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mintsuwu · 2 months

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please how did you come up with her design I've been trying to make a design for my poppy playtime oc but it always ends up looking like rubbish please give tips😭😭

Hello, thank you for asking! Truth be told is that it took me a bit to figure out how to do LoolaLamb in general, she didn't come out too well on the first try xD I had to tweak a couple of things in her like the hair, colors or snout.

Initially, I wasn't quite sure of what animal picking for her, but then I went with the lamb idea for a few reasons:

- When I was little, I used to have a lamb plush I used to love dearly. Sadly I don't have any pictures to show since I no longer have it with me so I tried to look for one that looked similar on the Internet- But that was the main inspiration for her character. And since the Smiling Critters have their own plushies as well, I thought it would be interesting to make one of them after a real toy. I also took reference from other characters in media that were based on sheeps, like in Pokémon (Flaaffy & Whimsicott).

I would always recommend using references if you ever don't know where to start with a design. And in the case of a Poppy Playtime OC, you can look for references if you desire as well, or even turn a beloved toy of yours into a character, anything works!

In many cultures, the lamb is a revered symbol of innocence, purity, and sacrifice. It is often associated with religious connotations, particularly in Christianity, where it symbolizes the embodiment of Christ's innocence and the sacrificial lamb offering redemption and atonement for humanity's sins. I simply liked the symbology of this because I'm always a sucker for that when it comes to creating characters;;

This was mainly due to lore reasons, her association with Catnap, a follower of an entity, the Prototype, whom he workships and would do anything to get its blessing. LoolaLamb "sacrified" her voice for the Prototype (well, it actually was that Catnap took away her voicebox with that excuse).

Her name "LoolaLamb" is a word play for "lullaby", given the role she was going to have in the Smiling Critters line, a replacement for Catnap who would have a similar role as his, except that instead of using a gas to make people fall asleep, she would use her voice. Sheeps and lambs are also heavily associated with sleep and dreams, given the advice: if you can't get to sleep, just “count sheep” until you drift off into a peaceful slumber.

Sheep are wanderers. It's their nature. Even in the best and safest of places, places that provide protection, water, and food, sheep are known to wander off, get lost, and sometimes eaten by predators.

Her color pick was mainly because even if the smiling critters have more or less the colors of the rainbow and there are already two blue colored critters (Bubba Bubbaphant being more of a neutral blue or azure and Craftycorn cyan or aquamarine), I noticed that there were no dark blue or indigo colored ones. My first idea for LoolaLamb was to give her more violet colors, given her correlation to Catnap, but at the same time I wanted her to stand out amongst the others, being a little more of her own character, so that´s why I ended up picking a different color pallete for her.

And those are pretty much the basic things I had in mind when creating LoolaLamb! Of course it doesn't always have to be so elaborated with all characters, but I'd always recommend to find references, information, symbolism, anything that might help you with the creation of your character in case you don't know where to start or are simply stuck!

I might not be the best when it comes to explaining things but I hope this has helped you and I wish you the best in your creative process, anon! 🙏🏻💖

#fanart #oc #headcanon #mint speaks #ask #poppy playtime #poppy playtime chapter 3 #poppy playtime 3 #smiling critters #poppy playtime oc #the smiling critters #smiling critter oc #loolalamb #poppy playtime fanart #comic #catnap #dogday #i would have added more art but I reached the image limit LMAO

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iraprince · 1 year

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all ur dog-headed characters look amazing... whats ur secret

reference... but not too much!!!!!!

by which i mean i carefully study ref images of the specific breed i'm basing a design on, but i try to only nail a few specific details that really help with the breed identity, but then i try to back off and return to my normal level of stylization/shape exaggeration for the rest. if i follow ref too closely, especially with how stylized the way i draw anatomy is, it'll end up looking very pasted on — sometimes that's a bit of what i want, like dog with a gun from TVW, but usually you want things to be more cohesive than that.

what details to look for and adhere to from ref is gonna be really variable based on the animal you're stylizing, your goals for the character design, etc! off the top of my head, some consistent spots to make a dog Look Right are the angle of the forehead where it meets the snout, and the height/size of the eye ridge, as well as the angle of the end of the muzzle and the muzzle's height:length ratio; i think one reason these spots demand a lot of attention in ref is bc they're ones where it's easy to just Assume what they look like, and then before u know it you've drawn Generic Cartoon Dog instead of a specific one and it's hard to figure out why. (if i was at my comp i would draw some quick diagrams, maybe i'll come back and add them tomorrow — but rn i'm on my couch w a glass of vermut so i hope u can forgive my clumsy descriptions instead lol).

other bits i often find challenging on semi-realistic anthro characters: eyes and neck!! hitting the right scale on the eyes makes a big difference; you usually have to make them slightly larger to make the face look more humanoid, but it's easy to overshoot. the neck is tricky bc it has to do the heavy lifting of connecting an animal head to a human torso; i usually handle this by just leaning into it and making it brazenly fucked up looking instead of trying to hybridize too much, and also a bandanna or necklace hides a mountain of sins. (on this note, next time you watch 'the cat returns,' check out the cat designs, specifically characters who stand on two legs... they almost all have something around their necks, like ribbon bows or shirt collars! i'm convinced it's because of the neck problem.)

