Page 03-26
Chapter: Chapter 3: The Shrike
This may be an unpleasant turn of events, but keep hanging with me, guys. The first book (chapters 0-4) is just the introduction to a very long story. This is far from over.
Flowerlark Studios
Art and Comics by Lee
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Suspense!!! And the vote artwork makes it even more suspenseful! I can’t wait to see what happens! 🙂
I can’t even think of what you’ll do next.
Hopefully from that look, Arra is just incredibly shocked that someone would use violence… doesn’t *seem* overly, well, burninated or charred, just… stunned! (literally so in second panel) 🙂
For whatever reason, Arra doesn’t seem to be especially injured. I know that that it’s not just an aversion to depicting violence; Tor the Wyvern got torched by Strake all those pages ago and was properly melty. Maybe Great Dragons are simply more heat-resistant? Or maybe Kira wants Arra alive. A public execution of Strake’s only son would probably do more to Fallian morale than “hey you know that one rumor? rumor is that rumor is dead”. The anticipation is killing me!
On an extremely odd side note, I’m rather pleased to see someone finally not skirt around nudity issues by giving nude non-human characters Ken doll anatomy. Even if it’s not a out-and-out penis, a penile sheathe is more than I expected to see, haha!
Pokémon update of the day! I went fossil-hunting for about an hour (I wanted more than one Archen since the one I got had an Attack-hindering nature, very bad!) and ended up with a box-load of fossil Pokémon, haha. All told, I ended up with 15 Omanyte, 11 Tirtouga, 10 each of Kabuto, Cranidos, and Shieldon, 6 Aerodactyl, and 2 Archen. Boy, oh boy, did I ever make it rain in the Wonder Trade scene. And in an extremely random and bizarre turn, my friend wanted a Shuckle egg (so it would have his OT upon hatching) and decided that since he wasn’t going to use it, he’d trade me his Zygarde for it. I seriously traded a Shuckle egg for the game’s grand legendary.
I had originally drawn Arra looking more charred than that, but it made him so dark that there wasn’t enough contrast and it looked bad. 😛 I had also planned on having his mane burnt off, but it made him seem too comical.
As for his more accurate anatomy… I wanted to make the animals anatomically correct without the genitals feeling like a ‘focal point.’ Too many artists who include nudity make it what the drawing is all about. Here the focus is on the story, it just happens to be an adult-oriented story, but excludes blatant gratuity. I had inked in Arra’s testicles, but they ended up feeling like a ‘focal point’ due to the angle and composition of the panel, so I took them out, not realising that later that spot would be blurred enough to take that focus away. And by that point I was feeling too tired to put them back in and have to re-blur the entire panel. SO we will likely see that aspect of his undercarriage in future panels, and I can have all the nitpickers whine at me at some point about ‘But his balls weren’t visible in this page…’
I had always assumed in other fictional venues that the reason we didn’t see them was because Dragons, and other similarly powerful creatures of magical origin, had retractable genitalia. After all, there’s not much point in being a heavily-armored nigh-invulnerable behemoth if you’re going to keep your most important and sensitive parts right out there just begging for an arrow shot or sword slash or claw attack (or flame spell – ouch!) from an enemy. Now that I think of it, I’m kind of surprised that more animals in the real world don’t have that feature – seems like there would be some evolutionary pressure favoring it.
Probably because most fantasy artists model their dragons after reptiles whereas mine tend to be more mammalian (great dragons specifically being inspired by horses) or in the wyverns’ case, raptor-like. I’m going to admit that if we humans have detailed knowledge of a dinosaur’s reproductive organs, I am wholly ignorant of it, so they get visible ones like the great dragons. Common dragons (if/when they might be depicted- they are extinct long before this story begins) are closely related to wyvern (great dragons are actually not related at all to either, they just took a similar evolutionary path, much like, say, a wolf and a thylacine) and both are close to birds (thus the dinosaurish look), so they have some similar anatomical features to wyvern. One of them being that males will be properly depicted as being, well, male.
And I find it ironic that despite my attempts to make the nudity more subtle and not a focal-feature, it has become the main topic of conversation under this page. Mission failed.
Actually, I didn’t notice it at all until Sporkitude mentioned it. People being as they are, it only takes one person to mention it, and it will automatically become the main topic.
Hehehe, yeah, just blame me for that! xD
It really is well-done, by the way.