OC/Art blog

OC blog of modifiedyincision (aka ectopistes-migratorious-flock)

[the-bitch-mob]

fuck it. be creative even if you never really *make* anything. write out plot synopses of stories and then move on. design OCs you’ll never use. make mood boards and concept art and don’t do anything with them. life’s too short to forget everything that inspired you and creation doesn’t have to be “complete” to be worth the time you put into it.

[ectocs]

based on this should i play more or less cyberpunk

[ectocs]

i can turn any video game character into a furry. this is an easy example

[modifiedyincision]

im kind of in the mood to make OC references. but not like how i normally make refs, that takes so fucking much out of me. maybe like how i did JD: quick sketches, kind of messy coloring, but lots of text and doodles that get the point across?

[ectocs]

this probably could have gone on the art blog instead lol. well here it is now

[ectocs]

DANSA MED OSS

[ectocs]

Sobbing crying trying to hurry up and finish artfight prep but i got stuck redesigning my sona so that’s going to be like all of my preparations before its july 😭

[sanguine-squid]

"what do you do to contribute to society" i post my ocs to tumblr dot com lol.... 5 people on there like them.......

[eggwraith]

opens box that reads "i wanna draw again". inside lies a note. the note says, "mental illness and difficult circumstances have taken years of interest, accessibility, and skill away from me. i want to forgive myself for that. i want to heal my relationship to my hobbies. i want to feel connected to something that once made me feel good, but the cyclic discouragement is difficult to overcome." i turn over the note. on the back it reads "wannta drawe sexy bodies awooga"

[eggwraith]

seems like this one really resonated with the artists who dont do art fandom

[ectocs]

The Dirubael

What can I say. I think it's enjoyable to interpret things a bit strangely, as if I'm an alien who saw a handful of earth animals and has to guess the rest.

Fast doodles + some bonus stuff (gif warning) below :), plus the usual chatter:

Black, big as a horse, tail of an elephant. Easy-peasy, picturing a big ungulate thing. Jaws of a boar. Okay, huh. A few ways to interpret that, but I'm going with some tusks. Not too out there.

Unusually long horns that it can adjust... now that's something else. I wanted to imagine a reason as to why it could move the horns. This included any number of mechanisms -- literal horns that moved through strange muscle attachments in a socket? Interesting, but not sure how to convey that through art. Maybe 'horns' like a beetle has horns -- either part of their exoskeleton or as mandibles?

The description of how it fights is interesting. It obviously needs to be able to move its horns, then, or at least look like it's moving them.

I did a few very very basic doodles (by my standards), first of cattle... mostly water buffalo... to get a feel for their head shapes. In case you wonder what I'm doing when I'm not making 'decent', more complete sketches, it's this. Consider this extra behind-the-scenes stuff.

With the last one I played around a bit with the horns, but only barely.

At this point I decided to switch to something more boar-like, with a dash of beetle, but I couldn't come up with anything I really liked:

My issue was coming up with anything that could move, or even fake it. I started making that open-mouthed mandible boar, getting basically nowhere, when I had a thought.

What if we expand on that spiky bug limb idea. Bugs love having spiky limbs. More limb, less... uh... mandible or horn.

Inspired by mantids and an OC of mine, I created the first real sketch:

It looks like horns. From a distance -- because who would realistically want to get close to this -- it would look like horns, and like they were moving. Personally I like to imagine that they charge or stab with them, rarely extending their 'arms' save for pulling down vegetation from higher. I mean... trampling things underfoot seems like a better defense mechanism really...

I took a few cracks at drawing it but has struggling to refine it. I drew it once in a basic form, but couldn't do it again. That's when I decided to take things an extra step.

BEHOLD, THE MIGHTY SPORE DIRUBAEL:

Yeah, so. I made them in spore. Modded spore, specifically. No idea if they can appear in my world, but they're in there now, so maybe.

I walked this guy around and took a few screenshots as references before leaving. I did ask for some animated avatars, though. And I'm glad I did. I love this thing.

Here's a failed screenshot where I accidentally whacked my spacebar while moving my meaty hands to the mouse.. truly, a majestic creature, this is.

[cavernclan]

Destroying angel

+

[orbees]

oc guy moodboard

[ectocs]

The Hraetnug

This was a fun one! And as you can tell my tablet is once again working. At long last (like a week), I can draw!

