A collection of reference sheets and sketches for what I’m calling “the Boston arc.” I’ve been debating posting these. They’re pretty early stylistically (one of them I did the month after Watching and Dreaming first aired), but I figured I might as well. Trigger warning for blood in the last pic. I’ll warn again before posting it. Enjoy my snarky commentary on my own designs.
First - Wittebane parents. Since I drew this, I decided to cut everything prior to their deaths, so the designs aren’t entirely relevant, but I’m sharing stuff.
I have figured out more of their parenting since drawing this. Thomas is a pretty typical (for Puritans) authoritarian. Elizabeth was dealing with a pretty serious case of PPD (in a world with no idea of what that was) in the aftermath of Phillip’s birth and wasn’t the most emotionally present. Phillip’s birth was one of those that is perfectly survivable with modern medicine, possibly survivable but pretty traumatic without it. In the aftermath, the pattern of parentifying Caleb was established, and he’s the strongest attachment Phillip had, even prior to their parents’ deaths.
Next: the historical major players. I’ll draw the sucky puritans eventually; but I haven’t yet.
I’ll probably tweak these designs a fair bit - Hutchinson and Dyer especially. That one is the one I did almost three years ago, back when I hadn’t been diving quite so deeply into the historical clothing. HENRY VANE (the younger) is probably the most entertaining historical figure who shows up in the fic. Reading about his time in Boston is pretty wild. He reads as a privileged rich kid who got radicalized by the shit he read, but had a pretty rude awakening when he actually encountered it. He was ENCOURAGED by Archbishop, William Laud, the very guy the Puritans were trying to get away from, to go to Massachusetts. Vane really should have questioned that. But hey, he gets to be a source of levity of in an otherwise pretty bleak narrative.
He’s also the sort of person with the influence to make it possible for me to justify the less believable canon parts of the brothers’ backstory, namely how Caleb ended up as Phillip’s primary guardian. LOOK. This dumbass kid got elected GOVERNOR of the colony. His later life also points to him having mad charisma. I can justify a lot of wild shit if I can write it in a way that would make sense to him. Hence, my “get out of plot hole free card.”
The “John count” will be more obvious when I get around to more character sketches. There are a LOT of people named John with major story impacts. Besides Wheelwright, we have, at minimum, John Winthrop, John Wilson, John Cotton, and, when the plot gets to Connecticut, John Mason.
Next, the characters who are technically real people, but only in the sense that I found the names of people in positions I needed for plot purposes.
Not much to say about these two at the moment. William Wilson has no relation to the aforementioned John Wilson.
Finally, some baby Wittebro designs. Trigger warning for blood in the second image.
I would like you to know that Phillip should be wearing a dress in at least a few of those Hollow Mind portraits. That’s what was done, because that’s what makes sense. It’s a lot easier to clean up literal shit when it’s not caught in your pants. Breeching happened when boys had the bladder control and coordination to handle it, often around 5 or 6. For my fic’s purposes, Caleb gets breeched WAY too early as a way to hide his skin condition when the family is stuck on a boat for 2 months, and the impacts of that are still evident over 5 years later when the story actually starts.
Regarding that age 8 one? Yeah, that’s a trauma that is absolutely going to be following both of them around for at least all of Caleb’s life. Crossing out the date is because we’re in that awkward stretch of history where you have to figure out if the date being referred to is on the Julian or Gregorian calendar. Everybody here would be using the Julian, hence correcting the date to the 15th from the 26th.
I do have that pigmentation guide I mentioned. I’ll probably post it at some point, when I decide I want to subject the internet to the obligatory nudity.