Zoelin
Hooo boy. Zoelin. It feels like I’ve had her forever and yet I’ve only had her for about nearly the same amount of years I’ve had Ovvine! Weird. Probably because it was just the end of 2009 when I finished her concept sketches and was officially January 2010 when I uploaded her first sheet. I have the concept sheet up somewhere but it pretty much reveals all of what I had originally thought for her. Some things have changed for her in her first appearance. Her ears were more pointy and her tails were actually more full like a fox’s, but they thinned out to become gerbil-like tails and her ears were more rounded as she herself became “more rounded". (weak rimshot)In the beginning I was going to make her a squirt but then I realized maybe I should try for a taller kid since..well…Lunira’s already a squirt and that’d be like, having two squirts on my plate. And diversity’s always fun to have on your plate of ocs. I literally asked around about what height I should make her and I think it was Ros that suggested making her inbetween heights? :’D Not as tall as the average kid but not as small as the normal squirt. And then the name kinda stuck from there as my own headcanon of Zoelin calling herself since she noticed that it was an odd place to be.But she was odd herself and it was actually quite fitting. Originally, her personality was not spontaneous and full of jokes at all. She was supposed to have a similar characteristic to Numbuh Five in a sense? Quiet, kinda like Lunira, but more by choice because she was too cool for words and was more into action and stealth and weapons.Then during her first character quiz, I had three mountain dews within a few hours and was literally writing the first thing that came to mind when it was time for her to answer and..yeah, that pretty much sums up her random personality. But again, it fits her. I do feel like sometimes it’s unstable and I worry that others might not understand it right, but the basic line is she’s usually cool with a side of sporadically epic outbursts to fit the moment and to fill the silence. The same happened into where I had started delving deeper into her personal life and background and such. (The original reason why she always had bangs over her eyes was that she was blind but then I scrapped that because blind + flying = safety hazards everywhere) And she became more concrete in my brain that I just kept thinking more and more about how she is and why she acts the ways she does. It really all boils down to where she just prefers to laugh off the hurt with a good joke even though that’s really bad.I’m nearly 350% sure that the brotp dynamic between Zoelin and Finnick as well as the animosity between her and Milo-Lee is the foundation of Bailey and I becoming twins but it worked out so well. Like, creepily and awesomely well. It’s also interesting because it helped flesh out her wild-card like personality. Some days she can be cool as a cucumber and be the most agreeable person, then other days she’ll just be stubborn and annoying because she’s irritated enough to that point. Her fuse is slightly shorter, but her actual anger isn’t shown as much as her up-front anger. The up-front anger is what’s usually shown when she’s fighting with Milo about random-event-A, or if she’s just peeved at a rude person. Her actual anger I have written about somewhere in my gallery and it’s…its something. It’s her more rabid side, and I should write that again some time. Gylan had also helped in shaping her personality, as well as Niji. Like Finnick, she feels more at comfort with those two and calms down more instead of going all out. While Gylan is more of her opposite in a lot of ways, it’s not too opposite at all where they are completely on different poles of the planet. She’s just as much of an influence on him as he is on her. As she grew now, I like how she’s gotten more docile in some ways when she’s older. Instead of being crazy for a lot of things, she’s just got a personality that’s just “Zo" and she has this flair of “yeah I did it, but I did it because it was fun, wouldn’t you agree?" about her. I guess the best way to describe her would be thinking of Zooey Deschanel from New Girl but with about a few more explosions here and there.
Maybe Zooey with a mixture of Kristen Schaal.
Yep.
I didn’t realize this but I think I figured out how to draw satyr legs before DR when I had designed Zoelin, so it’s kinda funny that the one thing that makes me fretful of drawing one is actually something I knew to draw all along. I love how versatile I made her design in the beginning with the dual tails and specifics of how she walks/stands, so there’s nothing I’d change about her design besides fleshing her out more in the normal sense of body tone.