As usual, stuff below the cut ! No doodles this time :( I kinda freehanded everything in one take this time around.

Has wings but does not fly made me initially think of flightless birds -- ostriches, then penguins. But I didn't really want to just draw a bird. Maybe something that looks like it has wings? Like a sea turtle's fins? That would also work for laying eggs in sand and leaving them.

Alas, the animal in question has feet "like that of a camel," which a sea turtle obviously does not have. That detail made me think of tortoises, which are also shelled beasts, but they're equipped with definite feet.

A tortoise, however, has nothing resembling wings, on account of it being a tortoise and having no need to fly or swim anywhere. I played around with the idea of giving it some hybrid fin-foot thing, like if a sea turtle also had legs, but that looked awkward. Now they're kinda normal legs, if a bit thick, with pseudo-fin-things on them. I dunno, it seemed fun. And I was right.

Still need wings. I did recall several species of turtles with spiky scutes. There's Graptemys nigrinoda, or the black-knobbed map turtle, for one. Though a few in Graptemys apparently have that notable ridge and spiny edges too.

Tried out some different shapes -- boring process, trust me, no interesting sketches to share there -- and decided that editing the shell would be a good way to kinda get that wing thing going.

I wanted to keep it looking like a turtle/tortoise to some extent, so I didn't want to go full nodosauridae, though making long spiky parts definitely made me think of them. In particular, borealopelta and sauropelta. So I channeled a bit of that armored tank into the shell design.

Besides all that, though, I mean. 'Tis a tortoise.

[ectocs]

bestiary stuff has to be late… my tablet shit itself 😞 so sad

[ectocs]

Previous bestiary: The Gaersnae

I did say I wanted to do some of the old bestiary challenges, even knowing what they were. So! First up, gaersnae.

Crawling things? Kills men by looking at them? Hisses? Conquered by weasels? Sounds like a cobra -- of the spitting variety. Though spitting cobras have painful venom, not typically "deadly," but whatever.

White stripes? A rinkhals has white/cream stripes quite obviously on its neck. And some photos show them on the body, too, though I don't know if they're all rinkhals (rinkhalses???) or some similar-looking serpent, just color differences, etc. Threw the stripes on the main body too just to be sure.

After biting people, the bitten becomes hydrophobic and is driven mad, apparently. Well. that's not good. Obviously, the gaersnae frequently contracts rabies. No offense to the gaersnae, but I don't really want to meet it.

[ectocs]

The Lumchagg

Feel like I'm cutting it a bit close this week :P

So. The lumchagg. It's a bird, it's purple, it likes aromatic herbs and it sets itself on fire to revive itself into a worm. Honestly this thing grew on me the more I worked on it.

Ideas behind this design below the cut ! Alongside some doodles, rambles, and concepts :)

It starts life as a "worm" -- a featherless, pink squirmy thing with nubs where its limbs will later grow in. The lengthy tail will later be absorbed to facilitate that.. like a lot of metamorphosing (is that the word?) creatures.

The idea at this point is pretty straightforward. Recently got to watch two robin nests grow, which was interesting, and young birds look really... fleshy. Wanted to give it coloring on its throat like the clitellum on a worm (aka the saddle) but I think it's just not distinctive enough. I gave it four eyes for more of a bug feel, though it's so minor I don't think it matters much in the end.

As it grows and gets feathers, the lumchagg's tail shortens -- the wings are the first limb to fully grow, giving it an amphithere-like appearance, though the legs soon follow within the same day the wings finish growth, making the change from worm to bird seem almost instant. All four eyes are open, though body coloration is not "mature."

Not much to say on this stage; it's a bird with fun antennae-like tufts on its head and a fun beak, a vaguely dinosaur feel, and coloration based sorta on a violet-backed starling. It has faint horns/ridges because ... um...... well to be honest I just decided to give it to the thing based on the dinosaur/dragon/etc vibes in the room.

In the adult stage, they will spend most of their long-lived lives as a darker, mostly-solid purple tone. This coloration lasts until the very end of their lives, at which point the lumchagg's wings become pale on the inside, allowing it to concentrate and direct the sun's rays onto flammable material. Through this method, the bird is able to burn and rebirth itself.

Drew the end-of-life stage here setting itself on fire. Don't ask how white/pale wings lets it burn stuff; it comes back to life, it gets privileges the average white goose doesn't get.

