Welcome to my Mystery Blog

Got the lines for Sy's shift form done so I thought I might post it! Since I don't know when the rest of the ref will be done. C: (The extra lines are just red pencil I just chose not to edit out so it'd look more sketchy hahaha)

Originally I was going to do a full sized version but, opted to draw him kind of chibi-fied instead. For one thing it takes up less space on the ref, and the other, after a specific plot point Sy (willingly) loses the ability to shapeshift at all, so you wouldn't see it after that anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Regardless, I still think it's really cute and worth including.

A long time ago he was meant to be a winged tiger, but he has since been moved into the bucket of 'chimeric shift'. Normally shapeshifters's main animal form would be an animal that actually existed in the world, but chimeric shifts are amalgamations....in this case just a feline creature with wings.

Time for another little me update

-Currently recovering from self-inflicted Psychic Damage. I do like to read a lot and normally these days I average like 1 book every 2 weeks or so....well......the week before last I read 5. Yes, five books in one week. I was really getting into this book series and my brain was like, "I'm just going to keep reading these back to back at this pace. Yeah. I can tank this. For sure." and it turns out....mmm....yeeeeaah, maybe not (°ー°〃)

-Still working on refs though! Currently I have most of the small items drawn out for everyone at once, next I gotta work on a couple medium items, then work on The Guys themselves. I'm basically tricking myself by getting most of the components done

-After the next ref I gotta decide if I want to work on this redraw I've been eyeballing, or if I want to try to design a new sona.....I really want a new one but I'm not entirely sure what I want it to be! 8Ta

-Also been doing a lot of worldbuilding, (I usually end up doing this at work when I have some downtime) ~ still continuing to flesh out a lot of events in the Ancient world. Some regular details are getting kind of...eldritch, lmao. I don't know why this always happens.....but its fine with me. I now also have several dead gods to inject into the present :D

Okay now here is a real doodle of my durge! I like him so I thought he deserved one 'real' picture. This almost turned into a disaster though, as it was originally just a sketch on red pencil, and I decided to add some light watercolor...which immediately started pilling real bad. Luckily when I went over it with colored pencil it mostly crushed it back into place so I'm glad it worked out 8^y

Anyway this is Tannis, he is a ""good"" durge, but in the sense of like...we're picking all the more heroic options (save the grove, save the moonrise tower prisoners, help with this, help with that), but he also refuses to acknowledge that non-lethal attacks exist and uses deception/intimidation to solve most other problems.

So, I'm still playing through BG3, as my Durge Tannis, and I was working on a normal sketch of him, but then...

Okay, in the mountain pass area, my Lae'zel actually managed to pass the checks to just walk in and grab the gith egg from the creche, then when I went back to the merchant lady to see what my options were, I immediately noticed we now had the option to PUNT IT.

Tannis is a ""good"" Durge though, and Bae'zel should get to keep it, so we did not go through with the punting. However, I envisioned this is what actually happened instead, in this specific style.

- Currently getting together lists that I need for other refs. I think I'm probably going to take the same approach as the last one: draw items first, then the guy. The extra bonus is that I can reuse a handful of Tower's assests on Sy's ref; since sions are kind of doppelgangers, a few of Tower's details (like the reflective eyes) are actually because they were copied over from Sy.

-Though I'm going to try to fit some other art inbetween the refs, like right now I've got a sketch going of my tiefling from bg3... I am still trying to get through the game, but it's been pretty funny so I like him a lot.

-Also working on my social media/internet presence stuff in general. (I'll make a pinned post eventually once I finish getting my carrd sorted out) I got a couple new accounts in different places to try to post on, though my brain is not really equipped to handle more than like, 2 at once x_x Part of the problem is all the different tag/posting formats are overwhelming... So I think what I'm going to try to do is either look into postybirb or make a spreadsheet that will reformat everything so I can copy/paste stuff. I still have to log in and look through the feeds (which is still... overwhelming) but anything to add SOME automaton would be helpful

The Beacon: Wind Towers - Part 1 (Probably)

Wind tower designs for Fatewinder's Beacon (which we will refer to as The Beacon) - these towers are SUPER important to this location so I've been trying to decide how to decorate them for a while now. Finally the other day I just decided to lean so hard into the sword theming I was like...YEAH. The towers are also swords now. Cheese. It's because the city is literally part of Fatewinder's (Aki's) body and he decided to make them all be swords, and now everyone has to deal with his decorating decision. I love it.

Anyway, because the scale of the Beacon is enormous and only like 10% is above ground, these wind towers have been magically enhanced to generate wind currents, move a lot of air in and out, and resist being weathered. They extend way into the ground and have a lot of different points for air processing, recycling, climate control, etc. They are absolutely still sword shaped going through the ground. Above ground they are just painted, as the Beacon is in the middle of a desert and they try to avoid a lot of reflective surfaces, but below ground they do have light metal plating.

I want to make a couple more illustrations at some point (so this will be repeated), but these towers end up being kind of a nightmare in present day. They have gone without any kind of maintenance for multiple millennia so their wind enhancement still works, but to the effect of: they now cause nearly constant sandstorms (and lightning) in the region and are the reason why the city is completely buried except for a few monuments. Of those monuments, if they don't have the weather resistance magic then they have most likely been sandblasted.

Oh my god guys look...I did it. I FINISHED A REF SHEET. It actually wasn't that bad, I kind of tricked myself by doing all the extras/accessories first, then by the time I needed to draw him it was like 'only this one small thing left'. That being said, it is a bit chaotic because he has the most going on with the extras, but that is On Brand for him.

Uhhh It was REALLY hard not to just infodump everywhere because there is so much about him. I did make him a page on toyhouse, so there is a tiny bit more info there and I expanded a little on some points, as well as some more reference art, but I still kind of took it easy as I was envisioning it turning into a huge essay. If anyone was curious about something or had a particular question about him though you can just ask ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

Art update: I am ALMOST done with this ref. Like I may be able to post it tomorrow, literally all I have left is to finish adding text in one corner. The only difficult part is balancing adding personality stuff vs purely descriptive stuff. I think descriptive stuff is generally better for the sheet itself (with personality in the textbox below) but... as someone who savesba bunch of ref sheets, I also like seeing at least a little snippet of extra information 🤔

Anyway, this sheet is going to be Tower. It's pretty chaotic because he has a lot going on so I drew a lot of stuff, but I think that's on brand for him. I want to do 4-ish more refs (Sy, Cavi, Torch, Aki, in no order, plus refresh the sion sheet) but I think this was probably the most complicated one so at least it's out of the way.

Here comes the obligatory Orb picture for flight rising's latest breed!

Art update: I am now done doing all the lineart for my latest ref project and scanned them, now I just need to work on getting everything into one file and color it. This will probably take all week. In the meantime, have this very random malacyne that I drew!

This one was just a random design, just because I needed to fill some space, though out of curiosity I checked and the last time I drew one was Ghost like 10 years ago... 😱 This species ended up getting shelved along with a bunch of other stuff, but maybe I can rework it for an AU, idk, still fun to draw though.

Ref Sheet Update: I have done it. Against all odds I have drawn The Guy in a decent looking pose. I just need to finish adding some more details, but otherwise yeah, just need to scan everything and throw some flat colors on.

I ended up drawing a whole lot of accessories too so hopefully that will help with getting the Vibe across. (I think that coming up with the colors for these will be the hardest part, actually) One of these days I'd love to put together like, a moodboard of meme redraws to help with Vibe even more but I think it's too much for now, lol.

Anyway I think finally having a new ref sheet done soon is exciting. :D