I don't say enough how deeply I appreciate people expressing interest in the stuff I make - though I try to show it by responding as much as I can in turn. But right now, I'm busier than I've ever been, reckoning with a family member's health situation, and that plus the nightmare-team combo of my godawful administrative skills and my sluggish drawing hand is not helping me manage my ask box in Times Such As These.
I feel guilty about receiving nice messages and questions, things I really want to answer, but getting too overwhelmed or lacking time to keep up. I'm hoping closing my asks for a bit will give me time to catch up and make this number look less scary. Hopefully it won't be for a long time! Comments and DMs will still be open.
Look at this awesome felt I had the pleasure of working on of @kwillow's character Theo!!! ✨
Very proud of all the little details like his glasses, cig, teeth, ... such a cool character wahhh
I'm already booked for felts for a while but I'll drop my commission info anyways (◍•ᴗ•◍)
Check out Zimt's commissions and portfolio! | Zimt (spoken "tsimt") • they • 33 • GER/ENG ...
@kwillow's Theo has intense, dorky interests in many things--fashion, weapons, old books… history… aka Hyden… but trains are something particularly relevant to life in Amaranthine, so he has both reason and opportunity to indulge said interest.
Unfortunately, his traveling companions do not share that enthusiasm.
Oscar had a short hair phase he got it choped on a fight. (Amborys had to see for himself)
Also Ambroy's making a PowerPoint presentation on why he should receive a special, personally written invitation from Oscar to the twins' birthday party…(he hadn't been invited). @kwillow
@kwillow What if Ambroys' halo became a loading circle when he's processing/thinking hard about something?
Unfortunately, his stupid glittery donkey face covers up part of it so the effect is not as easily readable as I'd wish. But it was a fun thing to make regardless! His mood halo is one of my favorite bits about his design, and this silly idea gave me a nice excuse to play with it.
Process stuff underneath the cut!
First I made the sketch.
And then I just went nuts.
Yup, the process wasn't linear at all. I colored the clothes and rendered his earrings before I finished making the lineart for the face/hand.
WHY??
Listen, animation is hard, and so is keeping oneself motivated while making one. The face/hands were the most intimidating parts of this animation, not only because they are the most complex (and therefore time consuming), but also due to how important they are. I can slack on his bow, but if his expression comes out wrong, that's a much bigger problem.
Finishing some of the simpler parts first got the progress flow going, and it gave me strength when getting to the harder parts because "look, I've got all this done already; I'll be fine". If I insisted on making all the lineart first before doing anything else, I would have frustrated myself with it because the finish line would seem much farther away than it really is.
Progress gets slower when I get into bigger challenges; having little breaks from that kept me feeling productive (and it was a lot more satisfying/fun experience overall).
I don't know if this explanation makes any sense, but that's the best way I can describe it haha.
The people-pleaser is unpleased when the people aren't pleased. Maybe 7/10 uncomfortable, not because you're making him worry about his future, but because you're implying you aren't impressed by his outfits and that is so much scarier.
The way he'd reply to this depends on whoever was asking, so I stitched together both modes for this. In the open, he would just give the "aaw what are you jealous? ♥" response. He's trained himself to avoid emotional meltdowns in public. His household has to put up with those instead! That first part, where he flips back and forth between egomania and insecurity via babbled rapid-fire questions, is is much, much closer to his unguarded feelings than what outsiders see.
Some part of him genuinely believes he does everything for his beloved but ever-demanding public. Dressing up to brighten their drab lives, saying "yes" to every dance as he's asked for at the latest gala, adding another fib to his fleet of little white lies that keep everything nice and copacetic, etcetera. Ambroys congratulates himself on his saintly selflessness, even if 1) no one even asked, 2) he always slips out of doing any unpleasant or difficult or unglamorous favors or 3) the real benefactor is himself.
Ambroys feels that he deserves praise for caring so much about other people, but he's got it backwards--he only "cares so much" because he wants praise. He doesn't grasp the difference between doing things for others versus doing things because of others. "Desperately seeking attention," as you say, is the actual reason why he does anything beyond eat and sleep, even if he doesn't realize it. Ambroys is a flower that thrives in the (spot)light and wilts when left alone in the dark.
Relax your grip, lady. No one's taking that thing away from you. (No one else wants it.)
If Jocosa were asked this question by someone in-universe (9/10 uncomfortable, especially here in her younger years) she would give the answer of "being in the family way again would not be medically advisable." That is truth-adjacent, but not the whole truth. As she says, questions surrounding her fertility followed her for years, through side-eyes from her peers; glances of pity by her staff; through exhortations and excoriations from her husband and father and mother.
Jocosa wasn't deluded--she knew why her strange, singular spawn was considered unacceptable. Years prior, even she'd have agreed that she was duty-bound to produce progeny. That was the girl that married a contemptible man at the behest of her father for the good of the bloodline. Despite pressure from those same men to submit herself to more pregnancies, for the first time, Jocosa refused their demands.
She'd never have dreamed of such rebellion in her youth. But coming into womanhood--or, perhaps, the nights enduring the humiliation of the marital bed, the years spent sick and suffering through futile pregnancies and miscarriages and stillbirths, and the months caring for the infant the family doctor told her would die (would be better off dead)--changed her. She developed resentment, spite, a thirst for power of her own and, most surprisingly, a deep affection for her wretched little whelp. Though her body had recoiled at the thing growing inside it and vomited him up prematurely, he still clung to life and to her, loyally obeying her desperate, whispered orders to stay alive just one day more. He had stayed by her side when none of her other offspring could and none of her family cared to, and she'd stay by his.