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slagethor · 7 months

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14 and 25 for the artist ask?

14. How has your art changed over the years? A ton! Like a lot, a lot! I apologize if this is long but I like thinking about how far I've come, its a good day for it. I picked up drawing again during one of my most boring jobs in an office with no wifi, and hour long lunch breaks. I was super into fire emblem heroes at the time, so I took character requests to fill my time. It was honestly a fantastic way to start, because the simple shapes made for an easy on ramp for me. Immediately after I started feeling comfortable, I threw myself in the deep end and did an inktober and luckily I liked it! I stuck with pretty simple lines once I invested in a tiny lil tablet, and had a hell of a time figuring out what "Layers" and "Stabilization" were. I think these two exemplify a the best of what I could make at the time.

After I started getting comfortable, and understanding shapes a bit better, I actually became pretty paralyzed about details in my art. I realized that if I stared at my art for more than 30 second I would find a new problem with it. Like I would zoom in waaaaay too close to smooth curves, like correcting 4 pixels. I realized that was a problem, so I came into a brush where these "errors" were in fact one of the features, and worked with that to make my lines a bit more loose, and force me to stop thinking about those tiny "mistakes"

After a few years of working on that, I feel a lot better about lil bits like that in my art, and I've largely shaken the bit in my brain that wants every curve to be perfect. I found that I wanted more weight and variance in my lines, and that brush didn't really allow for pen pressure, so I again switched brushes. This current brush is actually meant for sketches, but I like it more than any lining brush I've tried so here we are!

These are all better examples of each of these eras of art for me. There's a lot of stuff that doesn't look nearly as good, I am still making plenty of pieces like that today, but these felt like good ways to showcase each! 25. Based on your recent reference searches, what would the FBI assume about you? They would probably think I'm a furry, or I've got a thing for feet. I don't think either of those are true of myself, but I'm trying to get better at feet. Furry because of that Sybil draw, and also snouts are hard to figure out, that and digitigrade legs. I respect the hell outta furries doing that stuff all the time

#my art #thank you for asking I really love to talk about this

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basic-enemy · 7 months

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"Wandering Wolf"

ive been tinkering with these characters for like a year and a half now, they're fun to write but im having a hard time figuring out exactly how to finish a story for them. we got Matshi, a faggy exasperated grifter constantly trying to run a scheme, and Larka, a cursed half-wolf warrior who barely tolerates his presence while she wanders the countryside, helping out where she can (but really just fleeing from the consequences of her past life) idk if i'll ever get around to hashing out their story but i really wanna! in the meantime I've got this little bit here where I'm fleshing out the tone

I’ll be the first to admit it: stepping in front of a vengeful, bloodsucking, three-headed demon is never a smart thing to do. But Larka was about two seconds from hurling herself snout-first at that thing, and I've got a lot of money riding on this.

Try to understand—I didn’t have a lot of options.

“Matshi,” Larka said, claws tightening on her sword’s grip. “You are in the way.”

“I can see that,” I said. Fresh sweat stood on my brow. It had nothing to do with the flames crackling about the demon’s ankles.

The demon looked unconcerned. It just stood there, blood circling its heads like halos. Staring. At me.

I wondered if it were as impressed by my courage as I was.

“First and final warning, Matshi,” Larka said. “You had best move. Now.”

The glint in her eyes told me she wasn’t joking. Not that Larka ever joked. About anything. (Do you begin to understand? The endless pleasure of her company?)

“Larka,” I said, “Put that sword down before you get us both killed.”

“I will not.”

“I’m not asking nicely. Don't make me come over there and stop you."

To this day I remain unconvinced that Larka was capable of emoting. (I suppose it's a given, but something about having the face of a wolf precluded human facial expression.) All the same, the bark that fled her throat couldn't have been anything but a laugh.

"I'm serious!" I insisted.

Even the demon chuckled. Give me a break.

“Cease your laughter, demon,” Larka growled. She fell back into an attack stance. “The fool is mine."

“Yours?" I glared at Larka. "I don't belong to you."

