Vee Redesign For My AU, 'Snakes And Mirrors'.

Sometimes a family is a strange small child, three grown ass monsters who tried and failed to kill said small child, and the most delightful bird you ever will meet 😋

a very important lesson from sans undertale

Looks like someone want’s to die on holidays XD

Happy holidays YEET

ψ(｀∇´)ψ

Destiny Architecture

I went on a whole ramble about the architecture of the various factions in Destiny and thought I'd share it here. I'm not an architect, so my knowledge is basic when it comes to technical things, but hopefully it is interesting!

They did a fantastic job with the architecture of the different factions and what it says about them.

The Red Legion and Caiatl's Ascendency are all pragmatic, organised military designs - fortifications, the round buildings with windows on each side linked by trenches. Watchtowers. In the Arms Dealer strike, you have areas where there are loads of vehicles meticulously organised. They are prepared for the long haul, dug into the planets they land on, and they are proud of their machinery, both literal and metaphorica - it's all on display, the pistons and furnaces and engines. There are service shafts and hangars! It's all very practical (and makes the Glykon even more unnerving because the passages and service shafts don't make any practical sense in the way that they connect!).

Calus on the other hand... the Leviathan has the same base in terms of doors and the like, you can recognise some of the same basics - like the shapes of the doors etc. but the pragmatic things are hidden away - they're reminiscent of the servant quarters in old British stately homes - you need them for the place to function! But the people in charge don't want to see them. Calus wants to be surrounded by gold and riches and luxury and not think about the things and people that make it possible. It's always been something that I've thought of when it comes to his empire – he acts like all of it was a place of luxury and hedonism and art, but like the Roman Empire that inspired the culture, that luxury is truly only available to a few people, and is only possible because a much greater number of people are working to provide the materials and labour. We don't really hear or see much about the people the Empire conquered beyond the Psions, but were they living in such luxury? Probably not.

The Eliskni architecture all feels very cobbled together and makeshift - there are visible seams and bolts, spots where colours don't match. It's makeshift, which suits their history as a people who have been forced to flee and exist on scavenging for a long time. And there's always a lot of nautical theming going on too - rigging and nets and hoisted awnings like sails. They feel like places made by people who are expecting to need to pack up and leave at any minute. Everything tends to be rounded, which is particularly obvious when you see the Devils in Rise of Iron - everything is more angular because of SIVA and the Rasputin influence, even the shanks. I'd love it if we could get a look at the original Riis architecture.

The Hive are very gothic architecture with a dash of Gaudi (take a look at the Sagrada Família for what I'm thinking). High chambered ceilings, flying buttresses, all the carved figures and motifs - except when you get closer you realise that it's also uncomfortably organic. And it's also decaying – once you get inside the dreadnaught especially you find it full of piles of festering debris, wormspore growing from the corpses of thralls. There are spaces where anything could jump out at you. It's like a civilisation mocking the grand architecture of other species by warping it into something rotten (and also very gothic literature as well - the grand imposing gothic mansion with the dark secret and unpleasant history). The names of the locations in the Dreadnaught often tie-in with the architecture since a lot of them are religious: the portico, basillica, the crypts, the Cathedral of Dusk. They are a species worshipping Oryx, the very real and tangible god.

The Moon under Crota has a similar style, but where the Dradnaught is organic, the areas under the surface of the moon (outside the Red Keep) are more technological - there are still the flying buttresses and supports, the spikes and and pillars around the Hellmouth, but they're blockier, less rounded, stone and metal rather than chitin.

Savathun's Throne World has similar architecture, and returns to the organic feel of the Dradnaught, but in blinding white and red rather than browns. It's similar to the Leviathan in a way – the public areas are much cleaner feeling, regal and filled with Light, but when you dig down you can find the same rot and debris as the Dreadnaught (thinking especially of the 2nd mission of the Witch Queen campaign). Where the Dreadnaught was a mockery of other species, the Throne World feels like it's trying to copy them – this is what Savathun thinks the Light is, look she's changed, really! But in the end, it's more like a coat of paint slapped over a wall with a bad mold problem. The names also switch from kind of Catholic, to more magical and alchemical - Apothacary, altars, temples etc.

