#fire room

[ntls-24722]

Cave themed portraits. Not true fire room/cave art, but themed as such.

[rerollingforlife]

ooh Kaze.. don’t look at me with those eyes... DON’T LOOK AT ME WITH THOSE EYES!

[ntls-24722]

cloesona

Featuring @artastic-friend's Kofruth and Atzurae! HOOH I've been thinking about doing this meme for awhile I'm glad it turned out so nice

breakdown:

So, I had the idea that from time to time in the comic, or when the perspective shifted, it would shift onto the artstyle of the respective species, here's how things differed.

Kofruth opens the scene in cave painting medium, cave painting that is notably lacking in Blue! Blue dye is a fairly cheap, common dye and Debu love blue, but it's sometimes excluded from cave paintings designated for fire rooms, which is... where most of their paintings are. Debu caves are completely dark except for the room dedicated to having fire, their fire room, which also happens to be the one they display their art in - because it's the one room you'd be able to see it! However, due to the lack of any other light but their fire, and the color of the cave wall, it's extremely orange in the fire room, which dulls out the blue color from their art. So, sometimes, they do away with it entirely.

Also, why is Atzurae just a bunch of lines?

Debu, due to their size, have the quirk of drawing most things from the top view, since that's how they see everything - especially the 2-foot-tall zebraelves! To them, they just look like big spiders. So they draw them as fat little spiders.

Also, Atzurae's cloesona! It's... not a zebraelf cloesona?!?! It's been given Debu anthropomorphic traits - tusks, and big nostrils! It's almost like it's kofruth's cloesona instead...🤨

I turned off the multiply blending mode to better show this - So, despite zebrapeople, especially zebraelves, championing dye production in the early history of Bolur, they only really make reds and blues. That's cuz it's all they can see! They could make a yellow due to paint something, but why do that when it looks pink, and they have red and white right there in their disposal?

There's also the art style - I originally went a completely different direction with this. My inspo was initially ancienct Chinese art since I saw the parallel of how popular the medium of ink and paper had gotten between both societies, and I had juuuust gotten to finishing before (and you can kind of tell where I was, at the scars around Kofruth's eye) realizing where I should've taken zebraelf art.

Zebraelf's aesthetic attraction is for geometry, and curvilinear designs! It's the same for zebramen too, somewhat, though not as strong as it is for zebraelves. Zebraelves LOVE making things with one stroke and they try to do it as much as possible since it resembles the uniformity and cleanliness of their stripes, though the exaggerated fur was fun (since they express emotions with their fur) so I tried to keep that, too.

There's also the anatomical inaccuracy of giving Debu teeth gaps. Debu notably Do Not have them in their front teeth, and find the seperation of said tusks creepy.

But that anatomical inaccuracy is far less egregious than the one in the next frame:

A closed mouth!!!

Debu's front teeth do retain some vestigial appearance of looking seperate through the gums and the striations, but their lips physically cannot close like this. Zebrapeople can close their mouths, though with a little effort since they have a natural grin, but Debu mouths are too tight, period.

Also, I think a zebraelf might give Kofruth a monobrow! Monobrows are seen as beautiful (due to the singular, aesthetically pleasingly unbroken line), so while not as common in Debu, they might still give Kofruth one.

Not much to say here other than this is easily my favorite frame!! The sclera are shown here since they're often shown in distress, and the white is drool, which are Bolur tears

Most "vertebrates" don't have sad tears, they have sad drool, and i've decided the new reason for that is because their saliva has chemicals with a mild painkilling + soothing effect, so when they're upset their body kicks the saliva-making into overdrive both to calm it down with those chemicals, and to slow their own breathing by having to stop and swallow their own saliva

That and there's the very cool detail (in my opinion) that Kofruth is implied to be semi-animated - Marc Azéma and Florent Rivère made the claim that a lot of cave art was made to be animated under the flickering light of a fire, and that's why a lot of cave art seems to be a lot of animals abstractly juxtaposed on top of one another. (he also made a video showing this off)

Also, here's the GORGEOUS bull from the Cave of Altamira i based the cave paintings off of. STUNNING <3333

[ntls-24722]

Ah, my favorite part of speculative biology... the flying Thingmajigs!!!

Instead of domesticating wolves, the Music Men's best friend is birds. "Cloes," specifically. Many of them are insectivores because they're an alliance over their crops (music men get their crops free of pests, cloes get snacking) but they do have "raptors" that help them locate and catch prey and game that I should also design.

The Debu have domesticated the Homo Mousike equivalent of bats. Nocturnal, communal, cavedwelling cloes that even sleep upside-down! Though that last part isn't special, most cloes sleep/roost upside-down - have slight prongs on the ends of their muscular tails to help them hook on to a branch they're hanging on.

