Hey guys Lanky (or Mun I guess?) here! I’m so happy to announce that SW7 the Hyena fursuit is finally complete!
After nearly six months of planning and progress by first ever fullsuit is done! Already I can see a few small mistakes that I would like to fix the first time around but for a first attempt I think I did pretty well?
I’d like to talk to you guys about this character in general though. SW7 means a hell of a lot to me.
He started off as a human actually. About six years ago I joined the Alton Towers fandom and began humanising roller coasters. This is a process I’ve done for all of Alton’s Big Six, but The Smiler was the one that I always loved the most…well Nemesis too but shhh.
Anyway! About two years ago I started making anthropomorphic designs (not actually knowing about furries that much at the time) and eventually asked myself what Smiler, or Sam as I called him, would look like as a hyena? A few messy concept designs later and bam! Furry Sam!
It was from here that I ended up in the fandom thanks to [Jasper|http://aminoapps.com/p/p1k21n] who is the entire reason I got into this! They helped me set up my FurAffinity page with the user name SmilerTheHyena, because he was my main sona at the time. (And I was uncreative with his name!) Through there I also found BeautyoftheBass! Her suit was so beautiful to me and I was so happy to see another person that made a suit from a roller coaster the love!
In a short time I realised I needed a reference sheet for this guy so I went about making my first ever ref! It’s about a year and half years old at this point now, haha! You can see the difference between the first image and first ref right? That’s the start of this design journey.
As time went on and I got more comfortable with this fandom I popped onto this app (Thank Jasper again ❤️) and set up here as LankyLunatic though Smiler the hyena was still my main character to use.
Eventually I realised I needed a better reference sheet and got to work on making a much better one! Smiler 2.0 was born. This was a sheet I could use for better references! Yay!
…but alas that joy turned sour only a month or two later. Sadly I encountered my first art thief. This guy stole my design and impersonated me. It was heartbreaking to have a character that I adored torn from me so easily. Thanks to the support and help of this community though I was able to stop the thief in under 48hrs! (I also learned this guy is notorious for doing this to artists :/ )
After that point I had decided it was time for a design change and went about testing out a few different designs. During this time I nicknamed him SW7 after The Smiler’s prototype name as a sort of stand in until I could think of a better name, but it grew on me and in the end I renamed him SW7~
Now what you see before you is his most recent design and references sheet!
The fursuit itself was brought to life in my design course in college. We were tasked with making a sculpture and I brought up the idea of making a wearable sculpture. My lecturer was intrigued and gave me the go ahead and that’s how the suit construction began!
It took a lot of effort and trial and error, but finally I’ve completed one of my dreams to own a Digigrade suit! While the process was a learning curve, it has helped me understand things I need to work on to better myself in the future.
