It’s been great having all the support from the first two books to drive me as I continue on into the third. Plenty of inspiration is coming to me too, thanks to the wiki and the notes I’ve made within it. I’m feeling like I’m writing for something with a good, solid foundation now, and with that in mind have a few pieces of art and conceptual stuff to show, today…
Here’s the cover artwork for VARULV #4.
Here’s the line art for that cover.
Book three has many scenes taking place within a Troll community. With the wiki to help me, I decided on a look for the entrance to a Troll city. Inspiration came from everywhere on this one – old Viking camps, of course, but also Ironforge and Orgrimmar from WoW… or at least, the idea of a metropolis built into a natural structure… in this case, a cave.
Remember this post where I showed the initial design of one of my new, feline Ulven? Well, she’s been updated, quite a bit as you can see… Her name is Meskhenet, though she’s commonly called “Keni”. I wanted to give her something to make her special, and the more I thought about it, the more a cheetah-morph made sense with her design… She’s not the strongest character, but she’s obviously quite fast.
I touched on the Iele character a while back, as well. Here she is – well… here’s half of her sketched up, so far. It might interest some of you to know that I oftentimes sketch the transformed or Ulven forms of my characters first, so I can be sure their clothing will make sense on them. I then transfer that over to their human figures, which this sketch illustrates.
2 comments:
I like that you pay attention to the carry-over of the clothing from humanoid to animal form... for ease of recognition, right? It's not a matter of "oh crap, I rip another good outfit."
Haha yes! This might be ridiculous, considering in my continuity, the Ulven retain their clothes between human and animal form despite the fact that Ulven are MUCH bigger than humans -- that's gotta be one hell of an elastic fabric they've got on. All things considered, it *bothers* me when stories have people transforming into werewolves and magically losing their shoes or shirts or their entire wardrobe (without ripping or tearing I mean -- it's just *poof* gone!) and there's no explanation given about that. Worse is when they turn back, fully clothed. :)
But yes, it's definitely a recognition thing. Tricky stuff, having shapeshifters for your main cast... it's one way to tell who's who that I take pretty seriously. I'm toying with the idea of giving my humans slightly different clothes and looks between books, too, because I decided not too long ago that I want them to age throughout the series, just a bit.
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