#less human humanoids

[fantasy-anatomy-analyst]

(image description: a digital drawing labeled "making humanoids less human" with secondary captions on each side that say "alternate evolution" and "exaggerated features". above the secondary captions, there are two portrait sketches of very humanoid characters. on the "alternate evolution" side is an elf man with long dark hair. on the "exaggerated features" side is a woman who could be a nature fairy or a dryad, with flowers in her hair.

below the captions, these two characters have been redrawn to match their categories. the elf man has been redrawn with features more similar to a monkey, such as a very flat elongated nose, a small chin, and ears that sit higher on his head. the dryad or fairy woman has been redrawn with huge eyes and angular features, turning her hair with flowers into whole leafy branches with flowers. end description.)

hi i'm still around and i am finally caught up on things in my life, so i have time to catch up with this blog and all the questions people have asked! starting with a very old one. or several.

I had multiple anonymous messages asking me how I would draw specific fantasy beings to be less human, including witches of various elements. Rather than trying to answer each of them individually, I thought it would be more effective and helpful to talk about the general idea of taking fantasy designs that are usually more human looking and changing them to be less human. My favorite option is the alternate evolution, which I have been working and working on with my own fantasy people species.

Elves in particular have been a struggle, because I chose to keep my elves as a type of primate. It's been rough trying to abandon the recognizably human parts of their design and further embrace the simian features, because my brain does still have an internal bias towards the standard "elves are humanoid but more beautiful" trope. But I think I'm finally hitting the right level of "monkey" in their design.

The other option shown here is one I just don't do much, and which could be even further exaggerated into the uncanny valley. Take your humanoid characters and just shove them into the uncanny valley, exaggerate their features, add new things that have nothing to do with speculative evolution and just help emphasize the unique traits you want them to embody. elemental witches who become more and more fused with their element. nature beings like dryads that really just look like they broke out of the center of a tree. etc.

I'll make a few more posts with full body examples for both options, but I hope these portrait examples help a little!

remember, you don't need me to give you every detail of how your character and creature designs should look, and you don't need anyone else to do that for you either. If you want a particular artist to give you a specific design exactly as they would draw it, you ask about commissions and you pay them to do that design for you. this blog exists so I can post my ideas and give advice and occasionally nitpick about common mainstream fantasy design tropes that bother me lol. I'll give you ideas, but you gotta do the work yourself. that's how you improve.

[just-some-normal-jessica]

personal HCs of the human lords in black

yeah i based em off of the canon npmd ones with some nmt-lore-related details. it's all just for funsies rlly

[penofwildfire]

I lowkey want Zane to meet an android that's significantly older than him, older than his original body even, because they're from a realm that invented sentient androids sooner than Ninjago did. I want him to learn about this whole history and culture and be baffled by how comfortable and proud these androids are in their nonhumanity because he's grappled with it his whole life and the idea of fully truly embracing it is so foreign to him.

[volpestarks]

sanderson ‘s characters continued Kal + Syl

[aibouart]

i super regretted doing lines for these instead of coloured sketches so the lines are pretty shoddy. designs are subject to change but anyways

if you wanna read abt these guys: https://toyhou.se/26958153.puppeteer-info

more doodles:

[wulvert]

six sided lore last i bothered thinking abt her she is an android who cheats at gambling very proficiently & goes along with mari (the main character, who is a massive clunky robot) on their quest to sue like sooo many people for reasons that are convoluted.

[dispadaferisce]

"If you can power through, Throne of Glass gets good in book 3!"

Y'all are fucking liars. Heir of Fire will probably be the book that makes me give up on this series for good.

[ghcstcd]

I might have figured out how I'm going to draw a maskless Omega now. Still a pain to draw, tho!

[royalreef]

(( Honestly, while I do talk up merfolk and seeing merfolk as providing the same instinctual and automatic reaction and sensations as seeing a large predator much too close to you, and the deep fear that that provides — that is something that mainly applies to people who are less familiar with Miranda and, thus, less familiar with merfolk. People who are more used to Miranda and have acclimated to being around merfolk a lot wouldn't have that same reaction, or would only really have it in specific circumstances or when they are particularly thinking about it.

