This is a scene from my short story Sanity. Now, if you've read it, I don't have to explain what's happening [hint hint, nudge nudge].
Lately I've been fiddling around with ideas of different outfits for the tyjexes. Here are a few thoughts.
It can be very fun to draw random things inspired by music. All of these pictures were drawn while I was listening to a CD of 80's music, and none of them have any real meaning; they just seemed to fit the songs. The stuff at the bottom was drawn to "One Thing Leads To Another," and that little dark bit at the very bottom is the tip of my pencil [the rest of the picture didn't fit on the scanner].
I wanted to draw something ugly, or at least wrinkly and unpleasant. I ended up with two pix of someone who looks like a distant relative of Yoda, a sharptoothed snarling fellow, and a little green guy who bears a superficial resemblance to Rarr [they accidentally ended up with the same color scheme]. He's saying "Furnace Spirit!" because I was looking at a drawing of a furnace spirit [from Magic: The Gathering cards] from a distance, and instead of seeing what I was supposed to, I saw this guy. I spontaneously named him Limmani, just because.
Heh, I don't remember just where the idea for this came from, but it's a scene full of miscellaneous characters I'll probably never see again. The guy making a nuisance of himself is a vampire, and no one else is. Apparently he's a slightly obnoxious sort, and nobody trusts him to keep his teeth to hmself. [He wouldn't really bite any of them, but he does like to tease.] So the other three guys are wearing clothing that covers their necks. The one who had the misfortune to miss the last of the chairs is wearing a scarf, which the vampire is teasing him about.
Four-sketches-for-one: a cheerful little grin that just makes me smile, something that I guess is a type of air elemental [or a mugwump pixie], a reptilian character whose head is shaped like the number 4 [which is what prompted me to draw the pic], and a gargoyle-type who looks more anatomically feasible but also much more bizarre.
Two-for-one: a headshot of somebody singing [I really like that picture for some reason], and a sketchy attempt at making dijaderms look less dorky. Hm. Only minor success.
At the top left we have a frog guy that just sort of grew around two lines in the paper [his mouth and one eye]. At the bottom left is a fun little sketch of three people dancing around a bonfire. I was going to draw a full picture of that, but I never got around to it [and I do like the sketch]. It's one of those pictures that can be dancing to just about any kind of music [really, play something and see]. The rest of the stuff on the page is preliminary ideas for a Christmas present I drew for a friend. You'll recognize the largest pic there as the final version from the semi-serious art section.
This is a sketchy pic of an equally sketchy story idea that I may write out sometime. The guy on the left is Hazlitt, and the person on the right is Tran [who isn't in a story, yet]. They're hitching a ride on top of a train. Doesn't that look fun? It occured to me that Tran and Hazlitt were the only characters I have of their mysterious shapeshifting species, so it's only natural that they meet sooner or later.
An earlier stab at clothing for tyjexes.
I was reading Oath of Swords by David Weber (fantastic book; I read the sequel immediately afterwards), in which the main character is a hradani. Hradani are a race of tall humanoids with cool foxlike ears that just beg to be drawn. The cover artist for the book did it badly, and I wanted to give it a try. It was fun.
Somebody else had done some neat drawings on dark paper with chalk, and I decided it would be fun to try. It is, but with the materials I had on hand it was like using crayons. For some reason, I like the resultant sketch anyway. That's a bonfire in the background.
Ever see a really cool pose in someone else's art that you just have to try? This is one of those. It's hard to get right. First I did a sketchy pic of the same species as the original picture, then I drew an even sketchier pic of a Tyjex in the same pose. Then I gave up for a while.
Then I tried again. The overall effect has a few problems, but I am fond of a couple of the feet. |