The Awoken are really doing the whole fantasy elf thing in a lot of ways, but more with stone than woodland than in Tolkien when we see the Dreaming City. Everything fits in seamlessly with the landscape (which makes sense since it was essentially created with wish magic to be exactly what Mara wanted!). The buildings follow the lines of mountains, pathways carved into crystal caves, the bridge which has supports like the branches of trees like they've grown up from the ground. And there's nature everywhere! But it's not a natural environment. Even when it seems like you're in nature, it's very cultivated - like the garden of a stately home which wants 'wilderness' so has landscaped it. It's also deceptive in the way you go from the 'wilderness' to these very high fantasy buildings, and then as you walk you see these technological marvels like the Oracle Engine, just integrated into it. The Dreaming City is very much portraying an image and is a very finely tuned machine in itself. I kind of wonder what the other Awoken settlements beyond the Dreaming City and the Vestian outpost look like.

Clovis Bray facilities are very minimalist and very obviously designed to make you think 'lab' and 'high technology'. He really wants you to see his stuff and have you think 'this is the future' in a way that draws 70s sci-fi ideas of the future - the way all the sharp edges are rounded off, the bright blocks of colour, the way all of the technology is very conspicuously on display, the massive windows that make all the conveyors and machinery visible. He wants to show off his stuff, and also make everyone who works there know that they're being watched. There's also the huge open spaces and massive drops like Eternity and Creation, which are utterly impractical but also feel infinite and are designed to make you go wow.

You see similar architecture on Neomuna (since Clovis was involved with the colonisation efforts) but on a much more human scale. They have a lot of the same components – the pillars and display screens, the curved bases of the walls – but they're softened with plants and murals, places to sit and socialise. It's not a lab, it's a city where people live. And also it's Neptune, they are a long way from the sun, so everything is bright and vibrant to make up for that. I think you can also see a lot of influence from the Ishtar Collective locations on Venus in Neomuna - they also tend to have a lot of display screens and neon and lots of spots for plants to grow. And then you get outside of the City and see the Veil Containment bunker and see the concrete and metal pragmatism that underpins the city.

The Iron Temple/Vostok is a place that is trying very hard to be a medieval castle with all of the statues and bonfires and the whole aesthetic of the Iron Lords. The statues of the Iron Lords all bear axes and swords. But when you look at it, you can see the very Soviet brutalist foundation of the place. So much of it is blocky concrete - the walls are squared off and unornamented, the observatory is concrete and metal. Every time I go in to where Tyra stands, I'm surprised that the pillar she's standing by is not round, because it's very easy to buy into the illusion they're projecting. There's also the concrete pillar that serves as vault and lights up when you approach - it has the technology, but like the Dreaming City, it's integrated into the landscape. Unlike the dreaming City, they really don't want to show you it.

Raputin's bunkers are just fantastic design in so many ways. They have a very clear shape (you can see the shape of a door and know immediately that this is something Warmind related), everything tends to be at right-angles. It's all very pragmatic and logically laid out. There is definitely technology there, and it's not really trying to hide, but it isn't showing off like Clovis does. Where Clovis is 70's aspirational sci-fi design, Rasputin architecture has a very Cold War vibe to it - none of the technology is flashy - it's chunky terminals running the most basic looking command line UI. It's thick cables and pipes and probably a million redundancies. The kind of tech which is designed to be found in a few centuries and still be reasonably functional. Also unhackable unless you are physically present. Rasputin is an AI so advanced that he can out-think the Vex, but his facilities are built to have the resilience of a Nokia 3310 phone, and are inspired by bunkers designed to survive nuclear war.

