Stablehand scrap update: 9/04

A wyvern (which I’m tentatively calling Nycopteryx), and the Prince of Eggs.

You need no further explanation.

I have no idea what this thing even is, but I just kind of had it appear in my head when one of my friends said “Looks like John was the blue thing after all”, and then I had to draw it.

It might actually end up being a transformation for somebody in Stablehand or something, though I can’t imagine who just yet.

Two different things were happening on these pages: first, I was trying to draw the main characters/design their outfits a while back (while experimenting with perspective on Kate), and second, just today I was trying to design logos for the characters. JF: birdy. Kris: quartz crystals. Kate: dino wing thing, which didn't quite satisfy me. Lance: flaming blood puddle. Hughes: sprout. Ariana (character I haven’t designed or told you about yet): pouncing cat.

On a subconscious impulse, I also found myself imagining the logos sliding in from the side and the sounds they'd make as they did that, and tried to write those down. I really can't tell whether that was just a trope I picked up from TV and video games or yet another sign I may be synaesthetic.

Okay, there was another thing going on too: the reason Lance was drawn in ballpoint was that on the day I drew that, I was procrastinating on finishing my homework to submit online when suddenly there was a fire drill and because I didn't think to bring my homework or much of anything out with me, I was forced to sit and watch the deadline approach while unable to accomplish anything whatsoever. Nervously, I hunted up a piece of paper and a ballpoint pen and tried to draw Lance in order to calm myself. (In retrospect I think I did surprisingly well for not being able to erase AT ALL, being nervous, and not having any references.)

Oh, and I was also trying to design Grævonian newspaper stuff. So I guess four things were going on with these pages? That's... a lot of things.

And lastly, we have these. As I said, I forget what exactly gave me the impulse to draw them, but once I got it, I absolutely couldn't stop myself because the idea was just too funny.

As you can see, my ideas of Stablehand PSAs have somewhat evolved since the first time I drew an idea for one; the first time, I was just thinking about the general biology of hexarts, and not at all about what the government thought about them.

I plan to make more polished colour versions of these at a later date, though I don't know exactly when.

Stablehand scraps, 5/2~7/24

Has it really been TWO MONTHS since I did the last summary post already? That's a long time.

Well, anyway, here are all the scrappier things that happened in that timeframe!

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Fulvopards!

Fulvopards are pardeans, an odd group of "mid-sized" cats that I'm still figuring out. The main idea though is that they evolved from the close ancestors of either "big" cats or "small" cats (mostly small cats) but are a distinctly different kind of cat. (I guess by that definition the group might be polyphyletic? Eh, whatever. I'll fix it later. XD)

The fulvopard resembles a lion, but evolved from the ancestor of a more puma-like cat.

Three things.

1. People in Grævonia are very divided on their opinions about hexarts. Those in Wespiegel generally have a strong animosity toward them, and a lot of businesses have "no hexart" signs. Those in Easboro pretty much love hexarts and a lot of businesses have signs that say "hexarts OK" or something similar.
2. Skyland! It's a city in the sky. Made of walkways, platforms, pillars, glass, and downward-facing "groundscrapers".
3. This morning I was in kind of a silly mood and was kind of thinking about Stolen Heart and Arkturuse's teams and how they might decorate their buildings. Then I thought of how occasionally you'll find a store or whatever that has a big happy face and a message that says "have a nice day!" or whatever, and got these hilarious images of Stolen Heart and Arkturuse doing their... own takes on that. Stolen Heart's I've already explained; the joke behind Arkturuse’s is that he’s blind.

This pretty much explains it, except that Skyland's official name is probably going to be Zefír instead.

Video of a working prototype of the Stablehand interface. Or something like that.

The other day I was thinking about some things I could do with the interface, and came up with this idea of some kind of a tree showing all the possible choices, which you could access after getting through a given chapter in order to see what all the alternate possibilities were.

I thought that due to Stolen Heart and his underlings' story (I can't say exactly why yet because spoilers XD), it might be interesting to have Kodėlgi or somebody at a monitor looking at the possibility map to kind of put things into context. As I was trying to illustrate at the top of the page, you'd click on some kind of jackal head icon to access it.

The second picture is a demo of how the tree would actually look in a browser (the paths and symbols are random, not actual spoilers or anything XD). In the HTML, the tree is actually just a list containing a number of other lists with images in them, and the lines are made entirely using :before and :after pseudo-elements. Also, because of the way I made it with inline-blocks, the tree neatly zooms in and out when the size of the attribute symbols changes. When it comes time to properly implement it in the story, I plan to put in a way to pan and zoom in/out with Javascript.

Over the next few days I'm going to be modelling Wyvera.

[...]

I'm sort of toying with the idea of Wyvera's species cameoing in Stablehand [...] (for which purpose I'm tentatively calling it the squamopard or squamaeopard) though I'm not sure that will happen.

The squamaeopard would not be in any way related to the "true" pardeans other than its appearance, of course. It would fundamentally be more of a reptile than a mammal.

And this, which I just posted today, is going to be my next hexart drawing!

And my first single drawing ever to use more than one page of paper. I guess that counts for something?

TDNMB: the highlights, 4/16~5/2

Okay, now I've finally gotten all my blogs in order and decided what I'll do.

TDNMB and my Stablehand/Tyrian tags on tumblr will be for all my WIPs I feel like posting, and separate posts on this blog will be for the finished stuff. However, since I seem to be producing a lot more WIPs than finished stuff lately, I'm also going to post compilation posts here of the rougher stuff from my tumblr periodically. This is the first of those posts, mostly covering 4/16~5/2.

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Here I was trying to draw a symbol for one of the main characters to wear.

I can only imagine that PSAs in the Stablehand universe are some of the most entertaining things ever. At least when they deal with hexarts, anyway. XD

(If you don't get the joke here, as I said, people often regard hexarts as if they're some sort of devil spawn or something, so the thought of a bunch of them in the same place having a big party like this would be appalling to a lot of people.)

Another of the main characters hails from Hinotoria, land of the firebirds; it's a little bit like China. Here I was trying to design a style for a writing system to be used there.

Here I was attempting to design a logo for Stablehand incorporating the Destiny Attribute symbols and some calligraphy, as well as a general typeface based on it called Retrolark.

This was not actually posted in TDNMB, just on my dA, but I couldn't find my post if I'd posted it here, so here it is.

It's some more of the hexarts from the colour chart.

And finally, this is the WIP I was working on yesterday. It's Shadow, again from the hexart chart. He's going to be a semi-main character, but he'll be somewhat interesting to make a story about in first-person (read: a headache) because he doesn't talk or think in words.

His anatomy kind of shifted by the time I got him into Blender.