Stablehand: Flarefowl

Finally, the flarefowl! This should have happened much, much sooner given how important these guys are supposed to be, but it's better late than never, I guess.

The flarefowl or hwnzj is Hinotoria's national bird, from which the country gets its name. It's known for an exceptionally beautiful, elaborate, and varied song, but it only sings these songs at any length in places it feels more or less completely safe. As such, the Hinotorians regard it as a symbol of deep, fundamental harmony, and portray it in stories as being common in times when civilisation is running smoothly and not appearing (or only speaking brief, harsh notes the few times it does appear) when there is a bad government, unrest, etc. In reality, the birds could care less what the government's doing, but they actually are sensitive to obviously hostile behaviour and prefer quiet over noise, making the part about unrest partly true.

Though I designed them to look like pheasant-family birds (tragopans and grouses in particular) I feel like the Hinotorians would probably not eat them as a general rule because, you know, if you outright kill The Bird Of Peace and eat it it makes you look really, really bad. That's probably one thing that separates them from the more Wilful Sengra nearby—it seems really probable some Sengra would just kill the bird without thinking and be like you silly Hinotorians, what's so sacred about a stupid chicken?. ...As you can guess the Hinotorians are at best rather neutral about the Sengra.

I haven't decided whether they are sexually dimorphic or not. At first they were supposed to not be and both be brightly-coloured the way macaws are, but then the way this came out it's honestly pretty crazy for a normal colouration, so I'm leaning toward this being the male colours and the female literally just having a bright head and a drab body like a male tragopan.

If I do that, I might make the female have a greater portion of yellow on the head and a yellowish-brown body so it looks more like the yellow emblems Hinotoria uses in official-insignia-type stuff and that people also use casually as a sort of common symbol of a shared culture (like Jinfèng's emblem).

Stablehand: Shikunbao

Well, this is the Shikunbao. Like I said, my brain literally just kind of synaesthetically pulled it out of this song—as my handwritten note on the page just a little bit sloppily describes, "the song conjured up this exact body plan in my mind".

Shortly after "designing" it, I decided—again kind of subconsciously—that it would make the most sense as a mountain animal in an area either in or around Hinotoria because of its snow leopard-like spots. So, I thought about it a bit and decided that since a lot of Chinese names for animals are kind of just randomish but descriptive phrases, this thing would be called the "rock fist leopard", or Shiqianbao. In Hinotorian syllables that translated to Shjkjwnbaw, or Shikunbao. So... that's where its name comes from.

I also later got this idea that the Shikunbao would be somewhat self-aware and since the Hinotorians are associated with Unity, they would have somehow made some kind of agreement with them such that the Shikunbao are really willing to help them out, especially when they need to get through their rough, rocky habitat (but are still just about as cold and hostile as they were before to everybody else). I figured, Unity is a weird attribute and it needs some kind of wacky perks that go with it. Like having freaky yetimonsters at your command. :p

Footnotes

1. Don't cite me on this. I could be completely confabulating that.

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.

Stablehand: Dà Jinhuáng

Dà Jinhuáng, a great golden firebird of legend (hence the name) held to be a god-like figure and a kind of embodiment of fate and "The Tao" where Jinfèng comes from.

Few have actually seen Jinhuáng, but for some reason she appeared to Jinfèng, causing others around her to think that she might some day hold a great significance for her country and maybe even the world.

And actually, they could be right.