as-crow-flies

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NOT DEAD ‼️ Here's a bunch of study drawings that some of my friends were kind enough to let me use their characters for....

Characters belong to @boiledkwamaegg @as-crow-flies @sunlightpassingthroughthewater (x2) @dagothurgent and @sweet-milky-tea705 (in order) pls pls Go check them out they're so cool

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PINUP CHALLENGE: BLOOD OF THE DAEDRA

It's Faenil in Dark Seducer armor, covered in blood. What else is there to say? Full version below the cut...

I had to pause many times while drawing to wonder if I was doing too much and if I should just scrap it all, but then I simply doubled down, because idgaf anymore. Faenil is insane so their pinup should be too. I mean literally, they're in the Shivering Isles in this one. I also think Mazken should wear more straps and leather, so that's what I added. The blood was the hardest part to get down, because it's a vital part of the idea I had, but I kept adding too much which made the details look too crowded. I think I got it eventually, but I also made a clean version for funsies, which shall be posted separately.

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Y’all ever get really into reading something and completely lose situational awareness?

Like maybe you should’ve kept an eye out for that Thalmor Justiciar you lied to so he wouldn’t find your confidential Dwemer research.

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considering how ubiquitous birds are in altmer iconography i like to think (domestic) birds are a big part of their way of life, replacing the need for horses or dogs and stuff (alongside insects: as a kind of mirror to their dunmer cousins) and i just realized. the altmer would ABSOLUTELY have messenger birds. except, instead of carrying written documents, they carry vocal messages via mimicry. there's the added security too: they only speak their message when they recognize the face of the person the message is for. wouldn't that be fucking cool

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tavern at helgen, 17th of last seed, 4E 201. i sure do hope nothing bad happens

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Portrait of an Altmer, commission. Done in Rebelle.

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SU'UM AHRK MORAH.

WHAT WILL YOU BURN?

WHAT WILL YOU SPARE?

THE FIRE WITHIN.

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i said i would post more detailed stuffs but here i am again with one more sketch and a new outfit for the tortured dress-up dolly. ah well. anyways she feels like shit here but revenge doesn’t wait and she’s ready to fight some good old-fashioned wars

also i’ll put another quick vally sketch under the cut. it’s like an angsty meat grinder concept thing for that one time im cyrodiil when she killed a bunch of thalmor soldiers that captured and tortured her. but be warned, tw blood:

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sketch of @boiledkwamaegg’s sillies. yes i’m VERY normal about them. why do you ask

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Some College of Winterhold doodles. They make me so sick, in a good way. Yapping below the cut...

I don't think I've talked about this before but Brelyna goes way back in Faenil's creation history, like back when I was actually playing Skyrim as Faenil and they weren't so fucked up and evil yet lol... They were my magic-only playthrough so of course I had to put them into the College of Winterhold, and there I made them have this little situationship with Brelyna, because I always thought she was really cute :)

It was a huge deal for me back then because I had only just come out as nonbinary myself, so I made an effort to play as a nonbinary character too (this is also why it is important and a little personal to me that Faenil gets gendered correctly) and then I wanted to have some type of ship going on, and it was gay as hell!!!

Anyway, as you may know, in my TES universe the entire province of Morrowind has been hit with my genderfuckery spell, so I decided to make Brelyna genderfluid. I actually don't know if she was born in Morrowind but I'm assuming so since she's Telvanni, and some dialogue hints that she's even been there... And this would probably make her pretty old actually, like would she have lived through the Red Year... Lots to think about. I'm not gonna keep Brelyna very lore accurate though, I redesign all of the NPCs and am gonna hit all of them with my own personality headcanon beams. As you can see, Onmund is gonna have some much needed character as well. NPCs are too blank and boring in the game lmfao

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im currently working on some more detailed stuffs but here’s a sketch of vally’s dragonborn dlc arc design. those are her sad hours. i mean her best friend/lover is dead and now she has to deal with the fucking daedra they pledged their soul to. have i ever mentioned sethel was a follower of hermaeus mora? well im mentioning it now lmfao

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Skyrim and its disconnect from Nordic nature

Hey everyone, this is a pretty long read and kind of unrelated to any OC or art stuff, but I got really passionate about Nordic nature and seasons and how Skyrim as a game fails to capture its beauty and reality. Despite the length, I'm not very serious about this, I'm not an expert on ecology or anything and I know it's all just fantasy and I love Skyrim for that, so don't get on my ass about how I'm nitpicking, that's not the point of this post. I just wrote this for fun! Everything is under the cut.

One of my biggest peeves with Skyrim is that the ecology and weather in the game is kind of idealized and fantastical. I don't know, the environment is really beautiful, and some places look harsh and gray, yes, but it feels like it's a bit too scared of showing "ugly" things, forgetting that usually the "ugly" wet grayness of Nordic nature is what makes it so beautiful. I'm going to get back to that statement soon, stay with me. In the game, there are no seasons, which I'm assuming was purposefully cut out in order to save time when making it, but it takes away *so much* of the experience of living in a Land of Really Cold. The sun sets at the same time every day of the year, the same flowers bloom everywhere all at once, some places are in an eternal state of autumn, and some places never get relief from the frost. I don't know, to me it's boring, and almost a little uncanny.

