwan’s outfit from ch1, but the militia organized halfway through the chapter is more rag-tag since they are not professionals. I ended up with the rene’s “shark tooth” helm because I thought it was cool and unique. All of these designs will likely show up in the future to some capacity.
sharp-eyed viewers of a previous post may be able to infer some interesting tidbits about the rene.
speaking some NONSENSE!!
language and communication (or lack thereof) plays a huge part in the motherland. generally speaking, the languages shown to the reader will be translated in a form that makes sense to the character’s POV. basically the reader is generally in the dark to the same degree as the characters are.
each language (there are potentially like 7-12) has its own alphabet that will represent it when the characters don’t understand it. there are even different dialects of the same language where two characters may have an extremely difficult time understanding each other (eg creole to scottish) where some letters will appear as english with others as ‘unstranslated’ to seem like an accent. I use fonts from real life languages courtesy of google noto. It makes more sense to me to use a real life language that has been in use for X centuries instead of some random made up alphabet.
The non-english text is not made to be translated irl by the reader and I’m sure is total nonsense to a native speaker of the real life language. That said, I am trying to use alphabets that are either dead or so incredibly obscure to the audience that it will be almost impossible for that confusion to happen. The feeling is more important than what is actually said if you run it through google translate or whatever. And where accents and foreign languages are concerned I’ll try to make it obvious through context that the reader isn’t required to do so in order to understand the story.
Imperial Aramaic (extinct) and Kaithi (mostly extinct) will be likely seen the most. The Rene and Avato languages are the main ones used in the story, even by other nations who speak other languages natively. they are basically the greek or english of their day.
Tattoos IN THE WILD
throwing around a few more tattoo ideas.
based off a bit of maori stuff. more or less. i imagine if these people were real they would tattoo themselves all over the place and try to show them off (like we do), but for reader clarity it can muddy the silhouettes a bit if you aren’t careful. can take a long time to draw too.
also i mentioned this a while ago but it might be a little hard to see for the casual reader. above is the tattoo design for the main characters of chapter 2, more or less in the colors it would actually be. the dad has the ‘father mark’, basically the full tattoo for the family crest. lain has the ‘daughter mark’, a partial version that would be blended with that of her husband’s family mark if she got married. it’s seen as poor form to have the daughter mark take up too much of the face since it’s basically insulting the husband’s family if they got no space to put their bling on there.
men and women both get their designs when the come of age, so little kids don’t have them.
A tablet aside
no page this week unfortunately. still got a doodle for yall
(patented rob liefeld tinyfeet™)
i hadn’t really drawn sago (ch 1 character) since I got my new tablet. the main reason why the two chapters look a bit different is because by the time I started ch 2 I had a tablet with a screen. I don’t care how good your hand-eye coordination is, you are not drawing consistent and quick straight lines without seeing your pen. it was really hard to do any hatching other than very tiny lines and that just isn’t enough flexibility.
the new tablet is a bit harder to vary the pen pressure with on the other hand, but I’d by far rather have accurate lines. i’m way too lazy to take more time than I need to.
I also started using Clipstudio instead of photoshop and I personally like it a lot more. it makes it a lot easier to color and set up panels. the main thing it does worse is text (it isn’t great, but has gotten better). still recommend clipstudio to anyone though, it’s a waaay better price too.
at some point i’ll get a big ol off-brand cintiq type monitor tablet and then i’ll really be captain lazy. but doggone wait till you see how spicy my lines are then champs
Character concepts 3 – armor
(click to view larger)
some armor design concepts. on the whole metal is rarely used in Motherland due to a variety of factors, but the majority of regions have access to substitute materials. these alien ‘resin’ compounds are mass-produced from several species of wildlife and have no true real world analogue, though most have properties somewhere in the realm of rubber, chitin, ceramic, and polymer. among a myriad of other uses, they are used to make armor and weapons. it’s a big goal of mine to have some crazy setting weirdness and still try to make designs that make sense. I’m heavily basing armor and weapon designs off of real life ones since they actually work instead of hypothetically work.
pretty much all of the armor shown here would be ‘elite’ models that would be very expensive to create and own. common soldiers and guards would make do with much less. chainmail doesn’t really exist per se due to the tensile properties of resin, the city guards in ch 1 were using scaled or spined hauberks which is much cheaper than plate armor but still fairly effective. many of the (wealthier) renes shown were using plate armor which was inspired by the designs of real life armenian cataphracts, the manicas in particular. i just think they look cool.
Character concepts 2 – helmets
this is close enough to a character concept in my opinion.
it can be pretty tough sometimes but it’s always fun to have to design clothes and armor and such with non-human parameters. Of course the motherlanders aren’t that different from humans but it’s enough. One of my mains goals with this story and setting is to create things that are realistically exotic but could still conceivably exist within the setting. it’s not high fantasy, so I’m really trying to make designs and such that would believably be created by the people there with their resources and technology.
For instance, very little wood or metal is used in the Motherland world. it’s too rare or hard to shape with their resources. Much of the armor used by soldiers and such is a type of molded resin, along with kevlar-like hauberks made out of durable fibers from the local ecosystem. A wide variety of construction methods and designs exist in this era, influenced by cost and efficiency, and of course, looks. Rich people can afford more expensive and efficient protection than your average town guard. armor evolved in real life to counter the weapons of the day and vice versa, and here is no different. That said, the evolution of their technology can be anachronistic at times compared to our own history.
I really want to try to make things that are realistic-looking while still looking cool or at least interesting. A helmet in real life is designed to protect your face first and foremost above looks (with some less than “cool” results for the sake of efficiency), and boy do these characters have a lot of face to protect. a mask that totally covered their entire snout and ears would be very protective and practical, but looks real goofy as a result. It’s a challenge to find designs that do enough of both practicality and aesthetics, but that’s the fun in it.
