I follow & such from @thedorkyastra and I’m a lurker by nature but I miss having a creative community so if you want a writing and/or drawing bud I’m HERE.
I got lots of characters but everyone who has tags so far will be in my tags. Also will tag my hubby’s characters who I write and ramble about 💖
I love your art so much! There's such a charm in your style and colors. How did you learn to draw children and babies so well? I try but they never quite look right. They just look like I messed up an adult face. Any tips?
hey, thank you so much!!! tbh, children are tricky and it took years of practice before i felt like i drew them okay--hopefully these tips are helpful to you!
using georgia and her much younger self as a guide: children have big heads in relation to their bodies, with their features mostly relegated to 2/3 or even 1/2 of the face, depending on the art style. babies and toddlers in particular almost always have large foreheads and big cheeks, no matter what their individual features are.
my children tend to lean more cherubic and cartoonish because i've always adored how rose o'neill, the creator of kewpie dolls, drew children and babies. great big eyes, small noses and mouths, etc.
that being said: as you can see with georgia above, her younger self still has fuller lips and a wider nose, they're just small in proportion to the rest of her head, if that makes sense!
i would avoid any harsh lines/super definition on the face. i usually add a soft touch of shading or a few very, very light lines, usually to show the fullness of the cheeks like i've done with eloise above.
there are exceptions. sometimes my characters like wilma and all of her children have dimples or a particular way their eyebrow crinkles, or some other definable feature. all that is okay! but just know the more lines you add to a character, the older they look--so you want to use a lighter hand when drawing very young children or babies.
as children age, they "grow" into their facial features. their heads are usually still a bit bigger in proportion to their bodies, with a jawline that is beginning to define, but still relatively soft.
with ellen and leon below, you can tell they are several years older than eloise above, but not so old they begin to look like teenagers or mini adults.
overall, these are the tips that have stuck with me! because i like to give my ocs children or draw them as children, i make a point to dedicate time to figure drawing people of all ages, from babies to old folks, and it has helped a lot!! thanks for asking!! <3
i was tagged by my buds @couriers-mile and @datura-tea so i may do this twice. it was about time for a new wilma picture + bio anyway! thanks guys <3
fandom (or og story): wilma is my sole survivor for fallout 4! she is a boston blueblood descended from pre-war, pre-divergence north east freedmen. a former debutante and army nurse, wilma holds the title of minutemen general and friend of the railroad.
years after she and preston get married and start a family, she hangs up the general's uniform to become a midwife, helping deliver babies all over a now safe and thriving commonwealth ❤️
full name: wilma audrey wilcott (neé lange)
gender: female
pronouns: she/her
age: 27
species: human
race/ethnicity/class: black american with a multiracial mixed father. the langes were upper-middle class due to their involvement in local politics.
describe them physically: wilma is 5’6” with a solid, shapely build. her hair is a mix of 3C/4A texture, and styled in a half-up pompdour with pinned locks free falling over her shoulders. she has greenish hazel siren eyes and dimples on her cheeks.
describe how they dress: wilma usually wears the general’s uniform when they’re doing minutemen work: talking to prospective settlements, meetings at the castle, etc. if she’s working hard gardening or building something, she’ll wear a breezy playsuit or overalls she can get dirty in (if it’s warm) or her vault suit, with or without the top unzipped and sleeves tied at the waist.
in her off hours, she is an absolute sweater girl (and probably modeled as one briefly pre-war) she likes dainty tops that tie at the collar or waist and cigarette pants/jeans. likes when preston takes her out because she can wear a dress ❤️
favorite things: yao guai roast served with fresh baked razorgrain bread, desk fans, black coffee, her railway rifle, watching the sun come up, purified water, diamond city radio, and preston’s hat
least favorite things: radstorms, super mutants, food that’s too irradiated to consume, feral ghouls, her old home in sanctuary
hobbies: sewing, experimenting with recipes, sketching/journaling, building things, hunting for pre-war tchotchkes and treasures
quirks: sings/hums old hymns from her childhood, writes down EVERYTHING in her traveling notebook, always checks her hair/clothes when passing a reflective surface
what's up in the romance department (and if they're aro, are they in a queerplatonic relationship): wilma is with preston garvey! he is one of her earliest companions and as such, he has been present for a lot of her post-vault escapades. there’s camaraderie and mirth, even platonically, but garvey’s feelings blossom fast for his commanding officer.. and wilma falls too. they are comrades in arms who are devoted to the cause and to each other.
