#hey remember when I said i'd go back to being normal again abt this film. yeah that was a lie sorry

[roukabi]

Hee hee! hee hee ho! My grubby furry hands will contaminate everything you love!

(Designs are free to use with credit, if anyone’s interested!)

Exhaustive design notes/trivia/extras are under the cut!

[Image IDs: a series of animal designs for Vide Noir’s characters. Buck Vernon is a sand-colored whitetail deer (how creative) with dented antlers, a brown-and-white striped bandanna, and a guitar slung around his back. Lee Green is a peach-and-cream fox with a white lily above her ear. Frankie Lou is a clouded leopard with a wavy black ‘mane’ of sorts. Jasper and Hontanx are mutts; Jasper is slender and mostly grey with brown dorsal coloring while Hontanx is more boxer-like with short, white fur and grey patches. Johnnie is a german shepherd mix, with half of his face scarred by black-braining, and sports a red bandanna on his leg and a leather World Enders jacket. Moonbeam is a black lop-eared rabbit with lavender undertones, also wearing the World Enders jacket. Alex is a doberman with slicked-back hair, also (also) with a World Enders jacket and much smaller black scar on his cheek. Toby is a very scruffy rufous treepie (don’t ask), mostly tan with a black head and wings with white accents. Finally, Z’Oiseau is a melanistic Bengal tiger, where his stripes are large and take up the majority of his fur. The final image is a lineup of all characters, with heights considered. Each design is still sketchy, and construction lines can be seen. The artist’s signature overlaps each image. End IDs.]

Well, well, well. It appears I’m at the stage of obsession where I make furry designs for the characters. Because I’m always paranoid that I need to explain myself for everything I do, here’s the comprehensive guide to each design. If I’ve done a good enough job, you can tell who’s who pretty easily. 

Buck: Hmm, now how did he end up as a deer, I wonder...? 

Silliness aside, Buck’s antlers actually play a pretty big role in representing his psyche/self-esteem, as they break off in certain scenes until the end, where they become shattered stumps. Jasper breaks + steals one antler when Buck gets black-brained, which I’m sure can be used as a metaphor for something.

He’s also got big ol’ floppy ears. When I make animal designs, I try to mimic the form of someone’s hair via the ears or cheek fur, though, as you’ll soon see with Frankie, that’s not a hard-and-fast rule. You’ll also notice that he wears a bandanna, even though he doesn’t in the film. This is because I felt his design lacked color. And bandannas are cool. And my brain is addled with Hadestown parallels. 

“But Rook!” I hear you say, “If Buck’s a deer, how can he play guitar? And how is he supposed to hold a gun?” Well, the answer to the first question is that he plays with his teeth. Obviously. And the obvious conclusion to the second question is that he doesn’t need artillery when he has a crown of stabby stabby bone.

Lee: Lee is a fox - outwardly desireable and a character of multiple folktales. There’s not much to say about her design otherwise, except for the addition of a lily - referencing ‘Fool For Love’ with “I’m asking Lily to be my bride” as well as ‘La Belle Fleur Sauvage’. Oh yeah, and she’s way too big compared to the other characters in the height chart lmao pretend she’s the average fox size 

Lee fascinates me, and I think I’m the only one who thinks that way lol. It’s revealed at the end that she had Way more agency over her situation than everyone realized. Did she know about Z’Oiseau’s kill count before getting with him? Does she know now? AFWP says that she overcame the Vide Noir addiction, how did that go? Did severing herself from the drug sever connections to Z’Oiseau’s empire? What does she actually think of him? What are her songs like? Is she okay? Does she regret anything? Is she the same Lee who’s known as Lee Avery in the World Ender MV? AAAAAAAAAAAA

Frankie Lou: Picking the animal was easy, designing her was not. Clouded leopards are native to Cambodia, and I wanted Frankie and Z’Oiseau’s designs to complement each other in some way (I’d made Z’Oiseau’s design before I made Frankie’s). So there’s a spotty kitty and a stripey kitty. Clouded leopards are also insanely elusive, which adds to Frankie’s mysterious ghost facade in the film. 

I normally don’t like adding ‘human’ hair to animals, but when I initially made Frankie without her hair, it really felt like something was missing. I like the way it looks now, and her plumed tail ties it together. The spots are not end-all-be-all, and can be simplified for animation.

Jasper and Hontanx: What better to chase after our Arthurian White Stag (Buck) and Teumessian Fox (Lee) than a pair of hunting dogs? Jasper and Hontanx needed to complement each other in the classic “Big Guy, Little Guy” trope, with the ‘little guy’ (Jasper) being tall, slender, and shrewd, while the “big guy” (Hontanx) is muscular and rarely speaks. Their names even follow the Kiki-Bouba effect. 

I thought about making Hontanx fluffier, but the boxer look fits well, too. There’s some patches of longer fur around his neck and shoulders.