(I also think it's not accidental that the Warsats are made up of many angular shapes, especially triangles, trying to be a sphere, considering the whole motif of the pyramids vs the Traveller)

Pyramid Architecture is really really trying to pull off the sword logic 'pared down to remove anything extraneous' and present the idea of a universe united as one in its final shape... and is failing miserably at that. At first glance it's all straight clean lines, black stone, leaning towards brutalist, but they just can't keep it up – they're full of pillars serving no purpose, statues, coloured stone insets. Rhulk's pyramid is full of artwork painted onto the walls. There's so much symbolism built into them. They're incredibly ornate! Because as much as the Witness wants everyone to believe that it is one united force with one specific goal, it kind of isn't. It's made up of many many individuals. Even if those individuals that made it up all agreed on the final shape, it's nearly impossible to get one person to have a 100% consistent view of the universe, let alone hundreds! And especially in the Witness' pyramid ship in Root of Nightmares, you get the impression it's something of a mausoleum for its species and the other species its destroyed. There's lots of coffin-shaped and sized objects in there, and relics hidden away. It isn't as clean and focused as it would like the universe to think.

@dimiclaudeblaigan asked for a tutorial on how to begin drawing. Good news! If you can draw a funky looking stick man, you have already started!

I think that stick people are a great starting point for artists because of the things you can learn from them that will be important later on.

If you are able to draw a circle and a couple of lines, you can easily put together a stick person.

Congratulations! You have started to draw. :)

A stick person is a very minimal artistic representation of a real life person. It is simple yet recognizable, and is widely used in art, media, and signage.

But what can a stick person teach us about drawing people that look more like… well, people? Lets have a look!

By simply adding a few more lines, we can add a pair of eyes and a mouth. Maybe even a little triangle nose! Or half circles for ears. We can now draw a face, which provides a basis for all sorts of expressions.

These simple additions can allow us to explore the wide range of human emotion and individuality.

This may seem like the basics of the basics. But that is what we want! In order to get to the point where we are able to draw complex, elaborate representations of humans and objects, we will need to start with simple shapes like lines and circles and build our understanding from there.

For instance, lets give our stick person some cool new features, such as hands and feet. I chose little squiggly circles to represent hands, and triangles to represent feet.

We can go a step further and modify the body of the stick person to include shoulders, hips, elbows and knees. These parts of the human body are quite complex in real life But here, all we need to do is add a few simple lines and dots to our stick person.

The lines provide some additional structural elements to our stick person's body, which are the shoulders and the hips. The dots indicate the points of articulation - elbows and knees, the places where the arms and legs bend!

Now we can use our stick person to show us an even wider range of human movement, action, and expression.

Our little drawing of a human being is evolving! All it took was adding a few more lines and shapes here and there.

By elongating some of the existing lines and making the head an oval instead of a circle, we can give our stick person proportions that resemble that of a real life human.

By this point, we have managed to add more complexity to our stick person simply by using our ability to draw lines, circles, and other basic shapes!

These basic ideas are the building blocks that will enable us to create more complex shapes.

The next part may be a considerable step up if you are absolutely new to drawing, but I have decided to include it in order to show you how complex objects like the human body can be built from shapes that are a bit more complex than circles and lines.

For example. Two ovals and a rectangle can be combined to create a cylinder.

Six squares can be combined to create a cube, or a box. Here, each square is distorted slightly depending on which way the cube is facing.

Note that the back faces of the cube and the bottom of the cylinder are hidden. These shapes allow us to visualize that which should not normally visible.

A sphere from all perspectives can be represented by a circle. But we can make it more like a sphere by adding lighting and shadow if we so desire.

Cubes, cylinders, and spheres are examples of 'solid shapes' because they consist of 3 dimensions.

Lets see how these solid shapes can be used to compose the human body.

By stacking three cylindrical objects, we can create a torso. Two spheres have been added to form shoulders, while a smaller cylinder forms the neck.

An arm is an alternating sequence of spheres and cylinders connected together. Note that the hand has been simplified for this example.