But no one answered me. She just bared her fangs, and all three of the demon's faces contorted into mockery.

They began inching towards each other. Step by step. Closing the gap, and with me in the middle. "N-now hold on, everyone, let's all stop for a second, before we do anything we regret—"

Two seconds later, I was flat on my ass, a whirlwind of flames raging overhead.

That was when I realized the truth.

By the gods—I'm a terrible investor.

#writing #fiction #mine #i have a fair amount of backstory and plot fleshed out in my head for these characters #at least compared to other half-baked ideas sitting in my hard drive #i just never know how to write this one #but i would really really REAaaaallly love to finish some proper stories about these two some day

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red-the-dragon-writes · 3 years

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Today's post is not on the usual "writer blog fare" side. Instead I am going to introduce you to several fun facts about various animals on our planet and then talk about worldbuilding.

1. Lampreys are a kind of "living fossil"- a not-really-so-scientific term for a creature that has lived unchanged for a very long time, so long that we have fossils of them looking the same way they do now. They don't have proper jaws, just a circular sucking mouth with teeth set into it and a tongue designed to strip flesh off of what it touches. They're finless fish, look quite a bit like eels, and have this really alien, uncanny vibe to them.

[id: a long, slender bluish-silver lamprey sitting among rocks. It has a long snout, an eye, and then six small perforations in its side arranged at an even interval sitting behind the eye. The environment it is sitting in is very yellow and green in comparison. end id]

[id: an image of a lamprey from below. The snout ends in a round, flat mouth which is studded with teeth in four concentric circles. The teeth are smallest near the outer edge and largest in the middle, and look like very sharp round points. In the center of this ring is another, smaller circle, where the pointed, tooth-like tongue can be seen, as well as a hole for the lamprey to actually ingest food with. Its eye is visible, as are some of the perforations on its side. This one is a more mottled gray than the first one was, and less shiny. end id]

Sea lampreys, which are the kind i've sort of not really kinda researched, are a major pest in the Great Lakes, where they regularly attack fish. They can get up to two feet in length. Despite this, they are not particularly dangerous towards humans.

2. Horseshoe crabs are also "living fossils." They've been around and virtually unchanged for millions of years. They're not true crabs, and are more closely related to chelicerata species, like spiders and scorpions (and many more). There are a lot of cool features of horseshoe crabs, but one of their most extremely cool, to me, is their blood.

I'm not going to post any images of what I consider to be animal cruelty, so you'll have to take me at my word here, but this is a bottle of horseshoe crab blood. If you're sensitive to images of animal cruelty, I don't recommend looking for proof, but if you aren't, there are plenty of images of the blood coming out of the creature for you to verify this with.

E[id: a bottle of slightly frothy, opaque blue liquid. It is sitting in a row with several other bottles of the same material. end id]

I am a sucker for blue blood, I just think it's neat, so that's all I'd need as an excuse to slam some horseshoe-crab-inspired nonsense in my exceptionally gory and fucked up wips, and if you've been reading along with WiB you may have noticed that blue blood does come into play at some point! But that's not all that's neat about horseshoe crab blood. Unfortunately for the horseshoe crabs, but fortunately for us, their blood is literally the only source of an important compound used for detecting the presence of dangerous bacteria in certain pharmaceutical drugs. (Fortunately, there are replacements that will hopefully become more popular in coming years.)

Now that we've gone over all that, onto the worldbuilding!

I worldbuild by Rule of Cool. Let's just get that out of the way. Every so often people will ask me how my worlds get so expansive (not WiB, WiB i made up on the fly by cribbing from fanfic and like... BBC Merlin. Assume very little of this holds true for WiB) and the answer is largely that I take every interest I have ever had in anything and smash it all together and throw it at my wip to see what sticks. and then I just... like... reasonably attempt to figure out what the natural conclusions will be.

So: we have lampreys. We have blue-blooded ancient sea creatures with spectacularly important and valueable blood. We are writing this into a story that takes place on land, somehow.

- The first option, and the one I'm going to talk about most because I did it, is just to rule-of-cool it into a character. (Or a place, or an item, or whatever, but largely I do rule-of-cool on living creatures and think harder about the world around them.) If you've been keeping up with WiB, you may have noticed that (spoilers) Zero Point is some kind of fucked up magician with a lamprey mouth in their hand who shapeshifts and bleeds blue. This is where I got those inspirations from (along with, like, some other stuff. I promise there are no lamprey assassins, but- continuing in the trend of stealing from sea creatures- the bobbin worm is a spectacularly beautiful, spectacularly deadly creature if you're within its weight range. which is like, goldfish size, but. And cuttlefish are known to disguise themselves as other animals, and can change sexes if the male:female ratio where they are isn't ideal.)

