#palaeo's characters

[palaeosinensis]

To my general shock it seems I have not actually uploaded this piece to Tumblr before. Way back in 2021 things were...very dark and bad. I lost three family members and a companion their equal in about a year. Three of them in about four months. There was and still is a lot of baggage tangled up in there. I was painting my character Ama Tala (The mother of all wolves) thinking somber thoughts on the winter solstice. My grandmother died that night. It gives me a lot to think about every year. Last embers. Long cold nights. Sparks. New beginnings. Growing days. Happy Winter Solstice.

[palaeosinensis]

I have been pushing shapes and trying out many styles for short form comics. It's out of my comfort zone and it's not as easy as it looks. I already respect comic makers but that respect is ratcheting up the more I do this; there's so many parts. The character's design. How they move. What to leave out what to keep in. What to write in the dialogue boxes. WHERE to put them. How big should the text be? I have no magnum opus planned but sometimes I want to express things and they come across better visually than in text.

[palaeosinensis]

I am weirdly stoked by this drawing??? I feel like it's the first time I've drawn Ama Tala and her son in a style that matches head to toe and across species. Also did you know blue mechanical pencils are life changing? The scale is off but I don't know that I care. Technically that's closer to the size of her eldest wolf shaped kids while she herself (And her mate Baba Vilkas) seem comically gigantic. But hey little of their lore is locked in. Still. Just. Eeeee. I'd do comics if I could draw this well this consistently. Learning to stylize based on a set of rules vs exclusively what you like is challenging.

[palaeosinensis]

An anatomy/light/rendering practice piece of my character Veruk's true form.

[palaeosinensis]

what's your biggest (tallest strongest etc) oc?

I don't appear to have any great sketches photographed of him (oops!) but my literal physically biggest OC is probably Vaanru.

Vaanru like Moro is from the world apart and he's another long time resident of the realm. Most of the time he's an ordinary human being with longish hair, but when he's in very poor control of himself his dragon form takes over. It varies in size but at its worst he's of kaiju proportions. Vaan's probably the most uniquely strong character in that universe; he's not got the hardest punch or the greatest endurance. But what he can do is jump through his own void. His dragon form is a poor container for what Vaanru terms "void" for lack of an adequate descriptor-a great nothingness that's trying to eat him alive from the inside. It's painful, cold, suffocating, utterly empty, and incredibly hard to get back out of. But he can disappear into this void and claw his way back out in another location. Think of it like a wormhole; if the void is nothingness but also the shortcut then the distance between two points becomes...nothing. It saves a number of skins in the course of the world apart's story.

[palaeosinensis]

oki character questions. hope this is what you were looking for!

is there a character that is particularly fun for you to draw? do any of your characters have a story attached to them? is there a character that is particularly difficult for you to draw? which character has been with you the longest, and how long have they been around? and last: which character do you identify with the most, personally?

I have one OC that answers most of these questions. Meet Moro.

Moro is most of these questions! She is very fun to draw; she has a semi locked design but not locked in proportions or art style so she's fantastic for squash and stretch, gross anatomy, light studies, perspective...she's always fun for a quick page in the sketchbook. Moro is from the single most developed headworld I have even if I never write about it online. She's from "the world apart" which can be summed up as a purgatorial hell; you go there to learn what you must learn in order for judgement upon death to be fair. Ever seen people that never had the chance to make the right choice? This place creates that chance at the point in life you need that lesson most. How long that takes is highly variable; Moro has been there so long she's lost count. What lessons you need to learn are equally varied. The realm changes your appearance in accordance with the self and she does not think kindly of herself hence her particularly spooky look. Moro is also one of my hardest characters to draw. The more realistically you try to draw her the harder it gets and it gets hard FAST. Skulls are complex, exposed anatomy is complex, and large expanses of hairless white skin demand knowledge of the underlying musculature. There's no long hair or markings to cover up drawing deficits. I also can never make up my mind if she's canonically one body plan or if she has the ability to morph a little, stand on two legs, become more monstrous in a battle, etc. Moro has been around probably the second longest total; I've been drawing her since I was a young teenager. She's also the character I identify with the most on a day to day basis. She's got boundaries like a bunker wall, values justice over order, and sees herself as something rather ugly due to the messages the outside world has given her. She's gotten a lot of scars from doing what she felt was right consequences be damned. But there's a lot of love in that monster if you stop looking at the surface.

[palaeosinensis]

Made a maquette of Moro's noggin using a 3d printed skull from ArmadilloStudioShop. I used monster clay which when cool is really good at holding its shape so I can pop the ears on and off. I normally use 3D scans of skulls from zoos/colleges that you can turn around in space but there's something different about holding a physical object. Computer screens flatten things FOR you but YOU get to make observational decisions with a physical touchable reference.

[palaeosinensis]

Did a bunch of very loose sketches of Palaeo last night. Been a very very long time since I've drawn the character and not just the avatar. I kind of want to pick one to finish and challenge myself to NOT get hung up in detail and leave it as flat as I can manage.