#murderburding

[papermonkeyism]

Burds in colour, now in daylight so everything isn't quite as yellow!

[papermonkeyism]

Colored some burds!

Still undecided on whether the gray one's eyes should be blue or gold.

[papermonkeyism]

Had Thoughts (tm) of the old Murderburd thing, about potential redesign of the birdmonsters.

Having gone through what-ifs of huge dogs, dinosaurs, dragons, pterosaurs, owlbears and giant lynx-type cats, and none of them felt quite right, I briefly wntertained the idea of wingbeans, but the trolls didn't feel enough like "small cute pet" people instead of "large hunting animal" people. But what if something wingbeany, but big?

Also vestigial arms.

(I want to call the species "aarnivaris", as a sorta play on words with aarnikotka, Finnish for griffin, but I don't think that would translate back into English. Aarni is an ancient word for a spirit being or guardian of treasure, kotka means eagle and varis is a crow. On the other hand, Murderburd does not translate into Finnish without losing all the fun from the pronunciation, so *shrug*)

[papermonkeyism]

Yesterday's sudden Murderburd ponderings were inspired by a bluesky post calling "show me things you can do with just a pen!" and it instantly reminded me of these two ARPG pieces from.... few months shy of a full decade ago. Judging by the signature dates there. Oh. Wow. Time is a thing, huh.

ANYWAY!

I'm still quite proud of these! At the time I was doing a freelance animation gig at Helsinki, and had a full hour commute twice a day via a commuter train, so I had lots and lots of hours to kill, usually doodling. (This was before I got a smart phone, so there was no internet to browse nor social media to scroll.) These two specific pieces were done over few days with the same ballpoint pen, the latter being tinted brown with photoshop afterwards. (Couldn't find the original pen colored version online, and I'm currently at my parents' place about three hours away from the sketchbook that drawing is in.)

Good times, good times! I've missed drawing these characters a lot over the years, I just wanted to redesign the ARPG specific bird monster characters into my own designs before committing properly. It only took me... about a full decade to do so, apparently. 😅

[papermonkeyism]

Thoughts for the revival of the murderburding!

This time thinking of their house. I really like the one proper interior shot I did back in the day, the color pic here, but I could always do better! Specially if you look at the old pic and notice how one end of the house is noticeably smaller than the other...

Mainly thought about upgrading the fireplace a bit, and to potentially add a storage room and maybe a chicken coop? They will live next to a troll village, so they don't really need livestock, but chickens are still good, yes?

(I have plans of making a model of the house for reference, so I don't make it quite as lopsided this time over.)

[papermonkeyism]

Cleaned up some BURDS!

Will have to wait a bit for colors (as I forgot my watercolors when I came to my parents' place).

But BURDS!

[papermonkeyism]

"Needs some tweaking."

*redraws the entire fucken bird*

[papermonkeyism]

Dangerous thoughts:

"Oh, hey, I could make a zine out of this!"

Because the Murderburd thing used to be an ARPG, it didn't really have anything beyond the ARPG prompts. There was no story nor context beyond "two troll women who live together raise couple of birdmonsters", because it wasn't relevant to the ARPG to have context beyond drawing the bird monster characters for points.

I am, however, actually recharging my batteries while vacationing at my parents' place, so the creative juices appear to have gotten flowing, and now I suddenly have context. The context isn't even too complex to overwhelm the core of the trolls raising the bird monsters! So, this is actually feeling like something I could possibly handle without too much extra work.

Okay, so.

There's a troll village that has been plagued by a pack of birdmonsters. After the village starts losing cows to the birdmonsters, they hire a couple of hunters (the two trolls, Tekla and Hulga) to drive the pack away, with the implication they're going to move to a cottage near the village to keep the birdmonsters from coming back and work as general hunters besides that. The duo comes, drives the pack away, and discover a harchling left behind, deciding to raise it as a hunting animal. Ta dah! We get to where the ARPG started with minimal added extra, with the nearby village offering additional interactions as drawing prompts.

I think I COULD actually handle this one...