June 25th marks another Marot Mart Gang birthday with Dento, happy birthday Dento!
I just barely made it in time but I did it!! It was actually really interesting working on Dento’s design in particular since I’d yet to figure out what the elder zoras would look like in my style, and it served as a little bit of a challenge for me because I don’t have a ton of practice with drawing older characters in general! I ended up quite pleased with how this one turned out though and it’s actually made me more excited (rather than the previous apprehension I had) to draw Dento more! But also, thank goodness my normal design for him isn’t going to have the scarf accessory because the elders’ jewelry in particular was a pain in the butt to not only draw but also just to figure out how it worked 😭 I've been churning out these portraits for the past few months but luckily I get a break for a little while until the next one on the list!
Just as I did with Tona in relation to Cleff, I obviously tried to give Dento some features that are similar to Marot since he was the one to outright pass down those traits to her as her grandfather! Aside from that, I actually somewhat (only very slightly) based Dento’s features off of one of my grandpas on my mom’s side, who’s an electrical engineer and actually taught college classes at one point. It’s of course not exactly the same as what Dento does but Dento’s clearly very skilled and educated in his craft as I know my grandpa is with his own area of expertise so I felt it was fitting. They also have a similar sort of work ethic, at least for my interpretation of Dento
Are you guys ready for another extremely nerdy explanation on why I chose a particular day for one of the MM Gang’s birthdays? Yeah you are, it’s under the cut!!
Disclaimer as usual that I am not formally educated in the areas of study/practice that I’m talking about here (though I have of course tried to make sure I’m providing correct if simplified information) but as I’ve mentioned before, I always try to look for a day that relates in some way to something about the character and I knew that for Dento, it had to be something involving metalsmithing!
With that in mind, I started to look at metallurgy/metalsmithing terminology and researching various parts of the process, steps, techniques, etc. and one of the things I looked into was the different types of heat treatments used on metals. One of these is precipitation hardening, which is used to increase the yield strength of a metal (AKA the point at which deformations to the material go from being temporary (elastic deformation) to permanent (plastic deformation)), which makes it so that you’re able to apply more stress to it before it reaches that point. And get this, one of the steps in precipitation hardening is aging, precipitation hardening is even sometimes called age hardening due to this!!
That in and of itself is obviously super cool and would serve as a neat little reference but where does the number for his birthday itself come in? Well, precipitation hardening is specifically used with alloys and superalloys, so that's where I started branching out from to try and find something. Superalloys are alloys that are able to perform well even at very high temperatures, and among other things are also really resistant to thermal creep deformation, corrosion, and oxidation, which would absolutely be of particular interest to a predominantly water-dwelling species. So I looked into different superalloys and the one I want to focus on is Inconel, a nickel-based superalloy. There are actually different types of Inconel that each have slightly different properties from the others, such as better weldability or improved resistance to high temperature corrosion, based on the percentages of each element within the alloy's mixture. There are quite a number of them but as you might've guessed by this point, one of these variations is none other than Inconel 625
Interestingly, one of two methods is usually used for hardening the alloys depending on the specific type of Inconel being worked with. Inconel 625 actually isn't one of the variations that uses precipitation hardening and instead is strengthened using solid solution hardening whereas Inconel 718 does use precipitation hardening. That was another potential number I could've chosen since both of them are two of the most commonly used ones, but I went with Inconel 625 because of what in particular it's commonly used for. Both Inconel 718 and Inconel 625 are commonly used in the aerospace, chemical processing, and power generation industries just to name a few, as are a lot of the other alloys. Inconel 625, however, is noted in particular as being especially suited for aggressive aqueous environments such as both non-oxidizing and oxidizing acids, and seawater. It's often used in the marine industry you guys, it can withstand extreme conditions both in and out of the water!! When I read that, I knew I absolutely had to make Dento's birthday 6/25!!
We don’t actually know what kind of metal is used for all of the Zora’s jewelry and architecture aside from it being silver in color, but I’d have to imagine that it’s something other than actual silver given that silver has the highest thermal conductivity of any metal, so it could probably be an actual burn risk to touch if it's been out in the sun all day absorbing a ton of heat. I can't imagine wearing so much hot metal would be safe, let alone enjoyable. Most metals have a thermal conductivity of at least 50 W/m·K, with a decent portion of those being at least 100 and silver being 429. Words are starting to blur at this point as I'm writing and fact-checking this so I haven't found a solid number but it seems Inconel in general is actually quite a bit closer to the least thermally conductive pure metal, manganese (7.81 W/m·K), which would make sense given it can withstand such extreme temperatures to begin with. And anyways, just coming from a longevity standpoint, pure silver is really soft, and while it is corrosion-resistant, it would pretty quickly oxidize given all the water it would be exposed to, even if it wasn't directly submerged in it. I'm sure the humidity of the domain alone would be enough to speed up that process and I feel it would just overall be a pain to maintain and keep looking nice. Inconel 625 would definitely be much better suited on a number of different fronts compared to silver but I'm obviously not saying that that's actually what the zoras use because there's basically nothing that outright supports or refutes that idea in the game itself
But ultimately it’s not like it all has to make sense or anything. I mean, the zoras are notably a species particularly weak to electricity and yet one of the most significant parts of their visual culture is the ornate metal jewelry that all of them wear, that would essentially turn them into a walking lightning rod if we go by real-world logic!
Working on the two Marot Mart Gang birthday drawings for this month (and struggling with one of them) right now but I just wanted to show you guys something kinda funny. So I was messaging my friend Jaden a few days ago and when I was typing, look at what for some reason one of the suggested words was
Like, why are we assuaging Dento? What shenanigans have the others in the MM Gang gotten up to this time?
The topic of this conversation was completely unrelated so the only conclusion I can draw from this is that my keyboard’s become just as zora-brained as I am lol
