A glorious homunculus, recently created to accompany the latest batch of grubs. Kitten season has come again, and so our spare time is currently dedicated to handsewing them plushes. These go with them when they are eventually adopted out - we brush their mother for a sample of her fur and add it to the stuffing so they have a familiar smell in their new home.
We did not use a pattern for this because our printer is busted and we don't want to hunt down a pattern for a mountain goat plushie and then have to, like, walk to the library and back and then a bit to obtain a printout, so we just sort of eyeballed it. The extra panels on the sides are where we had to extend the torso because we accidentally forgot to add an attachment point big enough to fit the head and had to either make it taller or have the neck attach where the legs were supposed to go. Overall, turned out great! Materials list below cut.
Materials:
-Random bronze fabric from our scraps stash
-$5 fleece blanket that we got from the Dollar Store (had to cauterize the edges so it would stop falling apart while we were sewing with it but worked out after that)
-Entire spool of gray thread from a sewing kit we got from someone trying to get rid of their old sewing supplies a while ago
-Buttons from thrift store
-White embroidery floss, also from thrift store (theoretically was for detailing but it turned out too thin to do any significant detailing so we just started using it instead of thread when we ran out of thread with like three things left to sew, which you can see most easily in the right front leg and the shaping of the chest panel)
-The yarn that the thrift store used to tie off some of their fabric that we reused for fur after realizing the embroidery floss was too thin to stand out against the fleece
-Like 12 hours of time because this was all hand sewn and a considerable amount of it was handsewn while we were actively grubsitting
hello! Here to drop off some promised recs, we're still looking around and trying to find stuff we think you'd enjoy but we hope you like these in the meantime :) (these are rather soft on the whump scale sadly, I'll look for some more intense stuff. Do let me know if there's any specific tropes you'd like for me to keep an eye out for)
(some of) my own fic stash
https://archiveofourown.org/works/38332081
https://archiveofourown.org/works/29374692
https://archiveofourown.org/works/63400513
Bonus: conlang wildcard
https://archiveofourown.org/works/30982970
as for the pencil sketch: we'd love something with Aurelia!, either regular or Familiar Vessel AU, or whatever you wish really, feel free to go crazy I trust you with her :]
…the young vessel, unlike its mature counterparts, has little in the way of natural defense. For these first stages of life, its body plan must carefully mirror the mold into which it was born - the chitin of the host's original body protects their void from the outside world until they can maintain a shape of their own, the protective, malleable "skin" that allows a Vessel's body to behave like a body, rather than just the glob of void it technically is. While Void is known as a horrifically caustic solvent to us, residents of the Above, to a creature of Void, much the same can be said about the Voidless air we breathe…
...while an elder vessel may quite happily persist outside of the Abyss, those whose skins have not yet toughened must seek out any coverage that they can to keep themselves safe from the caustic atmosphere of the world outside...
References made for an RP server we've been around on. Team Mothiva, now including Absence from- christ it's been like two years since we posted that. Goddamn. Don't worry about how they acquired that guy it's fine
Unedited photos of watercolor we did as a christmas gift for an exchange. Also the most quality photos of this painting we have as we gave it away ~30 minutes after it dried and most of the intervening time was spent driving to the venue. Hope you all have a fun rest of year!
The first of many, the geef of capriunicorn from Discord Dot Com requested Klonoa which we banged out while trying to figure out how to put a pirate hat on a dinosaur with a neck frill (which we have since decided to use another outfit for because traditional hats are really hard to make look good on a centrosaurus and they would serve very little utility save for aesthetics, which is an issue when our backup is generally "modifying for utility".
This particular outfit required relatively little modification, and was mostly a "thing to chip away at when more complicated outfits are giving us grief" thing (thank you for giving us so many quadrupedal body plans, btw, we are genuinely enjoying modifying things it's just time-consuming to design & paint). The main thing was the earrings, as more traditional piercings with these clunky earrings feel like they would put a lot of very uncomfortable stress on rabbit ears. As such, these are functionally clip-ons (which would include a few more dangly bits for aesthetic purposes, but we accidentally painted over that with the black for the ear and there was no way in hell we were gonna make yellow stand out over that).
We stole this outfit from Vaishali from Empires & Puzzles (pictured below with the request message).
Only [AGE REDACTED]? He should have been at the club!
An Art Fight attack and the process of painting it, ft. our cat because using him as a backdrop for our WIP shots was more convenient than trying to get him out of the way for any of them. TBN belongs to @strawberr1m1lkshake and is merely being appropriated by us for Cool Art purposes. Like half of the paints in this are metallic.
