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 scrap update: 2/19~4/20

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.

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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.

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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. -_-)

Stablehand scrap update: 12/29 - 2/19

My grandma’s electric piano has a Conductor face. :p

Blender just does not know how to build a stellated icosahedron, does it? XD

This is going to be a Chaoswork Chimaera, one of my newer mystery beings.

A quick drawing on my tablet of a new form for the Observer, before I go take a much-needed shower.

I got the idea when I saw those realised ghostswords a few minutes ago. It made me think about the Observers for some reason and then I imagined the two different forms fusing together into a kind of “grand alpha” form. I now imagine that every group of Observers probably has one.

An attempt to design the "Alfagransza" and "Zfetagransza" forms ("granszata") for the Observer.

The idea is that though Observers, like other mystery beings, are biologically asexual and don't really even know what gender is, they do tend to form pairs in which one tends to be dominant and the other tends to be submissive, and occasionally they switch roles, also switching forms as they do so. Sometimes, when a pair has especially good unity they can literally fuse their bodies into one and become a powered-up Alfagransza or Zfetagransza (which, again, can alternate between the two forms at any time, except it doesn't really "take orders from anyone" to do so).

I haven't really worked out the significance of this yet but I'm leaning toward them being leader/protector figures. I'm also leaning toward every population of Observers having them though not sure whether that means one or one of each.

And the granszata! I don't think there's much more to say about them than I said in the blockquotes.

And... I guess this counts? It's from a dream I had, in which "Hughes" was my pet, but it wasn't the actual character, just a bird I'd named that. Oddly, though, I thought it was him, and thought it should be able to talk, but then I realised, nope, it wasn't, and was completely disappointed with it for not being a talking Corvus albus. (Talk about high expectations.)

So... finally, Nassak and Pantéras! After you've repeatedly seen me post random things about them, finally you have some idea what they look like.

I think the theme of this page turned into "people with darkish skin and weird noses" halfway through... first you have Nassak, obviously, but then I decided the queen should have slightly brownish skin and a weird nose too. And then, because she had darkish skin and a weird nose, Pantéras ended up with them too. Though the weird nose looks less ugly on Pantéras and that was half-intentional.

(I kind of don't like the name Ravenna but it was just what randomly popped into my head and I can't think of anything else. XD)

By the way, the "ad" in her name means "to". They have this system in Fulvopardia where they don't care what gender the monarch is, and if you are somehow audacious and Willful enough to worm your way up to the unmarried monarch and have them accept you, you can marry them and become "ad-Volitio". (I can only guess a bunch of people have failed and a handful have just been killed through the years and different reigns though, so it's kind of scary. :p) Then, both monarchs have about equal status though the second one nominally is less important and gets less say in things; of course, they can and usually do power through that "limitation" to the point it practically doesn't exist. This is the monarchy of Will after all.

I am guessing this has probably saved the monarchy since they don't have anywhere near as much in the way of inbreeding problems.

And... that's it. Wow. For some reason I didn't have a lot of scraps this past month and a half, I guess because a bunch of them got merged into other posts. Well, see you next time.