We can apply these solid shapes to the rest of the body to give us a more recognizable representation of the human form. It doesn't even have to be perfect. And just like that, our stick figure now has a silhouette that is unmistakably a person!

In the above examples, notice that we kept the stick person at the beginning while building up the shapes and solids around it. This is because the stick person serves as a guide for positioning the body and its various parts -> also known as posing.

You can do the same thing to everyday objects! Here, I drew a wine glass by stacking these three dimensional solid shapes.

The cup and its contents are two ovoid shapes that were cut in half. The stem is a very thin cylinder shape. The base is a cylinder with a slightly wider bottom.

Solid shapes help inform us how objects and parts of the human body may appear from different perspectives.

For example, a sphere can be used to demonstrate how the human head appears when looking up or down, turned to the side, or tilted at an angle.

With these examples, I hope I have managed to convinced you that if you can draw a circle and a couple of lines, you can draw a person! You just have to train your eye to recognize the simple shapes within complex objects. Try it with everyday objects as well! Or even your favourite media! A drawing subject can be as simple or as complex as you envision it to be.

Once you have mastered that, there are many aspects of drawing you can explore from here that may require you to seek additional resources or a fellow artist's advice.

Last of all, remember that drawing is an iterative process. Even if you draw something correct the first time, you will need to draw it again and again to get it right all times! And by making small changes like the ones we explored in this tutorial, your drawings will gradually transform!

I hope what I've demonstrated here are enough to provide the basics of how to get started with drawing objects and people, and also to help refresh more experienced artists. :) Hopefully I didn't go too off topic with what was requested, and let me know if there are any more questions I can answer.

Cheers :3

The Empress and her loyal Guard.

Remember the UTY/UT cast Swap AU I briefly talked about a while ago? I finally finished my half of the designs, so @gaymeatcore and I can finally share our work LOL. They designed and drew Ceroba, and I designed and drew Starlo!

Ceroba swaps with Asgore, and is the ruling Empress of the Underground. Suffering from the loss of her daughter as well as her now ex-husband Chujin stepping down from his throne in order to focus on his scientific pursuits, she is consumed by grief and is desperate to obtain the needed human SOULs in order to break the barrier. She often isolates in her palace, not wanting her subjects to see how close to a break down their rule is.

Starlo swaps with Undyne, and is a humble-farmer-turned-Royal Guard. He took up the position solely to offer Ceroba some comfort and familiarity as her life turned to turmoil. Though he's miserable with the strict rules and protocol of Royal Guard, he maintains his post solely for Ceroba's sake, even if he knows deep down he can't kill any humans that may wander into the Underground.

Just for fun, here's my design notes for Starlo! In this version of the Underground, the royal guard (and Underground at large) has a Japanese theming and setting, so the guards have samurai inspired armor. Wanted Starlo's armor to, ironically, not fit him in the slightest since he's stifling himself into a role that doesn't suit him at all. (Forgot to put it in the notes on the image but the thing on his back is his rifle which is his main weapon here!)

POST FINALE HEADCANONS (ongoing list)

Camila and Luz both held Vee’s hands the first time she went through the portal door and returned to the Demon Realm

Vee is every one of the Hexsquad’s wingman. She’s give Hunter, Luz, Amity, and Willow dating advice.

Steve, Lilith, and Hunter joined forces to debelosify/decoven the Isles. They went around tearing down Belos statues and defacing Emperor’s Coven insignia.

Gus and Amity have gotten better at Spanish.

Lilith and Hunter are still rivals in a playful way. They occasionally recall their Head Witch and Golden Guard personas when trying to one up each other.

King found a way to reawaken Jean Luc.

Emira had her own episode with Eda and earned her Bad Girl Coven shirt.

Odalia and Alador got divorced. And Odalia got kicked out of the house.

Tinella Nosa now lives in the Clawthorne tower. She pays rent.

Anne and Luz have kept touch.

Luz and Amity made Good Witch Azura popular and it’s a best seller on the Boiling Isles now.

