Infernal Artisan

Ever since I was little, 90% of the time I draw figures from the feet up. I bring this up because I like this guy's legs. He had lots of names: Strange engineer, artisan of the strange and various permutations. Infernal artisan is the snappiest, but I do like artisan of the strange.

I'm getting more of a sense of who these guys are. They're a people who used strange sciences to alter their own bodies. They're from an older time, and the survivors are a little odd by now. They didn't used to be so alien, but they've engineered themselves into exactly what they needed to be. They busy themselves making strange architecture that shouldn't work. This guy's puzzlebox is meant to represent that. Very individual, though I think maybe there should be serf castes who are unfortunates altered by their betters.

I don't have a lot to say about the picture. Errm, I added the bifurcated arms mainly to stop him looking too humanoid. The torso's shading is unconvincing.

I'm experimenting with white backgrounds and grey shadow to make it pop. I like the look now but we'll see what I think tomorrow.

Revised vine golem

Flashback to May 2009. That vine golem's cute, but the flowers have far too much linework, the shapes don't flow quite right and the colouring is muddy. It needs a revamp.

That's more like it. I think the biggest problem with the old version was the line density. I did a lot of small things to improve the ratio of lines to open space. The flowers were dialed way back, trusting in the colouring to give them definition. The mask is redone and made to contribute to the 3d flow of the pose.

I decided some of the vine twirlies were unnecessary and removed them. A lot of the body lines were tweaked and separated slightly to make sure there was more body than outline.

I made up for all the lost texture with the colouring, now that I'm "allowed" to use detail shading. Much more vivid and tropical now too. It has most of what I liked about the original, but updated to my current standards.

I don't think I'll be giving this treatment to all of my old ones, but this particular one was drawn to my attention and it was nagging at me.

Yula

Yula is a word that means something between honour and law. It is the sum of honour and obligation upon a person, and also a property of things in the world bestowed upon a person. Countries, people, objects and agreements can all have yula.

A country's yula might include its code of laws, which all its inhabitants would be expected to follow. In turn the country protects and provides for its people.

If someone offends against yula then there must be some kind of penance or punishment involved to cleanse that person. It is a serious accusation and will often be a matter for the courts. Only in the most exceptional circumstances, self-defence for example, is it permissible to violate yula.

Everyday life is full of unspoken yula. You are invited into someone's house with the yula that you behave respectably. You are given good service by a shopkeeper with the yula that you do not disparage his wares. You are given free use of the roads and pathways with the yula that you not obstruct them.


Yula can be a source of strength. One might be given a bow and a quiver of arrows, all from the same tree, with the yula to fire never shoot other arrows from it. The arrows from that bow will fly straighter and truer than they would for a bow with no yula.

There is also divine yula, which are the intuitive laws that all people share. To respect the Gods and yula. To do no unnecessary harm. To pursue peace. To be generous to those in need. And so forth. Offenses against the divine yula are the most serious of matters as even those unaware of yula are expected to have an inborn sense of what is good and what is wrong.

Azoth

Black azoth. Tarry, used for porters/cumbers.

Silver azoth. Mythical. Said to raise the dead.
Gold azoth. Suppresses aging.
White azoth. Dangerous - siphons life on contact and turns red.
Red azoth. A gel that encourages healing.

Desperate citizens can make a penny applying white azoth to themselves to turn it into valuable red. But most of the red azoth on the market has less ethical origins.

Bulletpoint ideas

Rule-breakers.
Older but not weaker, just getting stronger for a longer time.
Suspiciously breathy fish-things.
Earth heaved up by iron that wants to grow.
A a dungeon of iron bars that un-rust as they grow.
A paintbrush-streak in motion, a tableaux in the moment of impact.
More to escape artistry than locks and ropes.
Renamed not reshaped; a change that doesn't touch the blood.
Like a many-legged turtle with a shell designed by an angry architect.
Tearing the air in front of him to make way.
Improvised clothing.
Wearing a dead octopus.
An endlessly useful device.
Likes to think a situation through after they jump into it (very good at escaping).
Terrified of the smell of XX's feet.
Exasperated by others, walks away from a situation without needing closure.
We're the muscle because we had the brains to decide to get stronger.
We are the kind of people that make things happen. You are the kind that watches.
You are the people who make things happen, but we are the happening.
An immortal who slept underwater. The barnacle knight. The coral man.
He looked almost like a man, but smelled of dead meat when he breathed.
A segmented red fruit that tastes of bees.
A large roast grub, split and overflowing with fragrant yellow stuffing. It raised difficult questions regarding the provenance of the hors d'oeuvres.
They had spent an inadvisable night together and to this day spent a a great deal of mutual effort forgetting about it.
The air was too hot for love. Even courtly love.

Poe Dolls

So I did go and make some variants after all. Also they got a better name - Poe dolls - because #3's blades made me think of The Pit And The Pendulum. It has that same quirky sound as snickerdolls, which is nice.


