wolfhidewinter - Tumblr blog

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Illustration for a client, bringing their written beastie to life :)

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A couple of the charr that showed up to the art party! Probably gonna do more of these through the day but wanted to post something while it was still going.

Harrow for @jynxghoststep Caldarus for @sleidog

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I swear I have more than just traumatized werewolves somewhere. This is Henry so far. About 7k words deep into a story about him

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Some recent comms completed. Back to work at full speed. Top one is a mini illustration for Djt. This was a patreon reward for hitting a certain amount paid through pledges of their Gnoll. The minis are part of a practice for photo bashing from my own photos The others are coloured sketches :) and the final was more of a character design based on text info for the client

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My dog was put to sleep last Thursday after a brief illness. I'm devastated and miss her horribly. She was my best friend for almost a decade and was around 14.5 when she went :(. Been going out on long drives to stay occupied as the house is too quiet now

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Illustration for my good friend Rom! :D Van helsing pose inspired of course ;)

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A selection of recent comms. I'm open for more! prices and more examples here :) - https://whwinter.carrd.co/#commissions Happy to do horror as always :D

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The project I'm involved in, please take a look! :)

Chapter Preview: The Way Things Are

Hello, Kinfolks!

We need your help.

The time has come for us to begin working with cultural consultants to ensure this game is the best it can possibly be. To make it happen, a preview of W:tE is going live on Ko-fi for you to read. This chapter is available in a raw rough draft to those who subscribe to me on the Fostern tier. All proceeds will directly fund cultural consulting for Werewolf: the Essentials!

Subscribers on the Fostern tier and above will have access to the preview chapter. With about an hour of reading, anyone completely new to Werewolf and the World of Darkness should have enough of a mental image of the game to start coming up with character concepts. If you already own a full copy of the corebook, you can even start running games.

Our first initial consultant is Thais Afonso, who is excited to partner with us to review our comic script. Ultimately, we want to continue working with them, but I also hope to hire Live Oak Consulting to lend a local Indigenous perspective to our writing on the game. Subscribing on Ko-Fi will help us accomplish just that!

This first chapter includes a preamble covering changes to the game aesthetic to one that is timeless; a linear presentation of Garou society in the Age of Heroes, their factions, the tribes, and their history. This is considered a keystone chapter that will set the tone for this and every successive book to come in the series, and with about an hour of reading, anyone completely new to Werewolf and the World of Darkness should have enough of a mental image of the game to be able to start coming up with character concepts.

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Recent headshot commission for Protogenanpu :) For anyone interested I have space from the 6th of February onwards. Here's a link to my pricing - https://whwinter.carrd.co/#commissions

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forest before winter by Kasia Rubiszewska

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A snippet of a piece I'm working on for an awesome project for an indie RPG model of Werewolf: the Apocalypse by https://www.tumblr.com/songoftrillium. If you're interested in the project read more here! Can you tell who I got tasked with drawing? hah

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A snippet of a piece I'm working on for an awesome project for an indie RPG model of Werewolf: the Apocalypse by https://www.tumblr.com/songoftrillium. If you're interested in the project read more here! Can you tell who I got tasked with drawing? hah

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The thing with the Mari Lwyd, though, is that it's being... I don't know, 'appropriated' is the wrong word, but certainly turned into something it isn't.

Thing is, this is a folk tradition in the Welsh language, and that's the most important aspect of it. I feel partly responsible for this, because I accidentally became a bit of an expert on the topic of the Mari Lwyd in a post that escaped Tumblr containment, and I clearly didn't stress it strongly enough there (in my defence, I wrote that post for ten likes and some attention); but this is a Welsh language tradition, conducted in Welsh, using Welsh language poetic forms that are older than the entire English language, and also a very specific sung melody (with a very specific first verse; that's Cân y Fari). It is not actually a 'rap battle'. It's not a recited poem. It is not any old rhyme scheme however you want.

It is not in English.

Given the extensive and frankly ongoing attempts by England to wipe out Welsh, and its attendant cultural traditions, the Mari is being revived across Wales as an act of linguistic-cultural defiance. She's a symbol of Welsh language culture, specifically; an icon to remind that we are a distinct people, with our own culture and traditions, and in spite of everyone and everything, we're still here. Separating her from that by removing the Welsh is, to put it mildly, wildly disrespectful.

...but it IS what I'm increasingly seeing, both online and in real world Mari Lwyd festivals. She's gained enormous pop-culture popularity in recent years, which is fantastic; but she's also been reduced from the tradition to just an aesthetic now.

So many people are talking/drawing about her as though she's a cryptid or a mythological figure, rather than the folk practice of shoving a skull on a stick and pretending to be a naughty horse for cheese and drunken larks. And I get it! It's an intriguing visual! Some of the artwork is great! But this is not what she is. She's not a Krampus equivalent for your Dark Christmas aesthetic.

I see people writing their own version of the pwnco (though never called the pwnco; almost always called some variant on 'Mari Lwyd rap battle'), and as fun as these are, they are never even written in the meter and poetic rules of Cân y Fari, much less in Welsh, and they never conclude with the promise to behave before letting the Mari into the house. The pwnco is the central part to the tradition; this is the Welsh language part, the bit that's important and matters.

Mari Lwyd festivals are increasingly just English wassail festivals with a Mari or two present. The Swansea one last weekend didn't even include a Mari trying to break into a building (insert Shrek meme); there was no pwnco at all. Even in the Chepstow ones, they didn't do actual Cân y Fari; just a couple of recited verses. Instead, the Maris are just an aesthetic, a way to make it look a bit more Welsh, without having to commit to the unfashionable inconvenience of actually including Welsh.

And I don't really know what the answers are to these. I can tell you what I'd like - I'd like art to include the Welsh somewhere, maybe incorporating the first line of Cân y Fari like this one did, to keep it connected to the actual Welsh tradition (or other Welsh, if other phrases are preferred). I'd like people who want to write their version of the pwnco to respect the actual tradition of it by using Cân y Fari's meter and rhyme scheme, finishing with the promise to behave, and actually calling it the pwnco rather than a rap battle (and preferably in Welsh, though I do understand that's not always possible lol). I'd like to see the festivals actually observe the tradition, and include a link on the booking website to an audio clip of Cân y Fari and the words to the first verse, so attendees who want to can learn it ahead of time. I don't know how feasible any of that is, of course! But that's what I'd like to see.

I don't know. This is rambly. But it's something I've been thinking about - and increasingly nettled by - for a while. There's was something so affirming and wonderful at first about seeing the Mari's climb into international recognition, but it's very much turned to dismay by now, because she's important to my endangered culture and yet that's the part that everyone apparently wants to drop for being too awkward and ruining the aesthetic. It's very frustrating.

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Spotted a funny "draw your oc in this" thing so here's Bastian. Not entirely sure if he likes it or not haha. Rip to whoever put it on him

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Experimental 'mini' illustration that was a Patreon exclusive, for Fouquin :)

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The orchard.

Seems like a legit place...

Inspired by a local apple orchard with an old hand painted sign hanging off a broken fence.

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Couple of recent comms :)