Protective

Lord Tsa’run, general, Inquisitor and bodyguard to High Prince Zul’jinn.

Another draw it again, the painfully cringeworthy original was done in 2003 and available for Patreons to laugh at. Redone as a sketch because it was supposed to be quick, but this way of colouring takes a while and is quite enjoyable. At this rate though AU$10 might be a bit of a bargain XD Anyway I probably just wanted to draw these two characters interacting in the original drawing so I have exactly no idea what’s going on here. Drew Tsa’run in the full military uniform and Zul’jinn in more formal gear to show development or something.

Andrew, Megan, Magellan and Andromeda

The twins!

Magellan and Andromeda were identical twins and very close to each other. Magellan was a bit of a wild child, Andromeda was much more sensible and down-to-earth. They were kind of background characters before so not that well developed, even though Andromeda was going steady with one of my main characters.

Andrew and Megan are not identical twins (in fact people who think that all twins are identical are usually surprised to find out they’re twins). Andrew occasionally flies into berserker rages like he’s about to do here (so don’t piss him off) and does have a bit of a short fuse; he is otherwise generally easygoing and amiable. Megan is a lot more calm and level headed which comes in handy in her line of work (she does covert ops, information gathering and diplomacy runs). Usually has at least one of her twin brother and her long-term boyfriend and less regularly her favourite girlfriend along or at least somewhere in the area as bodyguards.

Happy silly season!

“Doesn’t that make your teeth rot?”

“It’s worse when you’re with ’em!” Andrew snickered.

Zara passed Andrew another box of decorations from the bowels of the shed, surreptitiously observing Dakarai and Megan being cute at each other on the other side of the garden. The bright orangey yellows of the Christmas bush caught her eye. Around this time of year, especially among the people that celebrated Christmas, there seemed to be a tradition of kissing under mistletoe. The whys were lost in the annals of time (unless one cared to look of course). Andrew’s ears perked up as Zara’s trademark cheeky grin suddenly crossed her face.

Its gonna be okay

“No matter what you’ve been through, here you are, no matter if you think you’re falling apart, it’s gonna be okay!” ~The Piano Guys: Okay

Families are supposed to stick together, no matter what. If you can’t rely on your own blood, who can you rely on? Unfortunately some people are not cut out for parenthood. Andrew was always a difficult, headstrong, stubborn and short-tempered child, unlike his sweet-natured sister. He grew into a difficult, headstrong, stubborn and still short-fused-but-slightly-better-at-controlling-it teenager, who constantly butted heads with his parents, especially his father. A schoolyard incident got out of hand when Andrew perceived a threat to Megan and reacted violently, hospitalising his sister’s antagonist. There was police involved. While the twins had always had an inkling that their father had never liked Andrew, and were correct in thinking that he would be furious over the incident, neither of them expected that he would disown Andrew on the spot.

Are we getting sick of the greys yet?

The Dragonkin build was relatively easier than the Avian one; the wing fingers were a little bit fiddly but there were only five of them as opposed to a million feathers and all one object as opposed to a million XD

The tail rig was an almighty pain. Firstly, the pitchipoy script couldn’t seem to recognise the bones if I did the tail the easy way (one big bone subdivided down into a million little ones). Or if they were extruded one from another. Long winded duplicate, move along Y a bit and then connect worked (but took ages). Then I tried using bone hooks which I’ve done before but I kept stuffing something or other up and the spline would end up either moving or stretching a long way and I couldn’t seem to find the right combination of settings to make it stop sucking. Then I found this other method that uses bone envelopes which did the job I was trying to do and was a lot easier to set up (one armature modifier vs a million hook modifiers). Except that I’d made the tail too short so I made it longer. Then realised I need the end of the tail to remain stiff as in the time period I’m writing in pretty much all the Dragonkin have weaponised tails (I don’t think they all did in their early generations, but I’ll deal with that if I ever have to make a Dragonkin with a plain tail). Apparently pitchipoy didn’t like me modifying the bone chain so I had to do it again. Ergh.

Dakarai and Trajectory

Two characters also likely to get caught up in firefights but not so much on roofs and quite likely because they were following their favourite girls around (or one of their favourite girls in Dak’s case). Their appearances stayed reasonably similar though I made Dak’s hair a bit more sensible (I like long dreds so Traj had perhaps impractically long dreds given his profession) but they have undergone complete personality swaps. Traj was almost cripplingly shy around girls and a right arsehole to guys and was a bit tragic as he was madly in love with his best friend but she ended up with someone else. Dak on the other hand is confident, polyamorous and basically an arsehole because he spends a large chunk of the current block being racist.

Run XD

Base dragging Avi off on another epic adventure (or just to go find the missing-because-not-yet-made D).

Doing the turnaround directly before that with two characters was entertaining.

This work by bek (ryivhnn) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Avi showing off its feathers

Avi showing off its feathers to an admiring Base. Turned off the covert layers so the viewport animation would play in real time (going to have to just toggle visibility when there’s lots of characters) and left them off so it would render a bit quicker. Going to do a couple of refinement passes and decide whether I’m going to interact with them this time round or just have them fly off.

Guardian Angel

Here we have Azrael in a rare moment of happiness (no he’s not about to kill someone this time).

Very quick redo of a 2010 silhouette sketch from my sketchbook. It was supposed to be coloured but the coloured version ended up being too dark so I just used the multiply, overlay and dodge brushes from David Revoy’s awesome brush set. The original will never again see the light of day unless you’re a Patreon XD (I don’t use Patreon anymore)

I have wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiings!

And this time they’re not broken XD

Feather rigging took forever. I probably still haven’t done it right and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to make controllers for them (good thing I’m not aspiring to be a rigger!) but it will do for now.

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License