Wow... this one was a pain to process... the arms had lines to define the border between white and black regions, and I kept forgetting whether the black went on the underside or the top. Yet another character I have been only ever been able to draw once... which is a shame, ‘cuz I really like him, but there’s a lot of things I’d do better/different if I could manage a decent second take... Particularly the eyes: I’d much rather give him black eyes, but I’d have to completely revise the facial markings to make it work well. I wish I’d done the structure/tone of the feet better, which should be zygodactylous and white along the soles. The hands should have two fingers and a thumb each, and it wouldn’t have been hard to add a few extra digits on paper. Ah, well.
Early in my character design process for Percep., I decided on a trend of animal markings being darker along the back and lighter along the belly, the reasoning being that if seen from above, the black would blend in better with the ground, and if seen from below, the white would blend in better with the sky (Syzygy’s markings follow a similar trend). I’m pretty sure I read something about this in a Wikipedia article or something, but I’ve never been able to find mention of it anywhere. (Titanonewts spend most of their time hanging upside down in trees, tho, so their markings are inverted). It looks a lot like dramatic lighting, actually, which totally wasn’t what I had in mind but I’m okay with.
Enough of my rambling... I know what you guys are really here for: lore! Here we go:
Standing at a hulking eleven feet tall, The greater titanonewt is one of the more dangerous predators of the Broken Wood... They lie in wait, high up in a tree, their lanky limbs camouflaged well among trunks and branches. They drop down onto prey that passes below them, or land then pounce if their quarry doesn’t quite pass directly underneath. The wild population of Titanonewts has been in ready decline for quite some time, largely due to the lack of suitable prey in the Broken Wood, but they’re a favourite of naturalists. They survive well in captivity... they actually require very little space for a habitat, since they do not need a large territory to range in, needing little more than a decent sized tree and preferably a nearby source of water... that, and an outcropping of rocks in the sun to bask on is enough to keep them quite content. They are, unfortunately, dumber than a bag of hammers, and are not at all domesticated in the slightest. This leads to many fatalities among keepers that forget how dangerous these enormous predators really are. Efforts have been made to crossbreed them with draconic creatures to enhance their intelligence, though the addition of intellect usually makes them incomprehensibly dangerous to keep around. They’re already extremely strong and fast... making them smart is just begging for trouble. It’s bad enough that they already almost have opposable thumbs.
Most of the remaining wild titanonewt population survives by fishing, even though they are not nearly as well adapted for diving as they are for pouncing on land animals.
Just noticed I forgot to put white on the sole of his other foot... D’oh. X3