preston admires her knowledge, tenacity, and grit, but there is a certain softness to her that is not of this world and it makes him want to protect her. he’s taken by the way she carries herself and her little sentimentalities he’s picked up on while they traveled together.
they end up getting married a few months post-game and have 4 children altogether: shaun wilcott-garvey, and leon, ellen, and alma garvey.
best qualities: charming and charismatic, cares about others’ wellbeing, holds herself accountable, intuitive, has a big heart full of courage, resilient
worst flaws: a know-it-all, can be arrogant and judgemental, vengeful, snarky when she’s in a bad mood, a little vain
would you say they're a good person: yes
fears/phobias: losing preston or any of her children, deathclaws
tell us in a few lines how you got the idea for them/how they came to be: wilma is an amalgamation of one of my earlier couriers from 2014 and the first sole survivor i ever made who actually looked a lot more like georgia in 2017! i remade wilma about 7 years ago and took the name from an oc that would eventually become yvette, my institute scientist.
given that american history is such a big theme in the game, especially the setting, i really wanted to incorporate wilma's very deep roots as a black bostinian and how the history of her family would inform her background and decisions as a railroad-aligned general.
if you feel like it, add some sketches, drawings or pictures of your OC or anything that relates to them:
her pinterest board, her character tag, preston and wilma's playlist. plenty of art of her in my art and WIP tags. thanks if you read it all!
taglist from this post. let me know if you want to be added or removed:
@dannyburke @kyberinfinitygems @capcollector @pandyssiandiaspora @roberthouse69 @softwaring @squarepiggy @daddyfuckinlonglegs @strange-doors @imsadasfuckman @gardening--tools
Finally got a commission of Kate in her Followers gear from @ziorre 🥰 I love the grain sticking out of her bag and how rough her coat looks! Thank you so much for all your hard work! Just about everything you could ever want to know about Kate is under the cut. Sorry it's so long 😅
Summary
Kate is a botanist in the Followers of the Apocalypse, passionate about finding alternative ways to manufacture medicine without relying on scavenging Old-World resources. To do so, she'll need to breed hardier crops that can survive the Mojave climate, as well as express the chemical compounds necessary to craft them. A USDA Seed Lab located in the Spring Mountains northwest of New Vegas might just offer her the opportunity to do so, but the journey there is treacherous. It isn't until the crops on the farms just outside of the city begin showing signs of disease that Kate, headstrong and determined, sets out on her own to find a way to save the people of New Vegas from a potential famine.
Basic Information
S.P.E.C.I.A.L.
S - 2
P - 5
E - 6
C - 5
I - 9
A - 5
L - 8
Tag Skills
Science
Survival
Sneak
Traits
Good Natured
Small Frame
Inventory
Silenced 10mm Pistol
Hatchet
Broc Flower
Xander Root
Maize
Background
Vault 42
Kate is originally from Vault 42, located in Olympia, Washington. It was an agrarian vault, tasked with growing nearly every fruit and vegetable imaginable, with the hope of reintroducing them to the wasteland on Reclamation Day, or so the dwellers inside were told. For nearly two hundred years, they lived in abundance, never going hungry—until the famine hit. One day, the crops were flourishing. The next, they were diseased and sickly.
Kate's father, the lead botanist, tried to save as many crops as he could, but ultimately, it was in vain. Everything had to be scrapped. The killing blow was the discovery that Vault 42's food rations had been ransacked. Paranoia over hoarding, chaos, and civil unrest broke out. The Overseer initiated a lockdown, ensuring the vault would stay sealed, and kept himself protected in his office by posting guards outside with orders to kill anyone who came near. With their supplies running out and no means to escape, the vault was doomed to starve.
