Still more horny sketches

I’m still working on Melorne’s design. Latest efforts: I went to the Ultimate Ungulates website (yes, of course there is) and sketched a few animals with interesting horns:

( Ungulates )

Those are the markhor, takin, and eland, which sort of sound like fantasy character names on their own. (“I am Sirenia Takin, First Eland of Markhor, here to pledge my land’s support against the hordes of Hyracoidea!”)

The markhor horns look a bit like what I was trying to do with Mel’s horns in earlier designs. The eland’s horns are way cool, sure as hell someone’s going to wind up wearing them, but I don’t think they’ll work for the effect I’m planning for Mel. The plan is when Melorne goes disguised as a human, her horns take on the appearance of hair, so I need a shape that works without looking too implausible. Granted, the world of comics (especially manga) is full of wildly implausible hair, but I want to avoid the extremes. The takin looks like the way to go:

( Mel with takin horns )

Both male and female takins have horns, by the way.

To my muse

Look, I’m grateful for the new characters, situations, and chunks of dialog, but could I possibly take delivery at some time other than 4 AM?

Research involving women's underwear and breasts

I’m wondering about underwear. See, Melorne, as I’ve more or less settled on her, has these wings:

( Chibi Melorne! She's kawaii! )

She doesn’t always have them, sometimes they’re just tattoos on her back, but sometimes she does. So she tends to go for these backless tops, to keep from busting the backs out of her shirts when she pops her wings out. That’s all fine and good, but I’m wondering about bras.

Mel’s not particularly dramatically endowed for a cartoon character, but she does have breasts. She probably doesn’t want to let ’em just flop around. I’ve googled around a bit, and discovered that there are backless bras. Any women out there reading this have experience with these? I can’t seem to find any sites that provide a view from the back; do these things actually go low enough for her wings to clear?

Strings of Fate

I’ve finally gotten around to reading Strings of Fate by Jen Wang. I’ve been meaning to forever, ’cause I really like Jen’s flair for drawing people — an engaging cross between Disney and anime-inspired character design. But the first few chapters of Strings are done in an illustrated prose style that turned me off. I downloaded all of the first two acts (or what had been completed), and browsed through looking for where it turned into comics; looks like chapter 3, page 5.

I noticed that Jen solved a problem for one of her characters that I’d been having with one of mine: How to keep glasses from blocking the reader’s view of the character’s eyes. Jen draws her characters with fairly long noses, compressing the mouth fairly far down the face. For Zhu, her oh-so-adorable bespectacled character, the glasses slide far enough down her nose that they only overlap her eyes a bit. I’d been planning to solve the problem by giving my character the kind of glasses that have no frames along the upper edge. I may use a combination of the two ideas.

I’ve also done a drawing of Melorne in something approximating Jen’s style, working off this drawing of Hou in chapter 6, page 8; hence the startled look. Not quite there, since Jen uses markers for shades of gray like all the kids are doing these days. And if I were actually Jen, that vertical line marking the lateral border of Mel’s nasal cartridge would have gone all the way up to meet her eyebrow. Still, a useful exercise. I like the way the cheek and chin came out.