Originally they were the pests but now they keep pests out, not just bugs but any small animal. They're also communal much like most domesticated cloes, and by mimicking their calls you can command an entire flock, which is an especially potent ability when the only thing stopping these guys from going after bigger prey is numbers.

The gap between their front and back teeth are especially large so they can have a gap for Grip. They use their long middle finger to stab insects.

The Zebraelves have their insectivores, but they actually have clohe mounts! Diving, powerful flyers the size of our storks that they ride. They're not as communal as most domesticated clohes, and they sleep/roost on the ground, unlike most cloes. They actually can use their tail like a fish's, and swim like one beneath the water.

They're almost a bit too water friendly, and oftentimes, if you fly over water with them, there's a half chance they'll dive for a snack... It's best to keep them extra-fed but there's no cure for impulsivity.

Behold... the cloe equivalent to a crusty white dog. This one is a basic clohe domesticated for the purpose of keeping pests off your garden but the wealthy have begun breeding fancier cloes from the already curly-furred, cute, insectivores in nature.

Wouldn't be a true "dog" without the unethical breeding for cuteness

They have a version of fetch (aka some game universally played with cloes) where they toss them up in the air and let them glide/fly down into their hands. Once they industrialize/modernize I imagine cloe movies will have someone reluctantly adopt a cloe after literally tossing it away and having it fly right back over and over.

That one picture of the zebraelf holding her laughter in inspired me to make these 3 characters - these 2 mailmen who ride their cloes to far-out cities and deliver things and their kinda uptight boss who always catches them on stupid tomfoolery. Mordecai, Rigby, and Benson dynamic.

They actually do know Sindeer, Rinkalla, and Lepit, but the first one (fanny pack, "Mauli") is seen as a treat to have in the house and the 2nd one (mohawk, "Pua") is seen as a PEST by specifically Sindeer because she caught her stealing from her farm Only Once

Also, Rinkalla's petroglyphs.

The first one is set mostly in the past. shows the nigh-falling out between Sindeer and Lepit that led them searching for someone new, Lepit making his seperate burrow now that Rinkalla is there to sleep beside Sindeer, something she made to comfort Sindeer on her infertility woes, and Rinkalla offering Lepit a razor to shave off his back fur, alongside making fur extensions from them. Surprise! i forgot to mention that in their introduction post but Rinkalla and Lepit are trans and they have a sick trade deal

This one is mainly set in the now with just very domestic scenes for the most part of Rinkalla offering Sindeer handmade blades, Lepit caring for her when she got stupid sick, but that one gruesome, blood-covered scene was how this series of skirmishes with a group of Zebraelves ended, where a group of exiled, unwillingly nomadic raiders were attempting to drive the 3 out from their homes so they could take it. The first time Lepit got stabbed badly when they came, they got away and stole a big chunk of their food, but the 2nd time, Sindeer literally picked up one of them, chucked them into the air, and called their cloes to feast on the fucker midair.

That ended that issue very quickly! It was the scariest thing Rinkalla had ever seen and she commemorated it

[ntls-24722]

go make cave art today

[ntls-24722]

🎶🎵myyyy paleo ponyyyyy 🎵🎶

Middle and right ponies are edited/traced from ElementBases and animepegasus on Deviantart, respectively! I wanted to make them look particularly bible accurate/on model for the effect i wanted to go for, and they are loosely based off of actual cave paintings of horses (seen below). (when i say on-model/bible accurate, i mean at least in the lineart... the ponies in mlp are much more vibrant, i realize, LOL)

NOTE: i know NO lore and this is probably a violation of like, ALL of it. i had a vision and my dumb caveman-obsessed brain sought to enact it.

Also, apparently, it wasn't known that wild horses could have that spotting, which made that last painting of a spotted horse a very big deal! This painting, in the Pech Merle cave, made scientists have to literally go back and double-check horse dna and make sure wild horses could actually be that color around the time it was painted. So this is a very cool, very special mare :D

Also, the snouts were less exaggerated/smoothed out to look less... cinched? I believe wild horses don't have as small/cinched snouts as domestic ones, and have thicker, smoothed out ones like a draft horse. Which this piece also implies the snouts we see in mlp were made through selective breeding... or through the same reduction of facial prognathism that humans went through as we transitioned to nicer, easier-to-chew-and-process cooked foods!

[ntls-24722]

"do you still love me?"

[ntls-24722]

Fire Room

I wanted to draw a little candid scene :)

this is actually some of the first homo mousike lore that i've made, where in their caves there is a dedicated fire room. It's the hub of everything Cool with Debu because it's the only room with light - Debu caves are in complete darkness, so this is not just their kitchen but their art gallery and often where Debu hang out.