Mostly I talk about it a lot just because I'm interested in writing merfolk as truly inhuman, and it's one of those things that I have gripes over in xenofiction. Miranda's expressions aren't human, her body isn't human, none of her reactions are human, and that's a huge gap to try and cover between merfolk and humanoids! It really does feel more like you're talking to a particularly smart tiger, and she breaks a lot of the fundamentals of basic socialization for any other species! It's hard to get comfortable around her for the same reason people often have huge issues with anything that strays radically from the human facial plan or that they can't immediately sympathize with!

This is also the same reason why this starts to go away as people get closer to Miranda — not because she's any less of a merfolk or any more human, but because it's easier to automatically associate what she does with her moods and thoughts and her as a person. It's a degree of familiarity that starts to get so ingrained that it becomes subconscious, not just taught or learned but lived.

Think of it like the difference between someone who doesn't know anything about arthropods, and thus groups them all into "scary" and "frightening", and someone who has learned how to tell them apart, what the different species are and what their different body parts are, how to read their body language, how they move and what they do and how to behave around them. Even if the latter doesn't necessarily have more positive feelings about them, they still no longer possess that immediate jump of "this is not like me and I cannot understand or cope with that."

And, yes, this is why so often the narration and Miranda's actual emotional state or thoughts don't actually line up. Miranda might not think this as anything special and might be comfortable and relaxed, but not every muse will have the familiarity and understanding of her to realize it!

[itsbrucey]

Also idk what au I'm even crafting at this point but they own where the Dads are monsters. And Henry is a Harpy. I have a Harpy hierarchy/species guide I was making for my own use/OCS that helps categorize harpies based on like.....their heritage??

It's 3 tiers and it's Matriarch Harpies, Mother's Blood Harpies, and Mother's Tears Harpies. They're all based on certain depictions of harpies in media/myths, with Matriarch being the least human and Tears being the most human.

My OC Vali is a Matriarch harpy, and they're based on ancient green myths/"classic" harpies which tend to just be large bird months with a human's face and head. Mother's Blood Harpies are more human but still pretty large and birdlike, having human torsos and heads but still majorly Bird. Mother's Tears Harpies are like the modern day Harpy, with wings for arms and feathers/bird feet, but human torsos, legs, and heads, and they tend to be the smallest/most human sized.

Maybe I'll make a diagram someday but it's IRRELEVANT bc it's just A CONCEPT I MADE FOR OC NONSENSE. the point is I'm using is for Henry as a Harpy and I think he'd be a Blood or Tears Harpy because it mimicks his elf heritage. I think he'd be a Tears Harpy while Bearry would be Blood Harpy for the sake of it?

[blujayonthewing]

how exactly does 'forest gnomes can talk to animals' work

can gnomes talk to each other in birdspeak

[fantasy-anatomy-analyst]

Making Humanoids Less Human

I did make a small post on this, but now I've got the art for a much bigger and more detailed post! so here we go.

I had several anonymous asks that all came in quick succession weeks ago. Every single one of them was basically just a variation on "how would you take (typically humanoid) fantasy being, and make them look less human?"

This blog does not exist for me to just give people original designs for free, my goal is to show off my own personal thoughts about fantasy design and help people figure out how to adjust their own designs to fit their vision better. That means when people ask me questions about how to do something, I want to give them things to think about so they can come to their own conclusion. I don't mind making original designs to illustrate concepts, but a whole flood of "show me how to make this specific thing look different" all at once like that was too much. I'm not answering them all individually, it's just not what I want to do.

But what I can do is show my own thoughts and ideas about how to take any fantasy design and push it further away from "human", and you all can look at my ideas and figure out your own way to do things!

So here are the main 4 methods I've come up with to make humanoids look less human.