Johnnie: Everyone’s favorite little hurricane! Johnnie gives me exciteable puppydog vibes, so I made him a German Shepherd mix (mix, being “something fluffy”). His cheek fur is missing on his black-brained side, and his eye is a little messed up, but here’s what he looks like when he’s a-okay:

Moonbeam: Rabbits are associated with the moon in multiple mythologies, so it’d make sense to make Moonbeam one. I haven’t drawn her in her fortune teller gear, but I think she’s happier to don the World Enders jacket instead. She’s also got some purple undertones for flavor, and they make her stand out as the only design with a cool color pallete. She’s just got that transfemme swag, I suppose.

Alex: For a character who only appears for 2 seconds, Alex seems to have made a permanent impression on Vide Noir fans, including myself. Strong, tall, and effortlessly cool, I wanted him to look like a model World Ender. This mayyyy have resulted in him looking nothing like his younger brother, but maybe one takes more after their father, and the other, their mother. Idk. I have this whole backstory thing with Cobb where the Redmaynes have this godawful father that Cobb helps them... get rid of. Because Cobb is the better dad.

Alex is the last of this bunch to be a canine, which I’m sure you’re all glad to hear. I don’t know why there are so many dogs. They just have that rugged look to them that suits the World Ender/Bounty Hunter style. Well, these ones do, anyway. Not Lee.

Toby: Toby was by far the most aggravating to design, and it’s pretty apparent in the final result. I mean, have you heard of a rufous treepie? 

I had no idea what I wanted Toby to be, but I wasn’t about to draw another canine. As Z’Oiseau’s nephew, he’d be associated with birds by default, so I started thinking about the kind of bird Toby could fit - it’d have to be territorial, annoying, and/or aggressive.

 Like... blue jays?

 While blue is not a color I’d associate with Toby, for whatever reason, I was getting somewhere. Blue jays are a part of the family Corvidae. Corvidae has birds that are black. Blackbird = Z’Oiseau! See? There’s a connection! 

I scrolled down through Wikipedia’s corvid list until I came across the Rufous Treepie, a bird not only described as ‘opportunistic’, but ironically has a symbiotic relationship with local deer populations... It’s also large enough to get stabbed by an antler from a certain less-willing-to-cooperate deer. 

So that’s what I went with. Toby’s meant to look more like a fledgling, given the scruffiness. I took some creative liberties with facial markings, but like. Who cares. 

“But Rook,” you say, “If Toby’s a bird, and Z’Oiseau isn’t, how are they related?” Well, the obvious conclusion to come to here is that you should stop asking questions.

Z’Oiseau: It’s Zazo time! With a name like 'bird’, you’d expect him to be a bird. But I figured that making him a big cat would play very well into the irony of his name and would present him as a real threat. After all, you didn’t find Tobey very scary, did you? And who names a bird “bird”? 

Because Z’Oiseau’s original name, Zozo, is Euskara, a language spoken in the Pyrenees, that was my first place to look for animals. Nothing jumped out to me, though, so I moved on to looking up big cat species and hoping for the best. Then an idea came to me - what about a tiger, but with reversed stripes? It’d fit the reasoning behind the “blackbird” name, and he’d be the most powerful big cat out there. To my surprise, melanistic tigers do exist, and they’re really cool. I picked the Bengal tiger of India for Z’Oiseau, as most of the ‘black tigers’ have been spotted there. 

Z’Oiseau’s stripes can be simplified for animation or what-have-you. Or you can draw every individual stripe as presented in the photo, I’m not gonna stop you.

Well, that’s that! Might make Tubbs Tarbell and Cobb Avery later. For now, as a reward for making it this far, here’s some silly scribbles + shitposting:

[peanut-butter-parkerxx]

he died his hair prank

peter decided to prank y/n by temporarily dying his hair silver..

pairing: peter x fem!reader

status: dating

peters pov

i finally found a way to get revenge on y/n and her stupid yet believable pranks, since she loves my brown hair so much, no i did not decide to cut it aunt may would literally murder me if y/n didnt so it before her, i decided to temporarily dye it silver but she doesnt need to know its temporary ;)

y/n/n and i decided to hang out in the evening since i told her i had to go run some errands for may, thankfully she believed  it, so now im on my way to go buy some hair dye....*nervous laugh*

i got the hair dye and i took all the stuff out spreading them on my bathroom counter, i decided to record this coz i dont think ill dye my hair again any time soon, plus it felt like i was filming a youtube video

"ok so i watched a couple of videos before this coz i dont wanna mess this beautiful gem up" i said reffering to my hair "im obviously not gonna bleach it, so lets hope my hair is light enough to show the dye" i prayed and attempted to put my hair in a ponytail and it looked pretty good, i watched how y/n does it on my hair everytime we do face masks but doing it for yourself is wayyy harder

*A/N: look at this cutie 🥰 anyways back to the story*

i dyed the side of my hair first getting the dye everywhere, thank god i took the bathroom rug out so it would not get stained, and then took the bun out and sectioned it