It didn't take long until the dwellers began killing each other—parents and children, brothers and sisters, friends, and lovers—over the last remaining scraps of food, but the atrocities didn't stop there. Those who survived the food riots resorted to cannibalism to satiate their hunger. To protect her, Kate's parents hid her in an access panel and sacrificed their last remaining rations to feed her. Her father had plans to sabotage the reactor to force the Overseer to open the vault, but before he could, the cannibals found him. From the access panel in the reactor room, at ten years old, Kate watched as her parents were murdered, then dragged off to be butchered.
Desperate not to let her parents' deaths be in vain, Kate, herself, sabotaged the reactor to draw both the Overseer and security downstairs, then snuck up to the Overseer's office. She picked the lock on his door and found he had been the one who had ransacked the vault's food stores. Towers of purified water, stacks of Instamash, sugar bombs, and Salisbury steak, crates full of fresh fruit and vegetables lined the walls of his office. Kate was devastated.
While the Overseer attempted to stop the reactor from malfunctioning, Kate accessed his terminal. Though the clock was ticking before both he and security would return, curiosity got the best of her. Searching through his communications, she found evidence suggesting that the vault was merely an experiment to begin once the population had reached a certain threshold. The disease that killed the crops was manufactured by the Overseer himself. The last communication on the terminal was an outgoing message that the experiment had begun.
Infuriated that her parents' deaths, and the deaths of those she had once called friends, had been reduced to nothing more than data points, she chose to wait instead. She hid in a locker within the Overseer's room, then waited for him to return. She watched as he stuffed and gorged himself on the rations, her belly growling and threatening to give her away. Then she waited until he fell asleep and stabbed the Overseer to death in his bed.
As he lay dying, Kate, covered in blood and gore, looked down at her hands in horror. She had become just like everyone else. Shame and guilt overcame her. Quickly, she packed a bag with all the supplies she could carry, overrode the bault door controls, shot and killed both security guards who had been stationed outside the office, and fled the vault, running as fast as she could to put as much distance between her and the cannibals that were sure to follow.
With raiders around every corner, the city of Olympia was too dangerous for her to stay in, so she headed east into the wilderness. Using stealth and sheer luck, she managed to stay alive for about a month on her own, but eventually her supplies ran out. Thanks to her father's botany expertise passed down to her, and through trial and error, she quickly learned what plants were safe to eat and which ones would put her through agony.
For a while, she stole from farmsteads, always retreating into the wilderness in shame before she could be caught. Eventually, she came across a caravan and overheard them talk about the New California Republic. They spoke about politics and the expansion into the Mojave, and how taxes were bound to go up yet again. Recognizing these as signs of a functional civilization, Kate set out to find it, but before she could, winter settled in.
The Watchers
Wearing nothing but her PIP-Boy and a vault suit stained with blood, Kate attempted to trek through the Cascades. The wind was brutal and icy, and the snow relentless. Exhausted, malnourished, scared, and alone, she found a little alcove in the rock just off the trail. In there, she brought her knees to her chest and cried into them, only for her tears to freeze to her cheeks.
But just when she thought her time had come, a man wearing a firefighter's respirator mask and helmet found her. He wrapped her up in a tattered wool blanket and carried her up the mountain to the Lookout, an old fire watch tower, where a group of Forest Rangers provided her with medical care, food, and warmth.
Kate would learn that the Forest Rangers belonged to a group of settlers calling themselves the Watchers—the descendants of tourists and U.S. Forest Service workers who had been on Mount Rainier when the bombs dropped. Relatively isolated and protected by miles of wilderness, they survived for years by living off the land and trading with travelers who passed through the Cascades.
The Forest Rangers were elite woodsmen, trained in firefighting and search and rescue operations, and were responsible for protecting their park and keeping order. The man who had saved her was a Ranger by the name of Mason, who had seen her attempting to hike the trails from his station at the Lookout. Once Kate was well enough to talk, he asked about the blood on her suit and how it got there, but fearing he'd put her in jail—or worse—for killing the Overseer, she kept silent. Mason accepted that the child before him had been through something awful and let it go. Instead, he focused on what he could do, and that was teaching her to survive.