So you can take the elements you like, and just kind of slam them together haphazardly, which is what I did with Zero Point. The trick to this kind of worldbuilding is just to avoid looking too closely at it. The magical assassin has a fucked up mouth in their hand? Yeah, okay, that seems kind of fucked up and creepy. What do they do at all times? They hide it under a glove. So the protags Just Straight Up Never Ask. And voila; it never gets explained, and it never has to.

Same with the blue blood. It shows up, it functions as a plot device because only Zero Point has blue blood; it is never explained or even delved into with much detail. And if it were, it would fall apart instantly, because the justification is literally just "i thought it was neat. No, no one else is like that. I don't even know why they are. i just felt like it"

- The second option is to consider the effects of the things that you're working with, and then work off of that.

Let's take Zero Point again. Strip them of their context (weird assassin with magical powers) and just like, consider the fact that this is a creature with blood that regularly retails for over $10,000 USD, is intelligent as fuck, shapeshifts, has a mouth in their hand that may or may not be their actual mouth, and can exist on land so long as they have suitable access to water. What does that mean for our setting? Surely they're not the only person like that; so you have a whole species of people who are sort of but not really amphibious, shapeshift, and maybe have magical powers, who knows. They can't shapeshift their fucked up lamprey mouths, maybe. That seems like a reasonable limit. So their blood is highly valuable- what does that mean for their relations with other people, or their culture? What kind of foods do they eat? How do they create a sense of culture as shapeshifters; is there even a way that they represent themselves in art? How do they interact with the world? Do they have a "true form" or not? Every one of these questions will spawn new questions. If you answer all of them you'll lose your mind, but if you answer at least ten you'll spawn a much more background-heavy world that can help to shape your story much more effectively than trying to just craft a narrative will. Sometimes it works very well for a story. Sometimes it gets you lost in the weeds.

- The third option is to reference something else, and build off that. Again, let's use Zero Point as the example.

In the original story that the WiB ensemble is from, Closerverse, which may have some mentions on this blog but honestly I have no idea, there is a city that I've done quite a bit of worldbuilding on. This city is called Hudson, and one of the major important features of it is that it is partially underground. (This is a reference to the DFZ of Rachel Aaron's Heartstrikers series). Hudson is intentionally run to be the worst, most unpleasant city in the world, and one of its features are its wildly intelligent, dangerous forms of aquatic life. The lowest level of this city is partially submerged, and all of these creatures plague the people who live down there.

Closerverse was also set during a period of early industrialization, and Hudson heavily referenced US history, especially 1900s-1920s labor history. Tenements, pollution, zero protections for workers, et cetera. Hudson is a nasty, miserable place, and everyone who lives there can feel the jaws closing in on them.

Anyway, in Closerverse you got these fucked up massive eel-like creatures (lampreys, but with extra features) that due to some rather significant meddling wound up growing legs and then got really massive and started eating people. They have blue blood, glow in the dark, and make fairly decent eating as long as they aren't eating you. And they're intelligent. Given the whole "mutual eating each other" thing, the eels and the people of Hudson have some pretty major animosity going on.

Most of Zero Point's stuff is really just me referencing the Hudson Eels, because I fucking love those. They're some of my favorite worldbuilding elements ever. But given that no one else in WiB has ever seen a Hudson Eel, let alone seen their blood get dry on things, or whatever, everything about Zero Point is wildly out of context. And that almost makes it better, because the whole deal with them is that they're mysterious and weird, and having them be a mysterious and weird reference to something no one but I know about most likely is like, fun and neat.

There are, of course, other modes of worldbuilding as well, but I typically aim to stick to the first two as much as possible. The cooler you make something, the more possible questions it raises; the more questions something raises, the deeper your world gets.

Although, a word of advice: sometimes animals just do things. Sometimes bodies just have features. Who would invent fingernails? But having them is mighty convenient, isn't it? For that matter, who would come up with a deeply logical and reasoned explanation for eyebrows- but not having those would be very strange, to us. You can get away with doing a lot by just having that be how it is, and not having the characters comment on it.

Also, the more "shaped" a thing should be, the more you'll want to take the second approach. For house design, something intentionally built, you'll want to know why it was built, and what purpose is this and that room, and why is it painted such and such colors. But if you're talking about adding a second moon, like... fuck dude, who needs to know why there's a second moon? Maybe if you have sailors you have to know what it'll do to your oceans, but that's the kind of thing you can kind of just say exists and move on. You'll figure it out; it gets pretty intuitive.

Anyway, happy worldbuilding!

#writing advice #long post #worldbuilding

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