"dont let me down brad mondo" i whispered getting even more nervous than i was before i brushed the dye of the first section "i did it" i smiled proudly but then it hit me "i did  it, i did it, this part of my hair is silver! oh my god" i was panicking, what am i doing? this is a prank this is a prank its not real calm down peter

suddenly i got a facetime call from y/n

*babyyyy 💕👀 would like to FaceTime*

lit up my screen, i panicked a bit trying to find an excuse to not answer the call or at least not show her my face, but i remembered i was in the bathroom....hopefully this excuse will work

i clicked on 'accept' and waited for her to connect

"hey babyyyy" she beamed, shes cute when shes excited but her smile faded when she couldnt see me "where are you?" she asked

"im in the toilet babe, but i couldnt not answer your call" i laughed trying to act normal and backing up from my phone as much as possible

"oh" she laughed, i wanted to grab something from the counter and i thought i did it carefully but what she said, said otherwise "wait why is your hair silver?" she asked her eyes widening

"wHAT? what do you mean?" i squeeked, i hesitantly put the undyed of my hair to the frame and she sighed in relief "my hair is brown, love nothing to worry about"

"thank god, although you kinda looked like jack frost which was kinda hot....but no no no no i prefer brown, dont even think about it" she warned, i laughed at her statement, it kinda made me more confident, maybe i would look like jack frost "anyways, ill see you in a few, im almost at my house, gotta go, byeee" she said waving her hand at the camera

"byeeee" i put my hand in the frame and waved, she laughed and ended  the call...that was close

after a few curses and an hour of dying my hair, i finished! and im pretty proud of the results, lets just hope my hair doesnt fall out

*A/N: this is the only picture i found of a guy with a somewhat wavy hair so imagine this is him but with messier hair dye and its all over his hair but not till his roots, OH and silver lmao*

so i took a photo of my hair and sent it to ned, he was with me throughout the whole process coz i needed someone to talk to, i usually annoy y/n with my daily rants but i couldnt so ned had to hear me talk abt how Mrs Barbosa gave me extra homework for being late

After I texted Ned, I got a text from y/n/n

"Babyyyy 👀💕: hey Pete, where are we hanging out? My place or yours?"

I told her that she could come to my place because I got a 'surprise' for her, i knew i had to record this so i quickly placed my phone on the desk

"YOUR BITCH HAS ARRIVEDDD!" y/b barges in, flopping on the bed next to me

"h-hey y/n/n" i said laughing at her dramatic entrance but still confused on how she didn't  notice my hair, just act casual, she moved closer to my body looking at the computer thats on my lap

"what are you doing?" she asked curious "

oh nothing, just watching guys surprise their girlfriends with dying their hair a bad color"i laughed acting as casual as possible

"oh thats funny, but if you did that to m- *looks up* *big dramatic loud gasp* PETE- I- WHA- HOW-" her eyes were as big as ever, I've  never seen her this shocked "WHAT HAPPENED TO MY LUCIOUS BROWN CURLS" she shouted completely ignoring my computer and sits on my lap to get a closer look

"YOUR curls?" i laughed

"yes MY curls what happened to the light brown almost hazel in the sunlight curls?" she brushes my hair through her fingers trying to get the dye out "i dont think my brain processed this yet- WAIT YOU DYED IT RIGHT? SO THAT MEANS IT'LL STAY FOREVER?" looked down her mouth parted

"isn't  that what dying your hair means?"

"HOW ARE YOU SO CALM ABOUT THIS I MEAN ITS A WHOLE DIFFERENT COLOR, AND WHY SILVER-ISH GREY?"

"I actually really like it" I said combing my hair through my fingers but she swatted it away so she could look at it more

"babe *laughs* you said I'd look like Jack Frost" I told her tilting my head

"well Jack Frost is hot but you're hott-ER I don't want you looking like Jack Frost because I said so! I love you for who you are....especially your brown hair"

"so if I told I like it you'd be ok with it?"

"Yes if you like it and it's your choice? %100"

"so what if I said it's a prank?" She was gonna nod her head coz she thought it was like the other question but then stopped midway and widened her eyes

"your kidding"

"yes in fact I am" I laugh and point at the camera and she gasps

"you..you....YOU BITCH" she punches my chest jokingly "I ALMOST GOT A HEART ATTACK AND GOT ALL SAPPY AND MUSHY FOR YOU JUST SO YOU COULD PRANK ME?!" she shouts point her hands everywhere "You know I was like scared! Coz you said you liked it and I was like, oh no I gotta get used to this no more chocolate curls, but not as in i lied I just gotta get used to it which added more pressure than I already felt!" She stated but I only laughed even more and awed

"babe don't worry"

"I HAD A MATH QUIZ TODAY" she point at herself "AND YOUR HERE LAUGHING YOUR ASS OFF?? no wait let me sit on the bed since you like when I sit on your lap"

"no no baby I'm sorry" I said while laughing, her face was hilarious

"no you're not! and no kisses till Monday" she huffs and looks at the wall, I give her ten seconds until she turns around to ask one more question, and she did

"hop on the shower we're cleaning the white of you, you Jack Frost wannabe" well more like a demand I huffed but got up with her and turned the recording off

"neds gonna love this"

Have a wonderful morning/afternoon/evening/night!

-quacksonlover