The Art of KaliVasquez

Hello! I'm Kali, digital artist, 31yo, she/her. This blog is a collection of personal and commissioned art created by me, some of it is 🔞. By default all content posted here is meant for adult adiences - you have been warned. Main blog is @kalivasquez.

[kalivasquezart]

Has Evi considered cutting off the pinky of the mech arm, or would that do more harm than good?

HMMM... you have a point. Expies only got 4 fingers, which is why the pinky in her bionic arm is so weird. There are no neural pathways in her brain for this new body appendage. I can totally see her try to cut it off. However, one may argue that she could lean how to properly utilise the extra finger if she really wanted to, maybe with a little help from braingrow or neural booster. Perhaps the reason she still has the pinky is because her bionic arm is a much better tool to handle guns and anything that requires precision. I imagine expies' fingers to be bulkier and less dexterous compared to humans', especially with those big sharp claws.

On a related one, Mel was trained to use medical equipment, including surgical instruments as part of a program that planned to send Sawians to the Grey Planet in order to establish outposts for future colonisation. She often wishes she had human hands, or better tools to perform delicate procedures with ease.

[kalivasquezart]

I love your artstyle!! What brushes do you use?

Thank you! I use Procreate and my three most favourite brushes are Syrup, Tinderbox and Noise Shader. All three are standard brushes that come with the art program

[kalivasquezart]

Art revenge on @sznycelekshapedcreature

[kalivasquezart]

Icon commission of Vindi for @lozzington, via VGen. Thank you for your patronage (and patience)! 🙏

[kalivasquezart]

Pardon me if it's been asked before, but what are carriers and donors in terms of your experiment ocs?

(wall of text incoming)

According to C:U lore told via EPDA notes, Expies (and I think all Sawians by extension) are gonosimulistic, meaning they have two fully functional reproductive systems and any two individuals can breed with each other. Apparently they're also capable of asexual reproduction. That last part confused me a bit because I only vaguely remembered like… slugs and one species of lizard doing something like that. I assumed Expies have uteruses and placentas by the virtue of having human/mammalian DNA…

Anyway, I went ahead and read up on agamogenesis. What personally struck me as interesting was the fact that in this and other related articles, the organism capable of producing eggs or copies of itself was often referred to as the mother/female, especially when talked in the context of vertebrate animals (not amoebas or insects). I suppose this is fine if we're talking about biology without societal implications, and funnily this is what the EPDA note mentions, too.

When I first made my Expie OCs I didn't know they should be (?) gonosimulistic… so I decided to just slap the AU sticker on it. Now my AU story assumes that Sawians with single functioning reproductive systems can exist, but they're not as common. Still, I was a little hesitant to use male/female/cosexual (???) to describe their phenotypes, but then I remembered @flickering-nightfall's post on speculative biology of Rain World creatures - this is where the donor and carrier words come from. In the context of my AU, most Sawians are carrier-donors (gonosimulistic, about 50%), while the rest can be sole donors (male, 26%) or sole carriers (female, 24%). The greater genetic shuffling helped expand their natural lifespan from 30 to about 60 human years with much lesser risk of cancer, which was beneficial for the future plans of colonising the Grey Planet. I like to think the Company staff would sooner use those terms over male/female/other in order to not project human gender/sex frameworks onto the freaky test tube creatures, but also to kind of… further dehumanize them by only describing what their bodies can do, rather than acknowledge them as sapient species with identities.

Of course, such a policy absolutely would not stop the company staff from projecting human gender onto Expies. I believe Sawians have no innate concept of societal roles so if gendered pronouns are used it's very likely that the experiments accepted whatever their human caretakers called them, like a child would define their place in society by listening to parents.

[kalivasquezart]

[kalivasquezart]

You have some very interesting characters in the scav prototype universe. I read their descriptions on Art Fight. I'd really like to read their stories and see more drawings! Tell me, do you post your work anywhere else? Are you planning on writing a story about their history?

Oh, thank you! It's nice (and quite surprising) that there is such an interest in my own little C:U AU across many different platforms...

The place where I post most often is my art thread on the Target Planet discord server (official C:U community server) - there I share sketches and crumbs of info that usually is not, erm, big enough to form a tumblr post, if you know what I mean. Other than that, I think my ToyHouse currently has most AU lore written down in a readable format.

tbf I've only been into C:U for little over one month, my story is very underdeveloped and I don't know what I want to do with it yet. It definitely won't be as long and detailed as Pioneer!AU (@ask-the-pioneer). Still, it's fun to work at, and you shall see more of it.

[kalivasquezart]

[kalivasquezart]

Your expies look very drawable this artfight

reaaaaaaaaallly?

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A Thousand Eyes

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icons for my two new doggos who are about to experience The Horrors 👍 they've been added to my ArtFight and ToyHouse

[kalivasquezart]

Do you have a favourite gunsaw species

I'm boring a big fan of our favourite traumatized gray-ish fluff balls... and so expies currently hold the first place.

(but i'm slowly warming up to milkies, too)

[kalivasquezart]

do you care if people draw or write smut of your characters?

what an incredibly specific ask

yes I do care. I hold the sole license to produce smut of my own characters. those OCs represent a part of me, and I absolutely do not trust other people not to be disgusting

[kalivasquezart]

I wish to smooch the spearmaster, but alas, spearmaster cannot smooch back.

tfw no lips

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the first meeting

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ArtFight! Just two weeks away! It got here so fast! Can you believe it, slugchat!?

You can find my profile here: https://artfight.net/~KaliVasquez

Art Fight

An art gifting game

[kalivasquezart]

good doggy...?