... # n

we don’t do backgrounds too often, but... we like ‘em...

honestly surge gets us in a head to draw more scenery stuff

inktober 2018...
coincidence that it’s lightning in a storm in a place drawn like this? maybe... maybe not.......

this here is the first surge drawing we did
so the clouds in the top left of this new one are sorta a deliberate reference to that

the spires way in the back distance (which kinda look like seaweed lol) we made as like... reaching up trying to touch the clouds. but of course they can’t

the closer up mountain looks like a wall and we really wanted that huge sense of scale. like something so ginormous could be towering over you even when it’s that far away. but it’s not really trapping her it’s just... being big and above

it’s a flock of birds in the sky, we draw those a lot

june 2018 more birbs
(especially by the tower almost completely in the distance, i think, lol)

a lot of our inspiration for scenery comes from wings of fire, a kid’s book series that tells a lot of adventures in a dragon world... and honestly like either american fics or american webcomics lol, those give us maybe more of an emotional sense of... depicting scenery, if that makes sense

and stylistically we take (i think) obviously from daymare town, duh, but maybe moreso from like horizon zero dawn

oh the xanth novel series is a really big influence for drawing worlds too, and that fits the american stuff too because it’s literally an alternate universe peninsula of florida lol

AS FOR SURGE...

this one is the single biggest like... pole star for how we envision her as an expressive person

surge draw it herself of course

and this (a month earlier haha) is more or less our first real humanish image of her

it’s kinda funny spotting differences between that one and this new one, i think that her proportions feel a bit more her in the new one... but she also has the impression of being smaller here so it could be a younger feeling design for her too

her hair style is different although it’s literally styled just about the same in spirit. just spikier side bang thingies and flatter to her back hair that’s down

her HANDS
are the big one

that’s why it felt like we were sorta missing one of the markings that she’s a little bit cyborg lol, she doesn’t have the fingers for her rings

anyway these are sandslash hands

they’re just... big claws lol, and only two of them. i dont even know that she has thumbs in this expression

i dunno that they’re canon but they felt right for this drawing. we did almost all of her before the background... the background is an extension of her (well of her in this drawing), and her hands being this way - that’s an extension of... well literally her arms lmao. but also less literally

the pose idea was initially just “well her vag area is for sure gonna be out” but we figured out her arms would be down like that almost first of all, before actually figuring out her hair let alone the rest of her

we drew her because i was looking at my own body in the bathtub and going all, man there’s stuff about the way i look that really does do it for me (i was thinking about how our lower torso hair is all way more visible when it’s wet)...

she started outwardly presenting herself for the first time back in august through me, and i think in some pretty big ways she and i are specially linked with each other - especially ways that have to do with our body and experience of identity

i was absently musing about differently shaped pussies (tm) vaguely in relation to her and i like suddenly heard the sound of ‘shuuut the fuck up!!!’ so i was like GEEZ i think i accidentally stepped on someone’s charging cord lol

i think by that point we’d already figured out i wanted to draw her, so then i was certain

but yeah, surge really does live in her environment... we all take a lot of inspiration from her for that. she lives on the ground beneath the clouds and she waits patiently for the rain, and she walks in the morning and the evening and always experiences the air around her

she lives in indoor environments too, she sits on any chair in the weeeirdest ways lol

something that really speaks to me is the way she brings herself into her social environment... it’s funny because i think she both lets herself be shaped by the people and space and vibes around her, the most of all of us, yet also has... like such a strong and clear core identity that she’s always got with her, too, and is never afraid to show. well that’s how it SEEMS, from the outside-inside, lol

yet we like drawing her in almost solitude because, well... we like seeing that core when she isn’t shaping the surface and middle of her to the stuff around her, even if that does come comfortably and naturally

she’s confident in the core but the rest is sort of what makes a person a PERSON, and not a cartoon (her words i think), and she’s not always so sure she has much there, if you try to take her for... just herself

that’s why her pose in this drawing is almost sort of limp... it’s not lifeless but it’s sort of loose in a “well how should i be placing myself...??” kind of way

it’s also why her mouth is like that (we tried a slightly open one first but the almost-smile didn’t feel right)

the funny thing with this drawing, i think, is

she’s worried there isn’t much besides the core if you take her for just herself, but this whole drawing IS ‘just taking her for herself’... like we said, the background, the scenery, is an extension of her... it’s an expression of her

i mean look how easily words came to us for describing any of that scenery lol

it’s not because it’s all like, like we find meaning in randomness or whatever... it came easy because the meaning was there from the start

and i think if she has an easier time expressing herself in scenery or environment than in, well, “herself”, that still speaks to a whooooole lot of person. just saying

tangle, bluesky