Didn't end up putting distinctive seams on the wood, just changing blades and heads. I tried differences in the "spine", but I couldn't come up with two more that lived up to the (current) spiky mode.

The large blank areas did give me room to do differing paint patterns though, which adds a lot more variety after the colouring stage.

#2's blades were intended as guillotine blades. You know, that lovely distinctive rectangle with an angled blade? Well I tried, but they just looked like boring square blades with a little perspective, no matter how I arranged them. A shame I couldn't take advantage of that powerful shape. Maybe I'll get a chance later on.

I don't like how un-puppet-like this pose is. I want a puppet with its arms and limbs dangling. It's cool that they have weight, and that works for them, but I don't feel they represent the puppet idea very well. Another reason to do a third puppet type - providing proper context. And I should probably make another puppeteer.

Plant elementals and Guillotine doll

 Another puppet/doll. I doodled a few of them and this was the other promising-looking one. It turned out as a bulkier-looking thing. No variants obviously - didn't seem to be much potential for them, though I may try different arm-blades and masks at some point. Maybe play with the joints or give it seams in the wood? That's not a bad idea actually. But maybe later.

The spinal-looking connection between hips and torso reminds me a lot of the safeguard from Blame!, which isn't a bad thing since they were one of my major inspirations for the puppet look. For the record, the others are Naruto ninja puppets, Devil May Cry's early enemies and the character Puppet from the Amiga game Body Blows Galactic. That guy's been stuck in my head for years.

The worn-away paint on the legs and feet was very effective here. Makes it obvious that it's a wooden puppet without too much detail, and makes it seem heavier on its feet than the snickerdolls.

 I think I want to make one or two more kinds of puppet. I have a design for one that's stalled at the linework stage because of a dodgy neck, and I feel like I don't yet have a generic or baseline puppet. The snickerdolls seem a touch too characterful to fill that role at the moment. I want something in ruffle-y clothing, a skirt perhaps and floofy sleeves.

Getting away from dolls but not abandoning wood. Plant elementals. Intended for the witches, though flower-guy would also fit in with the jungle island. I'm glad I've been able to do more with this technique for depicting plant masses. As I've said before, monsters tend to lack superficial details that I can swap about to make variants. Too much of their shape comes from basic structural elements.

Anyway. I have issues with both of them. Starting with the ore tree-like, his pose is weird. I wanted an awkward and not-right pose, but this is a bit too far. I can see an easy alteration that might fix it but I'm leaving it for now.

I drew tree-guy without a head, but he seemed to need something there so I added the apple. I think this was a particularly good idea, since it gives him a sense of identity distinct from a generic tree-man. Perhaps Applechild as a name? Ambiguous whether the apple is the brain or just the prize. I imagine that his kind are something the witches summon from apple pips.

Flower guy's right hip is my favourite feature. Also the uneven "eyes" on the mask. I worried a lot that the flower drew too much attention from his mask/head. I've been staring at the whole, and now I'm wondering if it would look cooler if I removed the head entirely. The pose would be reinterpreted with the flower as the head and the result looks like it will be quirky.

However I did all this thinking after I'd coloured it, so I wasn't going to muck about back at the linework stage. So I'll note the possibility here to come back to one day.

Snickerdolls

Their "official" placeholder name is "blade dolls", but I really wanted to call them snickerdolls. See it's snicker as in Jabberwocky, or "snick" like the sound of scissors. A little more merry in tone, and more suited to the carnival/performance feel. I may yet decide to regress. On that topic, I'd have liked to give the green one blades that were as characterful as the other two, not just wolverine-claws. They're nice and shiny at least.

I changed the background colour for these because I was fed up with doing colour jobs that blended into it. The white lining only does so much.

In case it's not obvious, these are puppets/mannequins/dolls. I tried putting strings on them, but the lines stood out way, way too much. I wanted to try using the whites for strings, but if I start using the white layer for actual content rather than just framing that's a can of worms I'm not sure I want to open. I bet I could some cool things with it, but I'm scared I'll be upping my standards again.  The more I try to talk myself out of it, the more possibilities suggest themselves. I'm almost certainly going to do this at some point. But not here.

I'm happy with the colour detail. Pattern on the head was necessary to draw attention there. A little something elsewhere on each of them to give them that garish circus look. #1's fans came naturally. #2 was a pain in the ass because I kept trying to do her gloves/boots as wrinkled fabric - it looked like leg warmers and mittens. Her linework was a little dodgy in black and white, but the colour makes it work. #3's shiny ball-joints weren't something I had in mind when doing the lines - golden joints on #2 gave me the idea, and giving them some kind of glossy lacquer gave that one both spot colour and some detail.

I'm a little sorry that I didn't put coloured shapes on their chests like the masks, but I deliberately restrained myself. I don't want them too busy, and I wanted the wooden surfaces to be dominating and obvious.