Over the winter, Kate learned that the Watchers, those who lived in and maintained the settlements within the state park, kept farms at the lower-elevation campgrounds, and living quarters, medical care, trading posts, and schools at the lodges and cabins. She saw a functional society, where everyone was compelled to help each other, and felt sadness. It was the future on the surface that the vault dwellers had been promised.
It did not take long for Kate to discover that Mason, the oldest and most experienced of the Rangers, was a man of few words, but when he did speak, everyone listened. He taught Kate that the wasteland could be cruel, but that didn't mean she had to be, and that it was everyone's job to make the world a better place. From him, she learned to fight, hunt, fish, track, farm, cook, and use the land around her to her advantage, while ensuring that the forest they lived in, and all the creatures who lived alongside them, were also treated with respect. Finally feeling like she had a home again, Kate couldn't bring herself to leave when the snow thawed, and Mason, who had always wanted kids but never quite got around to it, adopted her.
In Kate's spare time, she pursued botany, identifying plants and their properties to see if and how they could benefit humanity. In a way, nature became her best friend. Whenever she spoke to her flowers and herbs, they listened, unlike the other children her age.
Though the Watchers had taught her a great deal and had become family to Kate, she still wondered who was at the other end of the communication that the Overseer of Vault 42 had sent. She wanted answers, and staying with the Watchers would mean a lifetime of uncertainty. When she turned 18, she said goodbye to her old friends and began her search for what she'd later learn was the Enclave.
Followers of the Apocalypse
Kate traveled to many vaults and, in her search, found very few details about Project Safehouse. Discouraged, she decided to head south and find the New California Republic, hoping someone there had some answers. The journey was long and dangerous, but since Kate now had the tools and knowledge to protect herself, she felt more comfortable traversing the wasteland than she had when she was a child.
Upon reaching Shady Sands, she couldn't believe her eyes. It was an oasis of civilization, with power, technology, running water, and social order. Kate learned that the Enclave had been all but annihilated some years ago, with their members branded war criminals due to face execution for their crimes against humanity. It didn't sit right with her, though—the timeline was off. If they had been destroyed before her vault executed their experiment, then with whom had the Overseer been communicating? At the behest of a compassionate local, she was encouraged to give up her search and do something she was passionate about instead.
Kate came across a Followers of the Apocalypse outpost, learned about their mission, and felt that their organization most aligned with her values. Upon learning more, she was instructed to travel to the Boneyard, where she was embraced with open arms.
There, she finished her education and studied pharmacology and botany, but her dream was to craft medicine without relying on pre-war manufactured materials. To do so, she focused her research on integrating natural remedies, like the ones she had learned from the Watchers, into western medicine, though she was gently discouraged by others to put her time and energy into proven methods instead.
During her final years in the NCR, Kate began a relationship with a medical doctor, but it ended rather poorly and rather publicly when she caught him cheating on her with his receptionist in the exam room. To get away from him and all the looks of pity others gave her, she transferred to the Mojave Chapter of the Followers. Since then, she has kept her heart locked up to avoid another heartbreak. It also meant fewer distractions, so her focus was solely on her research.
In New Vegas, she helped Tom Anderson get the West Side Co-Op up and running and took on the task of creating a community garden in Freeside, working closely with The Kings to keep it protected and watered. Not long after arriving there, she met Angela Williams, an OSI scientist, and befriended her, despite the tensions between the NCR and the Followers.
Seeing Kate's brilliance, Angela told her about the NCR Agricultural Project, their investigation into Vault 22, and the existence of a USDA Seed Depository and Botany Lab located in the Spring Mountains, in an effort to recruit Kate from the Followers and into the OSI. She then elaborated that while the OSI was able to send contractors into Vault 22, they had no such luck getting into the USDA Lab. What little intel that had made it back to them suggested that it was heavily fortified on the outside, and that the seed vault was protected by Vault-Tec technology, impenetrable without a PIP-Boy to override the door lock—something, Angela pointed out, Kate possessed.
