starryspectre

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Misc Bosmer characters

I felt like drawing elves and I really love the Bosmer from TES. I definitely took some artistic liberties with the lore here lmao. I wanted to a good mix of deep Bosmer and more cosmopolitan Bosmer, mages and Jaqspurs, various antler types. I'm also curious--do Bosmer shed their antlers like deer do? I did a couple of Bosmer who are in the shedding phase, because the idea of them yanking them off when they get loose like a wobbly tooth is amusing to me. I know some are supposedly glued on anyway, but some of them are grown naturally which is very cool

Looking at this tho it's very obvious which one is my favourite character to play as lmao. Find the main character!!

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Somewhere in the Fade

An illustrated concept for a chapter in my post-Veilguard fic Rush of Sighs. I haven't written this chapter yet but I could see it so vividly in my mind, so.. here we are ig

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Water Beasts

I'm very into amphibians lately :^)

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Catharsis

Kind of a corny thing but just this need to purge all this old shit and not being able to do it alone. Like you're just drowning in all your trauma and misery and for some reason you can only expel it all properly if you have someone to hold your hand through it idk

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Redid my Queen of Wands bc I went off the old design. She's feeling herself!!

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Stone Mirror

One of my favourite mythological figures is Medusa. However, one of my main gripes with the way she's depicted in modern illustration and movies is when she's made out to be extremely beautiful. Although there are some retellings of the story of Medusa where she's described as being extremely beautiful, most of the stories and archaeological evidence depict her as a monster.

I guess I just find it frustrating because it proves that, even in stories where a woman is meant to be ugly or monstrous, people won't allow it. It reinforces this message that in order to have value or power, the woman must be attractive. In order to give her any kind of dignity, we have to make her beautiful. I personally think that more women should be allowed to be monstrous and ugly, so I depicted her as the freakish, venom-spitting gorgon capable of turning people to stone with her gaze.

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Hope

'You have a rare and marvellous spirit...'

A few weeks ago, I did an illustration of Solas's spirit form and got to wondering what my Lavellan might look like as a spirit, and what their nature might be. There are a number of allusions in Dragon Age: Inquisition that the Inquisitor's spirit is unusual, and since all the lore drops in DATV I've been wanting to explore what that might mean. We don't know if it's unusual or if it's just down to the Anchor--Cole says it makes them 'more', but there are other things mentioned here and there that there's something weird about them anyway. Hope seems like a good bet for their nature given all the events in the story, so this is what I based the design on.

I chose 8 'wings' as a reference to one of my favourite films, Angel's Egg, where the coelacanth is used as an allegory for faith. Coelacanths are one of the oldest fish species on Earth and were thought to be extinct until the 1920s, when a live one was caught off the coast of South Africa. Before this, there were only fossil records. Coelacanths have 8 fins, with their tailfin having 3 lobes. It felt like a fitting reference to make given that both Angel's Egg and DAI are stories about faith and hope.

The spindly bits are based on siphonophores, which are deep sea creatures that, instead of growing larger, create duplicates of themselves with single functions. E.g., some parts only have mouths, for eating. Long strings of them live in the open ocean, and to me they look like musical notation--this also fits with the line 'everything sang the same' and how Solas and Lavellan's speech is in the same cadence. It's also how I imagine the relationships between spirits to function; they're all parts of a larger body, with differing functions to sustain the whole.

The 'head' is designed to look a bit like a starburst with parhelia or sundogs. (They're called sundogs because it was thought that they were the dogs Zeus walked across the sky by the ancient Greeks.) They're considered a good luck omen i.e. a hopeful sign. The colour palette is based on a sunrise bc 'The dawn will come' is the hymn sung by Andrastians in DAI.

The above quote is said by Solas in the infamous Crestwood scene.

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Sick Martyr

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Wisdom

A more detailed version of Solas's spirit form :)

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Woodland Alphabet

Finito!

I managed to finish off the whole thing in time for Xmas, which is useful since it means I can get it printed and sent off for my nephews, the second of whom is going to be born any day now. Since they're moving to Japan in the near future, it'll be nice for them to have something from their other homeland :)

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Lich

I wanted to do something for spooky season, and October is my favourite month anyway because I'm a big fan of fungi in general. So here's my lich, just risen from the dead, his body partially eaten away by mushrooms and creepy crawlies.

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Suntrapper

Getting really sick of being depressed. It would be really useful if I could just take those unreasonably rare moments of clarity and bottle them for when I'm feeling like shit

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Woodland Alphabet, I-P

Some more woodland critters. I'm a lot happier with these, so I don't think there are any I'm gonna re-do. Everyone likes the nest one the most for some reason, but I kind of like the kite most.

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The High Priestess

I decided to do a few more of the Major Arcana since I finished my Knights and Queens. The problem with this project is that I'm already finding myself wanting to re-do some of my earlier work, and if I go back and re-do all of them I'm never gonna finish. Ugh. I need to speed up!!

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Woodland Alphabet, A-H

Since completing my Coastal Alphabet, I've wanted to do another version with a woodland theme. I kind of want to re-do Elm and Hazel, but I'm still a bit on the fence.

If I get the money soon, I'm hoping I'll be able to get these printed as either flashcards or a poster, especially since my nephew is half Japanese and bilingual and will turn 1 later this year. I think it'd make a pretty cool gift!

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Brown Bears

I haven't done a pattern repeat in a while, and I wanted to draw some bears. So, here's a pattern repeat of bears. :D

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Mythos

Practicing my creature/character design skills with some classic beasties from mythology. (The bouncy Cerberus is my fave)