letsannabu-blog - Tumblr blog

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Simultaneously adorable and terrifying

comparing teeth

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Wow all my favorite people in one place! I'm spoiled 😍

gang’s all here

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Unfriendly fucking reminder that the best predictor of mass shootings is not mental illness, but being an angry young white man who has recently experienced rejection and has easy access to guns.

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Baby doesn't like the vet

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😍such a cutie! I want one!

Been a while since I posted but with the face reveal of my favorite comic, i felt compelled to make the little cutie known as thistle!!

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Great, now some dude knows where I live AND how to break in. How is this good?

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trying to survive in botw

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Aborkable

My doggo, Ezri, who rarely barks and mostly borks.

When I got her, she’d been abused and would cower and pee at almost everything, and had been mistreated when she’d barked, so she never would. One day months after I had her she got excited on a walk and borked at a bird, and then immediately cower-peed. I had to re-teach her to bark by gathering her whole human pack and having everyone bark and howl and feed her treats and pet her till she got excited enough to join in, and then got more treats. Took a while but I was able to teach her to bork on command (and she’s gotta be excited or she just stares at me like “Sorry, the bork system needs charging”) and she’ll do it happily when she’s excited to go for a walk or upon seeing a friend, and at birds. I love her croaky borking, especially when she started off terrified of making a joyful noise.

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Daughter of the Lillies is a good comic. I can’t stop doodling this precious child.  Each time the style is different.

Will I ever finish one of these doodles?

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💕💕

Orc dad is best dad.

Fanart of the awesome @bludragongal‘s Orrig from her awesome comic Daughter of the Lilies.

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Super cute

Well I’ve been following @bludragongal‘s amazing comic Daughter of the Lilies for a while, but my goodness let me gush the reveal of what Thistle looks like was amazing and the Cave Elf idea is also amazing, plus the part with the mirror and the smile was so adorable it hurt my heart. anyways after the amazing reveal I felt compelled to draw fanart for their comic

Anyways I’ve got my own art and comic on my page here, I’ve got a Ko-Fi if you wanna support my art here and I have a patreon here if you wanna support my attempts at making comics.

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This is what it looks like when you get a bunch of metal put in and then taken out of your arm

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Woke up out of a post-surgery drug-induced stupor to find the most incredible dotl post I've ever seen and I'm in love with a Thistle 🎶

The Thistle Process

Okay, it’s been two weeks or thereabouts, which should be more than enough time for everyone to be caught up who isn’t! So let’s start taking some serious looks at Thistle.

Thistle’s design has been a long process, which everyone in the $10 Tier on Patreon is already pretty familiar with, as they’ve been patient receptors to a lot of different versions of her that I’ve experimented with and tried out on them. I’m compiling the highlights of that process so you can see every step.

VERSION 1.0 (~2012)

On the left, Thistle, as she was originally drawn in the sketch comics that inspired the entire story. On the right, her colors at the time. Dang, what a babe.

Okay, yeah, y'all caught me: I was a huge Drizzt fan as a teenager. She’s obviously a Drow.

VERSION 2.0 (~2013-14)

Obviously, at some point I was desperate to get away from the connotations to DnD, and Thistle’s hair color and skin tone drastically change to ones not so easily tied to the Forgotten Realms series and their incredibly angsty characters. The words “Dark Elves” disappear from the comic and are replaced by “Cave Elves.”

At this point, I try to push away from the chronic SameFace I was suffering from at the time, and try messing with the exaggeration of certain features to get away from the Caucasian ones that made all my characters look the same. Her face shape completely changes, and, following some feedback from my very talented husband on what makes an appealing character design, her general anatomical and facial proportions change, too.

VERSION 2.1 (2015)

Yikes.

let’s…

not talk about this one

However, this is the first time the long back-hairline concept appeared, something I really liked that helped set her apart from your normal non-human fantasy races, and that stuck around.

VERSION 3.0 (2015)

Thistle’s features slowly begin to smooth out as I try to iron out all the angular features I was prone to draw, to make her more cute and appealing.