The idea burrowed its way into her brain and stayed there for weeks. With tensions rising between the Legion and the NCR, Kate knew that it was too dangerous to go alone and attempted to convince Beatrix Russell to accompany her on the journey. Beatrix agreed to go only if Kate received Julie Farkas's blessing, knowing it was a mission Julie, in good faith, could not sign off on. Kate attempted to persuade Julie, promising that she could craft medicine and solve their supply crisis, but the attempt failed. It was too risky.
While tending to the garden, Kate vented to Ross, a King's gang member, about her troubles and how she was disappointed with the garden's yield. He asked her if there was anything that could have been done differently, but Kate explained that it was a genetic problem—the species of maize they planted wasn't meant to thrive in desert conditions. If she had the right tools, she could genetically modify the crops to make them hardier, but the tools she needed were in the mountains, and Julie wouldn't sanction such an endeavor. Ross then told her that although The King had final say on Freeside matters, every man was free to live for himself. The way he figured it, she was free to make her own path, too.
Kate took the advice to heart and later that night set out for the lab, launching the events of The Fruits of Our Labor.
Personality
Kate is an intelligent, compassionate, kind, if not stubborn member of the Followers of the Apocalypse. Although she says she has a hard time relating to other people and prefers the company of plants, almost everyone around her has something kind to say. Her hard-headedness does have a tendency to rub people the wrong way, but her intentions are good.
Due to her trauma, she's not always forthcoming with information about her past. When initially questioned about it, she comes off as stand-offish and even rude—the reason being that even though she acknowledges "wasteland justice," the little girl in her still fears that she will be killed or put on trial for killing her Overseer.
When Kate later learns about the Enclave and their role in the vault experiments, she considers it a blessing that they were wiped out. She will comment on their atrocities and though she doesn't advocate for capital punishment, she believes all members of the Enclave should stand trial for their crimes against humanity.
Despite her hatred of the Overseer and the Enclave, she believes all living beings are worthy of respect and dignity—even deathclaws, who she cites play a keystone role in the ecosystem by keeping other predator populations under control.
Harkening back to her Watchers upbringing, she believes in conserving the native ecosystem of the Mojave and is hesitant about introducing non-native crops to the desert. Although she'd prefer to capitalize on existing flora, she is not naive enough to believe that humans won't grow what they can to avoid starvation.
As for her romantic life, Kate admits she doesn't have much experience, and the experiences she does have weren't good. After her last failure of a relationship, she put romance on a hiatus, preferring to focus on her work. When asked what she looks for in a person, she says she looks for someone kind, patient, and not afraid to do the hard stuff. Making her laugh is the quickest way to win her heart.
Overall, Kate is a bright light in what some would consider a hopeless, desolate wasteland. Though she is kind, she is not afraid to defend herself, often taking the route of stealth rather than rushing headfirst into battle.
In a 2011 blog, Platonic Forms of the Marginalized, Joshua Sawyer talks about his experiences writing Arcade Gannon, and his advice to other writers creating LGBT characters:
This brings me to my own experience with normative audience expectations of a character in a marginalized group: Arcade Gannon. Arcade is a companion I wrote for Fallout: New Vegas. In addition to being a Caucasian male, a doctor, and a swell guy, Arcade is also gay. Though Arcade has no more than five lines out of several hundred that relate to his sexuality (and even those are, at most, strong implications), players have given more attention to his sexuality than any other aspect of his character. Perhaps the most heated discussions were generated by an article Jim Sterling wrote titled Homosexuality and Fallout: New Vegas: A gay marriage made in gay Heaven. At the heart of the debate was Jim's assertion that Arcade was a great gay character because his sexuality is so downplayed, so "unremarkable". Internet posters far and wide both supported and contested this view, often explicitly stating their preferences for how gay characters should be portrayed. Like Lara Croft's sex, Arcade Gannon's sexuality dominated the definition and discussion of his character.
The obvious problem is that no character can meet every individual's expectations of how a group should be represented. Despite this, as long as a group is significantly marginalized among characters in media, whether due to simple omission or active exclusion, audiences will continue to turn rare specimens into exemplars.
