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. More info about them here!
Some symbols for the main characters (embarrassingly, the only ones I have in a finished state). When I posted this picture I didn't really know how many main characters there were going to be, but now I'm fairly sure there will be 12, so this is about a third of the symbols done. A few slightly more peripheral characters like Knight Cat will probably also get symbols though, so maybe a little less than a third.
The reindeer, aka the colour-changing camo antelope
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.
These obviously aren't things I drew, but I thought they were worth putting here as a reminder to myself to make counterparts to these things in Stablehand. (I already have the Blazondeer, but the camo-antelope could easily be a real counterpart to it the way hexarts are to the Hlardraho.)
This is going to be the TOC for the fauna section in the guidebook, basically. Before this, I created an XML file to store the tree in and made the tree in XML, then I made a javascript to turn the tree into a nested HTML list [...] and used CSS generated content to create the lines.
I know this is kind of a quirky way to do things, but it has one really big advantage—I can retheme the presentation really drastically if I want to without having to rewrite/restructure the data itself, and since I can alter it at the HTML level I have more control than even with CSS. It's also really easy for me to just add a creature/clade to the tree by putting a tag for it into the XML file and have it look great immediately, way easier than it'd be to try to wade around in all those confusingly similar ul's and li's every time. [...]
*incomprehensible programming nerd babble*
Oh yeah, I'm working on this too. I hadn't been saying much about it because it's nowhere near a finished, presentable state, but eventually there's going to be a "life compendium" for Stablehand so you have all the important information about the creatures in one place.
First design for Ariana as made with the selfy generator (see this post for Lance, Kate, Kris, and white!JF). [Actually, I just added them in here this time. :p]
The scarf should be light golden brown but since it and the shirt were one item, 'tacky red it is!'. :p
I also decided while making this she would have an inexplicable fondness for silly-looking slacks. Plaid, polka-dot, spirals, stars... anything flamboyant and silly.
Also, she's a slightly different ethnicity from Nassak and JF, who are Hinotorian. It might be the one from this place near Hinotoria I've had a vague concept for and was tentatively calling Tulmashania.
(I've been thinking about it and I think Tulmashania may end up butting out my ideas for "Volitia" while also kind of absorbing part of them. How funny would it be to have this place that's like, from a sort of Mongol-type nomadic tradition but then they wiped out this really Western, European sort of a place and then just started acting like they knew their culture perfectly and yup, we are so totally the Spanish lion kingdom over here look at us we are so cool. But to everyone else they just come off as weird because they don't get it, and like, the only way they can get anywhere is still just taking places over so they kind of aren't making any progress at least as far as spreading their culture and ideas and are kind of jealous of Hinotoria for being so good at that compared to them.)
I don't know if I've posted any avatar generator things on this blog before since they're kinda nonlibre due to the fact I didn't make them, but here they are, since they're probably going to inspire my final designs for the main characters to some extent.
Also the thing about "Tulmashania" is pretty well decided now. It's definitely going to be a thing, and there's likely going to be a ruler named Guillaume, a prince named Pantéras, and somebody like "Ravenna" from my previous designs too, with everyone's personalities and appearances reworked just a little. I'm tentatively calling the country um... group? (I dunno what you call a nomadic civilisation okay :p) as well as one of its previous rulers Kskenghra.
This is really old and pretty outdated now (it was a little outdated even when I made the thing, as I was just kind of experimenting around with ideas anyway), but it was an attempt to make a timeline for the world. Back then I only had two main countries + one tentative one so... yeah. Hinotoria is probably going to be about the same shape though.
In this picture I was trying to design an appearance for one of the main technotranscendents (I think it was supposed to be Rotator Phoenix but I'm not sure). To the right, I was trying to design an appearance for a people in a faction called the "Qarismata" who basically thought they could perform miracles thanks to the blessing of Patriarch. I'm... not sure whether I'll be keeping them or not; the technotranscendents are here to stay though.
Here I was attempting to draw Stolen Heart and Arkturuse in a less derpy way than I had initially, and also design a wyvern (which is now called nycopteryx) and a way to present character pages for the human characters.
This is the Retrolark. The idea was that it would be Kate's rôle object (I haven't used that term for a while, have I?), and be able to at least look backward in time a ways. I don't think I ever meant for her to actually be able to change anything with it though. So... I guess it's kind of like the Pensieve in the Harry Potter series.
It's a pun because retrolark is the style for Stablehand but this is literally a retro-looking lark robot that can... retrogress. (Way to explain the joke, Takumi. :p)
Early archetypes for Kris.
Kris, for instance, is obsessed with the idea of "The Superpower" (an in-universe superhero) and has the ability to take on several different superhero personas based on each attribute. She [...] has a "Versitotal" attunement.
I... think that's all I need to say other than I'm probably going to redo all of them at least somewhat except The Chatoyant and The Reticulated. Oh, and the one I marked "Fantasy?" is probably going to be the one of Eternity called "The Sceptred" and, well, have a sceptre.
This was an experiment to turn an earlier parody character into a more serious character, because I made the mistake of actually giving him a cool design (this is the same place Nassak came from, if in name only, incidentally). Specifically, the original I'd quite creatively called Tatsuv was making fun of fan characters with random gratuitous animal parts by being "literally the dragonborn", but I liked the way his horns, mane, and tail were designed so I reworked him into a humanoid hexart. This is admittedly way more human than I imagined most humanoid hexarts being originally, but it's still well within the range of possible shapes. (In fact, from almost the beginning I imagined hexarts being able to be almost perfect humans visually but that being extremely uncommon. So.)
On the other page I was trying to design a handprint for the flag of "Hexartia", a country almost solely made of humanoid hexarts. (Hexartia is probably still staying in the final story, actually.) Also, my very first attempts to arrange the attributes on a cube. I think I've showed you wips of trying to turn the cube into a vector diagram already.
A page where I was just experimenting with logo design and then suddenly I got the idea for the votsal's appearance and had to draw it immediately, explaining why the thing is crammed into such a small space (:p).
a page where I doodled Portent Rider's horse (which I'm thinking will have a different appearance now), an alternate form for Ikazuchi (Tyrian, not Stablehand), and a doodle where I was quickly recording a couple of slogan ideas for SH's organisation (it may be hard to read but the idea is there's like a big picture of him with a quote under it, the way a company sometimes does when it wants to be 'motivational', but the quote just says "do your job" :p)
...Yup.
A recent attempt to revamp Wyvera/the squamæopard.
I dunno... I tried, but I still don't think it looked as good as my very first drawing.
Aaand that's about it. Whew, that was really a lot. I need to stop letting my drawing folder get so full of unfinished drawings.
(Seriously, Blogger actually isn't going to let me have more labels than this in a post so I've gotta start posting more often, or abandon labels entirely. -_-)