Here is a basic idea of the life cycle, hastily slapped together as a visual:

There was quite a bit of thinking to get to this point. Here is the last sketch page I did. Unlike the other doodles I never bothered coloring it in, as I decided to go with this look.

Note the "wyrm" title -- I initially wanted to do a more dragon-y take, with a final form maybe being an amphithere, but decided against it in the end and changed tracks when I couldn't get that to look right. Liked the idea though, so it gets to be a life stage that exists for 0.1 seconds. You can also see the adult pose change!

The butterfly note here comes from some images I was looking at with interesting wing shapes. Never quite got it how I wanted, pivoted to a purely pennant-winged nightjar kind of wing.

Now the thing I had done earlier was some bugs, which I liked, but ultimately just couldn't draw 'em. Bird can be a loose term, after all, and large black swallowtails flying by at fast speeds have had me thinking a small bird flew past me on multiple occasions.

Plus, well, lots of bugs have worm-children. There are literally just worms, of course. But butterflies, beetles, flies, sawflies... all winged (usually) with little squirmy babies.

And the first doodle page was, of course, birds. I must admit, this is my favorite just because I figured out how to draw birds only on this ONE sketch session. That heron is beautiful. But anyway -- I kinda merged ideas together in the end, giving it several traits from both doodled birds.

In my heart, after all these arts, a lumchagg is a kind of weird purple bird of any type lol. Even from the beginning, I wanted that kind of long feather just for looks. Please note the incorrect text describing what I call the "standard-winged purple swampjarhen." It's a hybrid of a grey-headed swamphen (aka a purple swamphen) and a pennant-winged nightjar. Oops! I was looking at them in a tab, I have no idea how I messed up my own damn text.

Here's a pennant next to a standard -- big difference in silly wing feathers!

[mothwiingz]

hey btw there’s nothing wrong with shipping your ocs with canon characters. or shipping yourself with a canon character. even if you have a crush on the character. you are hurting literally no one. you can do whatever you want. cringe culture is dead

[ectocs]

The Dulyamra

post official dulyamra edit: added alt text from maniculum, thank you!

Well, after binge-reading @maniculum's bestiaryposting and all of the wonderful artists and wacky descriptions, I decided I might as well hop in. May redo this one later, but hey!

I might do some of the older stuff (even knowing what they are now, because seriously, some of those passages...). for this first one I just wanted to draw some kind of creature -- I've had art block, so I went relatively "basic" :]. more detailed, somewhat rambling thoughts under the cut (and some idea-testing sketches):

There are some pretty interesting things going on in this description. For one thing, a lot of it is dedicated to the parenting habits.

Since dulyamra have a liked and disliked twin, I decided it would only be logical for the disliked twin on her shoulder to be a little strange... so it's albino! Also, both of them are young enough that they haven't gotten their weird face-sacs like their mother.

The main working premise was "what if a bear had arms." Not so much, I fear, because I was trying to guess the animal (I wasn't, really)... but because it popped into my head during the first 2/3rds of the description and wouldn't leave, no matter what. I tried to make it less horrifying than what was in my head.

The detail of their emotions being tied into the moon's phases was intriguing. Ultimately, I decided to steal some patterning from a certain creature, with modifications: giving it vaguely moonlike shapes on its chest, while hopefully not also being too obvious about the moon thing.

Now the reason I may redo this in the future is because I find this to be an eye-catching bit: "they have compressed nostrils and a hideous face, its creases foully expanding and contracting like a bellows."

Oh, that's fun! I wish I wasn't stuck in a rut because I can think of so many fun ideas but no way to tie them together, or to a larger thing; something akin to a pug? Frog? Maybe their nose is like the worst bat nose to exist? A fan? Skin flaps? Only after drawing all this can I think of these, lol.

Ultimately I picked a guy with a neat nose/face situation to throw in the mix.

The idea here is simply that those areas by the nose could potentially inflate like a balloon, both while breathing and intentionally as a threat display. Initially, I had wanted to do something with face wrinkles and a dewlap of some sort, which I doodled initially (top right) with some other stuff:

But I couldn't get it to look right (or obvious enough without looking weird in a bad way), unfortunately, for the final piece, and switched lanes. I want to try again though!!!!

I like to picture this beast as being about knee-height.