Per Vee’s request, Masha was the first other human to be told about and granted passage to the Demon Realm.

Vee cried when Luz introduced her to Stringbean.

Jacob went to jail.

Camila has created her own Dominican spin on Apple Blood.

Vee and King became friends the same way Lilith and Hooty did.

Luz found out about Amity’s Grom note.

Principal Bump loved his Hexside memorial.

Gus and Matt kept their promise to the Keeper and helped restored the Illusionist Graveyard.

Luz kept her promise to the Bat Queen.

Eda finally returned the favor (and the whistle) to the Bat Queen.

King and the Collector have repurposed King’s Island into their “treehouse.”

Vee took Masha to Grom. And Vee became Grom Queen.

Luz, Hunter, and Camila accompanied Vee in her search for the other Basilisks.

Vee had a “Katara find finds the man who killed her mother” moment with Warden Wrath.

Everyone finds out Evelyn was a Clawthorne (obviously) and Hunter gets accepted into the Clawthorne family.

Hunter goes to Hexside.

Alador and Edric have a cheesy “I’m proud of you, son” moment. Probably over something silly like pranking Odalia.

Visitation

This one was written during Season of the Witch, after Immaru said what he said to Eris.

Link to Ao3 if you prefer to read it there.

Ikora Rey and Eris Morn stood together at the table in Ikora’s office, pouring over a map of Savathun’s spire, the locations of various secrets marked upon it. Eris was adding the details of the unlock mechanism for another location that had been found in the most recent passthrough.

Immaru floated in from an adjoining room, angrily hovering over the map, his spiked shell shivering in rage.

“Figures you’d be here. Something I said must’ve touched a nerve. I had a little visit last night from your psychopath boyfriend.”

Ikora looked at Eris in confusion. Eris shrugged and shook her head.

“Eris doesn’t have a… boyfriend.”

“Are you kidding me? Have you seen the way that guy looks at her?”

“What guy?” Ikora asked.

Eris looked up impassively from her adjustments. “I have no idea who you are speaking of.”

“Sketchy. Wears a lot of green. Has a fucked up sewed together abomination of a ghost that can’t speak?” Immaru visibly shuddered.

“Hmmm…” Eris returned to the detail she was providing on the map. “…and what did the Drifter say to you that has you so terrified?”

“That’s the thing. He didn’t say anything. Just stood there staring at me with those cold dead eyes. Then he bounced a coin off of me a few times while that darkness mutated freak he calls a ghost scanned me. Like he was figuring out which bits of me he could cut off without being noticed. Didn’t matter what I said to him. He just stared at me. Then he walked away.”

“It does not sound like anything of note happened at all.” Eris said dispassionately.

“I’m curious as to how he got in there.” Ikora muttered.

“The Drifter has his… methods.”

“That wasn't nothing that happened.” Immaru floated closer to Eris, his shell twisting sideways. “I’ve given enough threats to know when I’m receiving one. You keep that psycho away from me. You need me. Someone like that doesn’t follow the rules. Someone like that’ll cut you up for no reason, just because, just like he did his own ghost. He’s unhinged.”

Ikora sighed, “I will increase security.”

“I do not control the Drifter,” Eris stood as she finished her sketch detailing the order in which the runes needed to be activated to open that particular door. “…and, with all due respect to Ikora’s security methods, if there is somewhere he wishes to be, there isn’t much anyone can do to keep him out.” She twitched her fingers and her soulfire wreathed Ahamkara bone flew from where it had been sitting on Ikora’s desk to her hand. “If you do not want him to visit you, I recommend you avoid taking actions which might attract his notice.”

“Yeah it’s totally just coincidence he showed up after I started talking shit about your dead ghost. Not related at all.”

Ikora raised her eyebrows.

“Hmmm…” Eris turned to leave.

“The fuck are you smiling about.” Immaru snarled.

“Hmmm…” She walked out the door, cradling her glowing orb.