Death hadn't claimed him, and her family didn't claim him. Her son--her family's legacy--was therefore hers to shape, and hers alone.
With his best (and only) friend gone, an eighteen-year-old Lucas struggles to right himself from an emotional tailspin. He finds company in his late-night wandering... as well as a peculiar sense of deja vu. Whether this goes anywhere good remains to be seen!
(These characters are from Forever Gold. Itaja is set to appear in Episode 5!)
In which Theo says "I'm not naive," then proceeds to be deeply naive.
This'd maybe rank as 6/10 uncomfortable. Theo has little to lose by helping Hyden, and Hyden has little to gain by alienating Theo. It only makes sense that the two most intelligent men on the continent should combine their minds to see their missing pieces restored. Theo has no reasons to believe Hyden is lying to him about his intentions (no reasons he's paying attention to, anyway).
Whether Hyden cares is another matter. Theo is aware that Hyden is not exactly the sentimental type. That's fine, Theo knows he is unusually emotional compared to most and being more sensible than that isn't a bad thing. After all, his mother was a pragmatic person, not given to flights of fancy or great shows of emotion. Despite that, she and Theo were kindred spirits, and she cared for his troubles like her own. He and Hyden have much in common as well. Maybe it isn't impossible that Hyden could care, too...
I remember your eyes were clear, brighter than the sun
With hands so soft, delicate and sweet
You learned to fall and balance on your own two feet
I could only lead you so far
I believe in who you are
Take the world by storm, muster all your strength
Embrace the forces that surround you, bend gravity and space
This whole song reminds me of the kind of hope Jocosa would have felt for Theopolis when she was on her deathbed. Plus, those first lines remind me of this, how she always saw him as an innocent pure-hearted babe despite the everything of him. (Also, since it was a struggle to get him to walk on two legs instead of all fours it makes extra sense to me that she'd look back on it fondly as a victory).
With "child of the stars" I think of it as referecing the North's lineage and how she'd view him as yet another adition to it (which I imagine wouldn't fully coincide with his own view of himself and how he doesn't live up to it).
Anyways, both characters here belong to @kwillow, hope I captured them well! I used this piece of yours as reference/inspiration.
(Please do correct me if I misinterpreted anything about your ocs)
PD1: Hope I didn't sound too whiny in my previous post!! Part of why I struggled so much drawing him back then was that I wanted to get his features right, to put into the page all the quirks I love so much about him. Truly, I adore his design, every unusual bit of it, and I felt it was doing him a disservice to get him looking more "normal". Yes, it was a bit of a struggle, but it was a worthy one!
PD2: I did have an easier time drawing him here! Guess practice does make a difference :D
It's hard to rank how uncomfortable this question is, because Theo is certain of his goal but also has a whole lot of feelings about it. Let's just go with an arbitrary 8/10.
Theo would be inherently perturbed at anyone asking about his pet project as he has told no one besides Hyden about it -- but even putting that aside, discussing his grief and his failure to process it is naturally fraught. In this instance in particular, he's stumbling around expressing a thought he knows is not rational, but that he deeply feels to be true. It's a belief close to his heart (or, more aptly, his soul), one that straddles the line between spirituality and delusion.
Though his voice is faltering and his grasp on reality is somewhat unstable, his convictions are neither. He will never give up on Mother. He simply can't.
Featuring Hyden, who belongs to @chocodile , and Theopolis, who belongs to @kwillow
With "offensively loose" Theo doesn't mean that the garment is too big for Hyden; he's complaining about the density of the weave.
Why would I make this? Well, I was watching this video about historical linen, which mentions differences between quality in higher/lower classes, and remembered that Hyden got clothes from Ridge, concluding that "Oh, it sounds like something Theo would bitch about".
Please do correct me if I committed any mistakes on their characterization! I'd love to know so I can have it in mind next time.
It's the third time I draw Theopolis and each time he looks different. What can I say? There's so many ways to draw this stupid fucker, I cannot settle for just one!!
Same applies to Hyden, even though I've only drawn him twice. It was super fun to experiment with him, specially when it comes to the shape of his bunny ears.
Btw, the fancy chair is inspired by this post's furniture.
Stuff about the process underneath the cut!
ABOUT THE PROCESS:
I actually made two sketches. The first one, which I won't show here, and the second one (the one I posted).
That first sketch contains my struggle with getting Hyden's perspective correct; what you're seeing here is traced from there, which is why it looks so clean.
Instead of tracing him like Hyden, I decided to redraw Theo from scratch, which is why the sketch I made of him here looks a lot rougher than Hyden's.
Drawing Theo traditionally was much harder than digitally. You see, digitally I can just resize stuff to fit accurate Theoness, but traditionally I had to erase and try again. Turns out I kept accidentally using normaler proportions for him than appropriate, which led me to a lot of retries, but I stubbornly persevered because FUCK YOU, THEO, I'M NOT GIVING YOU LONGER LEGS.
I eventually got him well enough on the first sketch, but then I wasn't happy with the pose/expression, so I remade it anyway, lol.
To sum it up: This rowdy, insufferable little eyesore (/compliment) gave me a ton of trouble when drawing him, but I think I managed to get his wrongness right in the end.