Here’s one of the drawings that made me fall in love with the idea of Pointy Toothed and clawed Thistle. Also in this picture, something I’ve also only just noticed while typing this post, are the very, very first trials of giving Thistle bat ears, which I do not for the life of me remember.

Loyal members of the $10 Tier remember me being really, really anxious about Thistle and her design at this phase, because I still had a lot of problems with potentially playing into a lot of toxic tropes common to Fantasy.

VERSION 3.1 (2015-2016)

This is around the time when I get really anxious because I realize, wow, Meg, you gotta be really careful with this, you know, because RACISM, so moving forward from this point, making her an obvious member of a Fantasy race with more monstrous physical traits becomes a huge priority.

To date, this remains one of my favorite stages, but it still lacks the appeal and softness that I ultimately wanted. I really love and miss her crazy hair in this design (“crazy” being said with affection and the best of intent), but I already have such huge problems drawing characters consistently, that tracking each shape would have been a nightmare. Ah, frizzy haired thistle, you live on in my heart.

VERSION 3.2 (2015-2017)

This is the loop I find myself trapped in for about a year: trying to combine the previous two versions into one that’s clearly not Caucasian, but doesn’t drift into the dark and dangerous realm of Being Problematic™, with clear Fantastical Monstrous Features, all while fighting anxiety induced nausea if I start thinking too much about the potential backlash if I do this wrong.

VERSION 3.3 (June 2017)

….and then there was a hot second where Thistle had a straight up bat nose. Here’s another idea that I really loved - I wanted each Cave Elf tribe to have a different kind of bat nose to help distinguish them from one another, and it absolutely made them super cool and I loved it and I was really excited

BUT

literally every person I showed this design to didn’t… have an immediate reaction beyond an awkward pause and a “Weeeeehhhhhll…”

Ah, well, maybe for another project.

VERSION 4.0 (August 2017)

UNTIL FINALLY, Milo steps in and saves me again. Here’s a snapshot from the Photoshop file where I finally found the Thistle I had been looking for. On the far left is a quick doodle Milo did, just for kicks and giggles, that I couldn’t get my eyes off of. In the middle, my attempt to recreate the features and proportions he did in my own style. On the far right - another pass that was just me tweaking some of the details, until I suddenly realized I finally had the Thistle I wanted. (THANKS MILO!)

One thing presented in this version that doesn’t make it past this phase is Thistle’s overbite, which makes her pointy teeth visible at all times. I freaking loved this idea, but, again, ultimately had to discard it in favor of a design that made the main character appealing. Now I just draw her pointy, irregularly sized teeth everywhere whenever humanly possible.

VERSION 5.0 (January 2018) THE FINAL:

I need to be careful about the shape of her ears, as I tend to draw Lyra’s on Thistle out of habit. They should look more like how they’re drawn in the previous image, and are loosely inspired by Townsend Bat ears:

chirrup chirrup

This is the Thistle that finally appeared in the comic, a scarce 5 months before her scheduled appearance. I was really cutting it close, but I’m  really happy with this result. Of course, every version has a special place in my heart, and I know everyone will have their favorites. They all live on in my heart in one way or another, so picking a favorite is okay.

I can’t tell you how relieved and thrilled I was at the general response - there are a lot of things to worry about when working on a comic of this nature, and while being aware of them is very important, I’m happy that it looked like I didn’t need to worry nearly as much as I did during this process.

All right, there you go! That’s Thistle for ya.

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Nothing is going to change. Americans love their guns more than they love people and after Sandy Hook we decided that killing over 20 children was acceptable and not outrageous enough to make reasonable restrictions on guns. This is America, a country that has been around for 200 years, a superpower, a 1st world nation, and one of the wealthiest countries on the planet and we refuse to protect our own people. We respect guns more than we respect the lives of people. 

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AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!! there are no words just squishy happy noises

She either twisted her ankle or mentioned that she hoped she didn’t get her feet wet.

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This is your reminder to make sure you took your meds today.