It’s a… cyclops.

Still playing with fake tones, still don’t think they’re quite right. Tips? Ideas?

A changeling: a faerie child left in the place of a human child. Unlike most of the drawings so far this month, this one isn’t based too heavily on Wikipedia (apart from the changeling’s apparent love of playing pipes), but rather on a book I read years and years ago. I can’t recall the title, the author, or even any significant plot point, only that it was about a changeling girl. What I do remember is the look of the character on the cover – skinny, disheveled-looking, with a thick, ragged thatch of dirty-blonde hair. Inspiration’s a funny thing sometimes. If anything, my take came out far prettier than intended. (Edit: This! This is the book cover! It was listed in that very same Wiki article I neglected to properly read. Huh. Odder still, a different cover for the same book – one I’ve never seen before in my life – contains a very similar pose to this image. Double huh.)

This one gave me hell. I must’ve drawn and redrawn it a dozen times over the course of the day – it almost had me in tears, I was getting so frustrated. So when I finally did nail it down, I couldn’t help but want to put a little extra effort into the finished product. It almost makes me wish I’d done it on proper watercolour paper, rather than in my sketchbook – it’s a nice sketchbook, but it doesn’t take the paint the way a nice hot press would. (Man, I try so hard to keep my perfectionism to useful venues like paid work and portfolio pieces, and use this blog for quick, fun things, but… old habits, and all that.)

Yuki Onna – literally “snow woman” – is a Japanese yokai. Wikipedia: Yuki-onna appears on snowy nights as a tall, beautiful woman with long black hair and red lips. Her inhumanly pale or even transparent skin makes her blend into the snowy landscape. She sometimes wears a white kimono, but other legends describe her as nude, with only her face and hair standing out against the snow. Despite her inhuman beauty, her eyes can strike terror into mortals. She floats across the snow, leaving no footprints (in fact, some tales say she has no feet, a feature of many Japanese ghosts), and she can transform into a cloud of mist or snow if threatened.

I know there’re all sorts of special rules and traditions surrounding kimonos, so for all I know the kimono sleeve style/red sash here is incorrect or inappropriate, but in this case its usefulness as a design element trumps cultural sensitivity, and my need for sleep trumps my usually-compulsive research.

Cerberus: the three-headed dog of Greek and Roman mythology, who guarded the gates of the underworld. (The three tails, as far as I know, don’t actually figure into the mythology; I just wanted to add them.) Let me tell you, if you’re iffy on animal anatomy, adding on extra heads doesn’t make it any easier.

GRR

ARGH

…I think this offsets the unicorn quite well.