Thus further images and insights as promised…
One day at work, in order to take a break from all
my shopping about town and tea making and nail filing (because I was always one
to work super hard at the ‘actual’ job … I jest, I’m guessing it was a slow day
at the office) I started sketching and Amber and Fao popped out of my pencil.
Amber
hasn’t changed much over the years she is however, one character who works very
well in carton style and probably not so well in a more literal portrait form,
I am still not entirely happy with the last portrait I did.
Still
a stubborn spiky-pigtail haired girl with a
stupidly huge dragon appealed to me, in a way I guess she made me think of tank
girl, a rude, loud and crass woman. Not sure why it appealed to me on that
particular day or where her name originated from, she was just Amber as soon as
she appeared. Fao on the other hand wasn’t named immediately yet after very
little consideration I lazily jotted down ‘oaf’ and my brain made that
microwave noise ‘ting’ – ‘alright,’ it said ‘we’ll just reverse that and he can
be called Fao,’ – et voila.
On an early rendition of patterning for Fao I was
thinking he could have leathery skin:
but decided I disliked the above and went
for traditional scales as shown below.
Thought I’d show some of the portrait build ups for
Fao, above are the stages of sketching and below the stages of colouring.
That same day Amber came into being Panda also emerged
on a post-it note.
In the first sketch, Panda looked somewhat demure,
but she was easy to draw and reminded me of an older character I had called
Nami. This older character got her name from a client whose paperwork I filed
in my job at Nationwide Insurance Claims. Considering I went through hundreds
of paper files every day in that job I don’t know why ‘Nami Aoki’ stuck out at
me and lodged in my brain, I also had no idea whether the name was meant for a
man or a woman. Much later I ended up watching the anime ‘One Piece,’ and
discovered they too have a character called Nami and yes, it’s a girl’s name!
The ring around Panda’s eye was a pencil slip that I
decided I liked, and thought then logically that Panda must be her name!
Relating back to Nami, I decided Panda’s character must be bonkers, hell, she
has a ring around one eye and a split pupil that looks like a plus sign she
must be crazy! So from then on whenever something happened to me that I found
annoying or frustrating or just a bit crazy I would sketch Panda pulling
another insane face.
Also yes, Panda loves to play dress up and is one
of the few characters whose portraits I decided to render in two different sets
of colours. I imagine she changes hair colour as often as her barely-there
outfits. Her extended full name ‘Pandora Young’ came about later as a kind of
play on the fact that she’s ‘mad as a box of frogs’ and the idea that one
wouldn’t want to open Pandora’s Box. Plus Pandora is conveniently similar enough
to Panda for that to be her given nickname.
Now things really got going, or at least got more
complex, after I met my now husband, Jethro.
Naturally, I shared my ideas with
him and as a keen RPG player, he was instantly intrigued. His first instinct
was to make new characters or incorporate older one’s he’d used in his RPG’s.
In fact the below sketch was drawn specifically for
a written RPG that revolved around a place called Cold Harbour in The Elder
Scrolls universe. Keen RPG gamers will likely recognise the name as a place
that Bethesda are currently making an MMO out of, long story short, you
couldn’t play in the realm of Cold Harbour in 2007 so we made a written RPG
there because, well we could.
The RPG, like most online written RPG’s started in
some kind of dungeon or cellar and didn’t last very long. The image of Jet and
Cyan however spurred me to make more images of Jethro as a character for my
novel. Thus, the rather lazily named ‘Jet Korro’ came into being, one who looks
like my love and shares many personality traits including an OCD quirk for
symmetry. All of the clothes Jet and Cyan wear, are clothes we own, so their
wonderfully terrible dress sense does belong to us.
Jet’s character evolved visually quite a bit over
the years, aging perhaps alongside the man himself and getting several haircuts
along the way. Most fun of all was making a sketch combining Jet with Panda. (3rd
from right above) Perhaps you shouldn’t question the ‘why’ too much on that one.
This is also when Si’Ra, Dirzryn, Charrock and
Dro’Zar were added. All of whom Jethro had created for various written
role-plays but hardly used with the exception of
I always liked the early sketches of Dro’Zar,
something about his character made me want to draw him in a different way to my
other sketches. In case you are wondering, Dro’Zar is a Siamese point type of
Felid hence the large ears and shape of snout in his final portrait.
So you can blame Jethro for all the x’s,y’s and z’s
that are prevalent in so many of our character names!
You can equally thank him
for many of our anthropomorph designs, because whilst I was into elves,
vampires, and fae he liked the anthros, lycans and greenskins, which pretty
much made a perfect balance between us for the things I wanted to create.
I had already drawn Argo (left below), although in
the first sketch he was more lizard-like and less salamander-esq as he should
be, but of course when Jethro showed me his eagle sketch of Charrock (below right) I just knew the two would make a fabulous haphazard duo.
So far as Si’Ra and Dirzryn go, I think even Jethro
will agree that I ended up almost completely rewriting their personalities.
The base germ of their characters is still there
but I liked them so much that I wanted them to be important players and fill
certain roles within the tale, ergo, some of their original traits had to
change. Thankfully, Jethro was happy with the alterations and now agrees that
the newer versions are now better rounded and three-dimensional, in fact I
think he likes them more than the first versions we had!
Dirzryn (above) is one of those characters whose face I feel like I’ve always known yet pinning
down his image on paper I found very tricky in the beginning. His face was
stuck in my head and it was super-frustrating to be unable to get it out onto
paper. I actually prefer the older portrait I created of him (top left) to the
more recent one (top right) and even now struggle to get his face exactly as I
see it.
I
didn’t have a clue what Si’Ra (below) looked like until I found an image of a Prussian
Blue cat, then I knew, yep, that was him.
Our Felid names (that’s cat anthros to you)
originated from The Elder Scrolls feline anthropomorphs which are called
Kha’jiit, because the writers at Bethesda are obviously markedly less lazily
than I who simply chose to use the Latin for ‘cat,’ to name our species.
As a way to mark out our Felid names from those use
in the TES universe we decided that their surname and forenames would be
written in reverse and that as a social etiquette trait these people would find
it rude to be called by one name alone unless they asked.
So for example Si’Ra’s first name is actually
‘Raeemai’ and his surname is ‘Si’ which is shortened then to ‘Si’Ra,’ and even
if a stranger were to prefix a title such as ‘Mr,’ to his name he would expect
them to cite ‘Mr. Si’Ra,’ and not ‘Mr Si,’ or even worse as a display of
ignorance, ‘Mr.Ra.’
I swear I have come to work by the unforgiving
mantra of ‘if it isn’t hellishly difficult and complicated you’re doing it
wrong,’ because doing things the simple and easy way would just be too clever.
That said that’s all from this post, so until next
time keep it convoluted folks! ^_^
Oh and here's two recent 2013 ACEO's of our Si'Ra and Panda, just because :)
Oh and here's two recent 2013 ACEO's of our Si'Ra and Panda, just because :)
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