Clumping our Bugtobers into groups of three this year! We are toying with the gimmick of using one ink per day, mostly because we have way too many sample vials at the moment. This has thus far mostly involved a startling amount of learning to clean pens out thoroughly. Foxglove prepping for some free-range surgery, some more "pinning down our Vi design" activities, and, of course, [SPOILERS FOR DAY 11 OF OUR OTHER OCTOBER CHALLENGE].
In theory, the submission period has not ended while we were cutting this out, as we have been doing since we have unfortunately come to the realization that there's no way we're gonna be able to slap lines good enough to make cutting this out practical on this before submissions close. Please pray for us that Tumblr user flame-shadow has not stayed on schedule.
We have to post our works if we want people to see them. Can you believe it? Anyways, quick sketch of our latest iteration of Attempting To Translate Vi To Our Style In A Way That Still Reads As Vi, and also a pre-mulched Mulch that we drew to test out a dip pen. Will maybe make some more effort to more easily distinguish bees and wasps later, particularly with shape - a lot of the general bulk of Vi's torso gets disguised with the middle limbs here, and it takes away a bit from the build we're trying to achieve. We'll get the hang of it eventually, we're sure.
Did you know? You have to post art for people to see it. Wild, we know. Anyways, we finally drew our Bau's swords, and we're going to make you decipher their extremely thick (designated south Appalachian from our American Accent Experts) accent. Also comes with bonus notes under the cut.
"Y'see, the thing with weapons is that if y'ain't careful wit'em y'can really tear up a man. Throwin' metal aroun' th'place doesn' come without consequences. It c'n take a lotta work ta master any weapon't all, an' even more work t' keep from hurtin' anyone y'wouldn't want to."
"Take m'swords, for example. These're cuttin' blades, n' they're hooked't th'tip. Y'see this sorta thing fer sport, usually, but they're a bit useless fer actual fightin' cuz they don't cut shell. Y'need t'have some dexterity t'put 'em to work, 'cuz hitting shell with 'em's worse'n useless. Dulls yer blades, 'n such. Y'need ta hit b'tween th'shell, or't does nothin', 'n any actual hit'll be real likely t'kill 'r maim."
"Mine've got swordbreakers in'm, cuz I don' really use'm t'cut. Bit narrow t'really club with, but I like'm narrow cuz I like t'get inta guards. Th'hook's made ta get inta joints, but't works just's well t'grab shit outta bags'r hands, n' th'extra grabbin' bits make't a bit easier t'nab that."
"'f I miss, worse't happens is't some bug gets'r shell sliced, 'n tha' doesn't mean much, y'know? No major hit, 'll scab over'n a few hours'n be fine. 'f I used a crushin' weapon, though, 't might actually hurt 'em."
"'n a pinch, they'll work jus' fine fer th' original purpose. Fit th' hook 'nto a limb, give'a shallow cut, 'n most people'll back off once they know y'could've ripped a limb off. Makes't harder for'm t'wield a weapon, too. If's somethin' real fussy like a velvet ant- they don' clot like other bugs, so y'can't really draw blood from'm- then'm usually stronger'n em, so disarmin' works jus' fine, 'n I can hold onto 'em if'ey still wanna pick a fight."
"…'sides, carryin' aroun' two'a these makes me look real cool, don'tcha think? All fancy'n such."
Bau's specific accent for the in-universe setup rather than the "translating things" is, like. Distinctly "cricket or grasshopper who has not really made an effort to, like, get around the fact that their mouthparts aren't super made for the sorts of sounds used in bugnish" which is perceived as a Hick Accent because a lot of crickets Do tend to work around similar, like, Perceived As Hick Industries Done By Mostly Uneducated People. It takes Effort to sort of train yourself to speak in a way that will read to other bugs as More Educated, and Bau has just sort of… never bothered? Best they've got is enunciating it a bit more clearly, chief. They're not relearning how to speak a whole language to be seen as Slightly More Educated.
In terms of actual in-universe sounds that are Not translated to English they'll just sound a lot chirpier. You could probably interpret some of the words in there as adjacent to the sort of shit you hear out of birds. Might be able to unintentionally set off the fight-or-flight of bugs who used to be heavily preyed upon by small songbirds if cussing violently enough. Sometimes you accent sounds with actually making the standard cricket-chirp sound if you're trying to be sexy.
Sometimes you also do this when you are pissed off at people, This is because crickets are Like This and a lot of them will fucking fight each other for the approval of a potential mate.
Anyways, the fun part of Bau's weapons is that they are deliberately built for being showy and impressive and letting them do flashy sleight-of-hand with their opponent's belongings while also being hideously inefficient enough as actual weapons that bringing them onto the battlefield in the first place actively seems like a terrible strategic decision.