Like, one of the things we usually miss out on in open world games is that the world around us is alive, the world around us changes without us, and we need to adapt to it. Let's take something as simple as the sun. See, in the arctic circle and close by, nights are incredibly fucking bright in summer, and it often drives me a bit insane because I like to sleep in the dark. However, in winter the sun is only up for like 6 hours. Usually when the days start getting darker, maybe you feel a bit of relief, but you also start feeling this kind of dread about a quickly approaching period of Dark and Cold. If you work or study, chances are you don't really see the sun for weeks or even months during winter, because not only is it often cloudy, the sun isn't up yet when you go to work, and it's already set when you come home. And then, on a random Tuesday in March, when you're going home, you notice the sun for the first time in ages, and you just stand there, basking, celebrating the fact that you got through another long harsh winter. And then you have like two months of normal amounts of light, until soon you can't sleep again.

Seasons were pretty important to people in the past, they dictated how you would work, the amount of food you had, religious celebrations... I feel like nobody in Skyrim really talks about how bad weather can cause famines, or how a simple blizzard can make traveling impossible, or how seasons affect the animals you hunt. In spring you sow fields, in summer you tend to your crops, and in autumn you harvest. And winter? In winter you fucking survive.

Let's get back to the ugly wet grayness I mentioned. Most Finnish nature photography I see only captures the sun shining through the trees into the water in summer, vibrant orange forests in autumn, and the northern lights above snowy hills in winter. But like, what about when you go to actually walk in the forest and it's kind of lightly raining and gray, what about in spring when the snow melts and there's water everywhere and the grass is flat and yellow, what about when that one single week of autumn where everything is vibrant is over and the trees are barren and everything is brown, and what about 4pm in January when the darkening sky paints everything you see a deep blue. It's cold, it's wet and it's gray! And honestly, that's what I call the Land of Really Cold, and that's really beautiful to me - because it's real, everything you see changes in a cycle, and the good and the bad moments don't last forever. It comes and goes, and you start to appreciate every moment for what it is. Nordic nature is melancholic, and I don't think Skyrim as a game can quite capture that.

One of my favourite things about winter is when there's a field and the frozen tall grass and weeds kind of stick out of the snow. And let's talk about that, actually. See, snow isn't just some white frozen mass, sometimes snow is wet, and that's when you can make snowmen and throw snowballs at your friends, but in colder temperatures it doesn't clump up like that anymore. I think Skyrim can't capture the beauty of freshly fallen snow either, how soft it is, how sometimes trees are so covered in this blanket of it that the branches hang next to the ground. The game forgets how exhausting it is to trudge through knee-high fields of it, how sometimes you can't see a slippery patch of ice underneath, and how sometimes further into winter the snow gets this kind of hard shell on top that cracks when you step on it. And yeah, ice is fucking treacherous, you actually need proper boots in order to move around. Speaking of proper gear, it's really funny how poorly dressed some of the people in Skyrim are.

Anyway, I don't think it's a huge deal, like I said in the beginning of the post, these are just my own thoughts, and the landscapes and views in Skyrim are indeed very gripping and beautiful in their own sense. But like, I would love to see Whiterun covered in snow, or Windhelm in summer, or the Rift in any other season than autumn. I could talk about this more, about how eerie it is to spend a quiet midsummer night sitting by a still lake, how the yellow grass in spring quickly turns light green, how even the ugliest rock in a forest always beats the mundane city life, but I would digress, I've said what I needed to. Nature is alive and you can't just stop it from changing - when you do, you take away the life from it.

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medieval goth vally…or something along those lines. i think that’s her sitting during some banquet, buzzed and completely dissociated from what she’s actually doing with her life. in this moment she feels like the smartest person in the room, and the smartest person in the room obviously deserves some more wine. next thing she’s probably gonna do is go up to some high-ranking military official and convince him his mother never loved him. and he will never recover from that, but oh well. she needs enrichment

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quick modern au stuffs im probably not finishing so i thought i’d make a lil compilation. some of this is older and some is newer. there’s sethel going to a cooking comp(they win by being a terrible bastard), vally in some alt drip, the gamer version of @boiledkwamaegg’s wonderful freak (game…nil? gamernil?) and also sethel and faenil discussing science shit and throwing shade(they´d be such good friends btw. nonbinary and evil gang). in this au everybody goes to therapy. and also sethel doesn’t die so them and vally are a couple. it´s all sunshine and rainbows when you compare it to canon

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no time to explain, take this, don't lose it

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i present to you vally’s canon imperial army drip. or actually her canon draconic elven-сoded drip with the empire’s logo slapped onto it. you gotta have at least one fashionable person in the war room

this was a bitch to draw btw. i’m not sure if i’ll be able to replicate it LMFAO

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In honor of successfully attending Helsinki pride for the first time, I made the grossest nonbinary flag ever out of Faenil's color palette. I hope you all hate it. This flag is called Gendernil, it's when you're nonbinary but also fucked up and evil.

Happy pride (no I don't have anything better to post right now bye)