I found the first drawing I made of Cinnamon and thought it'd be fun to compare it with her latest one! First (left) was drawn in very early 2020, I believe. Latest (right) is from the latest comic page!
Cinnamon was created before Auro with no intention of making her more than a throwaway, silly DnD character, later turnt into character design practice. I'd recieved the Frozen 2 artbook for Christmas that year and was so inspired by all the dress design drafts and sketches in there that I wanted to attempt it for myself! A lot of that detail I initially gave her got lost in a "holy shit my hand will break if I draw that over a thousand times" fashion, which is a thin ice she still threads with all that frog foot/star pattern haha. Her fur markings changed too due to some character reasons as I realized more and more how chaotic and rude she is. The eyepatch, I feel, helps sell that versus in the first draft where the symetrical division makes her look more refined. She is not refined. If she'd have been born as anything else, it'd be a raccoon. Or an oppossum.
always go for the head
any tips 4 art
Another worldbuilding application of the "two layer rule": To create a culture while avoiding The Planet Of Hats (the thing where a people only have one thing going for them, like "everyone wears a silly hat"): You only need two hats.
Try picking two random flat culture ideas and combine them, see how they interact. Let's say taking the Proud Warrior Race - people who are all about glory in battle and feats of strength, whose songs and ballads are about heroes in battle and whose education consists of combat and military tactics. Throw in another element: Living in diaspora. Suddenly you've got a whole more interesting dynamic going on - how did a people like this end up cast out of their old native land? How do they feel about it? How do they make a living now - as guards, mercenaries? How do their non-combatants live? Were they always warrior people, or did they become fighters out of necessity to fend for themselves in the lands of strangers? How do the peoples of these lands regard them?
Like I'm not shitting, it's literally that easy. You can avoid writing an one-dimensional culture just by adding another equally flat element, and the third dimension appears on its own just like that. And while one of the features can be location/climate, you can also combine two of those with each other.
Let's take a pretty standard Fantasy Race Biome: The forest people. Their job is the forest. They live there, hunt there, forage there, they have an obnoxious amount of sayings that somehow refer to trees, woods, or forests. Very high chance of being elves. And then a second common stock Fantasy Biome People: The Grim Cold North. Everything is bleak and grim up there. People are hardy and harsh, "frostbite because the climate hates you" and "stabbed because your neighbour hates you" are the most common causes of death. People are either completely humourless or have a horrifyingly dark, morbid sense of humour. They might find it funny that you genuinely can't tell which one.
Now combine them: Grim Cold Bleak Forest People. The summer lasts about 15 minutes and these people know every single type of berry, mushroom and herb that's edible in any fathomable way. You're not sure if they're joking about occasionally resorting to eating tree bark to survive the long dark winter. Not a warrior people, but very skilled in disappearing into the forest and picking off would-be invaders one by one. Once they fuck off into the woods you won't find them unless they want to be found.
You know, Finland.
:3 feels happier than :) But not as genuine as :]
AAAAGHHHHHH ITS SO GOOOOOD!!!!
Necromancin dancin~
Spookified versions of my webcomic OCs! Only 1/3 survived this AU it seems. My idea was Cinnamon being some sort of ghoul necromancer, ressurrecting Skel-Auro. Not sure what happened to Winston tho!
BNUY
PokĂ©mon development history fascinates me like. Pokemon red and green were genuinely passion projects based off of very personal themes and which were kinda just assumed to end up as late game boy shelf filler but now theyâre The biggest media franchise straight up.
sorry to keep baristaposting but i have to share the conversation i just had