(image description: a simplified drawing of a humanoid face surrounded by four altered versions of the same face. clockwise starting from the top left, they are:

Speculative, drawn as a cat person. Additive, drawn with horns, pointy ears, sharp teeth, and a second pair of eyes. Subtractive, drawn with blank eyes, no nose, and no eyebrows. Exaggerative, drawn with a long face and huge eyes, as well as a wide mouth, narrow nose, and big ears.

end description)

I am personally a fan of the speculative route, which means exploring an alternate root of evolution to create a new design. Through this method, I've created monkey elves, frog goblins, and pig orcs.

the additive option is the most common, I think. adding new feature or doubled features to a humanoid form is a very intuitive way to change the design and make it look less human. you see this in most fantasy and scifi designs, like star trek aliens and the dnd player races.

subtractive and evaggerative are the most common options for people that like the uncanny valley. it's really easy to make uncomfortable designs by removing or exaggerating recognizable features, and they're often used together. Slenderman, for example, removes all facial features and skin color but also exaggerates the limbs and body.

Combining the four methods will give you a really interesting design as well! So for practice I decided to explore an alternate design for Tieflings, the part-demon player race in dnd.

(image description: four examples of differnt tiefling designs using the previously described methods. the additive example is just offical dnd art of a tiefling woman with purple skin, horns, and a long tail.

the subtractive sketch looks very alien, with a bald head, empty eyes, and no other facial featuers aside from a small mouth. it has three fingers per hand and two toe per foot.

the exaggerative sketch shows a hunched humanoid figure with huge eyes and big ears. the neck, limbs, and digits are all long with claws at the ends of the fingers and toes, and the limbs are also quite muscular.

the speculative sketch shows a bipedal figure with features similar to a giraffe, including a long neck, ossicones, and hooves.

end description)

now, because tielflings have such a distinct look to them, obviously my new sketches don't really look like tieflings, do they? the only one that comes close is the giraffe. relying only on one type of alteration to the human form has left the designs rather empty and lacking in the more iconic traits of the original concept. so i tried a sketch that combined my ideas! it came out looking like a completely different creature lol, like it could be a kobold or something, still not really a tiefling.

(image description: a sketch of a creature with a giraffe-like head, long tongue, and sharp teeth. it appears to be roaring at something and stands in a half-crouch. it has long limbs with hoof feet and clawed hands, as well as a long tufted tail curled behind it. end description.)

didn't work out. too far into the animal side of the speculative evolution, I think. so I tried again and got a design I liked much better!

(image description: a digital painting of a tiefling leaping back and casting a glowing orange spell. she is wearing a tunic with a corset and detached sleeves, as well as several pieces of jewelry. Her skin is purple with dark patches like a giraffe's spots, and she has a giraffe's ossicones as well as hoof-like hands and two-toed hoof feet. Her tail is long with a tuft at the end. She has glowing eyes and a flat nose, and there is a single sharp tooth visible poking out of the side of her mouth. end description.)

Brought the face back into slightly more human proportions and that helped a lot. Sometimes designs just take a few tries! that's normal.

and hopefully this is helpful to all of you! there are so many ways to alter humanoid designs to come up with something original and unique to you!

[youareinacomawakeup]

I think, as someone with faceblindness, my general disinterest in Lord of the Rings as a child came at least in PART from not being able to tell half the characters apart.

Merry and Pippin? I don't fuckin' know.

Aragorn and Baromir? Well, Baromir dies, so after that point, it's a lot easier, but mostly, Aragorn has slightly darker hair. As a kid, though, I distinctly remember not being able to tell which one even died. Just "one of the human guys".

Literally all four of the women look the same to me. Even the elves and the humans are hard to tell apart out of context unless I'm looking at their ears.

Gandalf the Grey and Saruman are easy enough. Gandalf the White and Saruman, however...

I've never seen any of the Hobbit movies, but, uh. The idea of keeping all the dwarves straight terrifies me.

[ambersky-art]

*hands you our favorite oc to draw* hi can i request Eleime as your favorite species to draw?

(They're a shapeshifter, the only colors that are usually the same are the hair and skin, and the heart-shaped pupil being some shade of pink.)

Okay so first of all, of COURSE I'm accepting this request

But a quick question! Does Eleime have hair even when they shapeshift or is it just the color that stays? Like if they shift into a species that, say, doesn't have hair?

[fxggotclown]

i find it very sad that i read a stupid amount of yaoi on mangadex earlier this year just to see what was up but forgot to put them in a list so i dont know what ones ive read

[hal-o-ween]