Niklas Jansson
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Monster doodles
🕑 Added 2023-07-28 19:07:21 +0000 UTCThese monster roughs are for my edutainment game. I'm just borrowing some shapes from my Digimon project here. I think Digimon desigs will be a bit easier to do. Pokémons are hyper efficient and stylized designs and I can't really handle that sort of laser focused clean simplicity. Well, I suppose the first gen were slightly more organic / less geometric.
The Pantsu stuff is unrelated telephone doodling I'm doing while listening to audiobooks (Shadow Slave atm.). I don't really have a project for it. Hmmm... Aboard the industrial space platform Textile Plant 1051, the Overlord Machine has malfunctioned following contact with an ancient derelict vessel. Now the worker replicants – suddenly free and in possession of the massive space platform and an ancient jump core – are facing an uncertain future as they're pursued by the ceaseless Machine Effectuate and pervasive Leviathan cluster organisms.
Edit: Also including some of the stuff that I post on social media as it might be a bother to check those. Viewing Twitter needs an account now? And Mastodon might be a bit obscure. Some of it will go onto respective webpages eventually.
Drawing tips - Not to be taken too seriously. My body lines aren't all that dynamic and I rarely do pinup proportions and poses.
Zelda glyphs - Each game is separated by centuries or millennia and fairly disruptive events so it's possible that the writing systems change a lot. It doesn't seem like Nintendo put a lot of effort into any of the systems. I wanted to come up with a more comprehensive system for Zelda 1 (which is set near the end of the defeat timeline... making A Link Between Worlds the closest known glyph set).
Runes - This is something I came up with based on the Futharks. I've added diacritics for vowel length as well as making the runes look a bit like the alphabet. Also added support for some foreign sounds.
Barbie body - Modern Barbie dolls are pretty neat. I actually thought they had these rigid soft plastic bodies still (like in the mid '80s), but no, there are two articulated variants: Made-to-Move and Extra. They're also quite affordable compared to other doll/figure collectibles... around 15-25 bucks. Economy of scale cheap sewing labour, I guess. My body here has altered proportions. Made a Cadian Uniform variant. Barbie is actually based on a 1950s Bild Zeitung comic strip pinup character (with exaggerated proportions and feet) for gentlemen. It was turned into a doll (still mainly for men) that a tourist picked up and cloned it into the Barbie product. Later the posable giant G.I. Joe doll was marketed towards boys, but it's strange (but maybe not surprising) to learn that proto-Barbie was a dude toy/collectible initially.
Zhodani - The inclusion of these psychic snake charmers into Traveller is somewhat controversial for various reasons. The game doesn't have anything as iconic as the Storm Trooper armour, or much to choose from really, but the Zhodani stands out a bit so I picked that to draw for the 46th birthday of the game.
Comments
Boone
I rarely feel more in agreement with a person than I did just now when I read "unkempt troll hair" and "brick".
Niklas Jansson
Norse "Y" is just crazy :o After having looked into runes in general, it's clear that there were a lot of local variation... probably it was difficult then to spread a standard and have it persist. The elder furthark seems to have degenerated into the simpler younger set due to low literacy perhaps. Some younger futhark stones have upside down and mirrored runes, and the word separators tend to be... random marks. Then they added the stung feature once things advanced. Well, so it seems.
Nineanon
there's a cool historical variant of the p rune in norway that looks like a big K, where the logic seems to have been 'hey, when we sting the runes k and t we soften them, this makes no sense for b to p, what if we 'open' it instead'
