Vrega - Tumblr Posts

Sketchavember 2012 - Part 3!

21 - Meilee, my adorable and awkward factory girl. She always looks pretty gormless, because people leave you alone if they think you're an idiot.

22 - Lin, who came to the same conclusion in the boy's side of the factory. Also has the misfortune of being on the back of Jemima's page, which I shaded with markers.

23 - It got to about 11:30pm and I was falling asleep, then I remembered I hadn't done a picture, so I drew Coda falling asleep.

24 - I almost got through Sketchavember without drawing Duo again. Almost.

25 - Noone, the main character of a graphic novel which I planned and then scrapped. I still want to do something with the characters though.

26 - Haha, I tried to draw a demon but he kept going wrong, so I rubbed him out and drew an angel instead, which was a million times easier. I wonder if that says anything about my psyche.

27 - Ah, here's the demon.

28 - Having developed a character model for Hephzibah, I completely failed to make one for Gorse. Oh well.

29 - A Vrega, having a nice stretch.

30 - Last but not least, Kero. Originally he was some kind of alien that resembled a demon, but I've been thinking I might just make him a sort of feral demon instead.

And that was last year's Sketchavember! I hope you enjoyed this insight into my pathological fear of drawing anything that's not people. XD

Inktober - Day 8

I thought since I love my kuretake brush pen so much, I should try using it for something other than just filling in black areas. It was hard to draw fine lines though. It was also really hard to get their proportions right, Violet is so much smaller than Meruch that it's easy to draw her looking like a child. Although maybe a small, cute adult would look like a child standing next to a freakishly huge alien. 

Violet wants to know how Meruch got the 'lightning flower' on his left side. 

Inktober - Day 16

When chatting to my little sister she said she thought Violet was kneeling down in the previous picture of these two. So I thought I'd draw a height comparison to show what's really going on.

Violet is right on the bottom end of the normal range for humans. Vrega are generally bigger than humans anyway, and Meruch is big even for a Vrega. Next to each other they look like an adult and a child, although they're both fully-grown.

Inktober - Day 20

"It's nice to talk to you without being able to see up your nose."

Violet is ill and often tired, so it's not unusual to see Meruch carrying her around the ship. This also makes having any sort of conversation a lot easier.

When I told my sister this part of the story she said 'I wish I had a giant alien to carry me everywhere'. Don't we all, sisso, don't we all.

Inktober - Day 26

More wonky anatomy, oh dear. This is what happens when I draw late at night.

Since you can sometimes see them a little bit in 3-quarter angle pictures, I wanted to show what the ritual modifications the Vrega get look like. Almost all Vrega are subjected to this when they come of age, as part of their Trial. Technically the spikes can be placed anywhere, as long as they're worked into the bone, but these placements are traditional. After their Trial women are usually taught how to fight using their new arm-spikes. Men just have to get used to not being able to sleep on their backs.

Inktober - Day 27

One more before I go to bed. 

One of the features Vrega don't share with humans is Ereth lines. 'Ereth' is an old Vrega word for fertility, and Ereth lines are loosely a kind of minor erogenous zone that appear when they're touched in the right way, and supposedly improve fertility. Meruch's come up very dark and are unusually extensive which should mean he's very fertile. 

He's embarrassed by how dark they are and doesn't really like people seeing them.

Day 7

I was going to draw something really neat that I saw on the way home, but then I was really tired so instead here's teenage Meruch worrying about his new Ereth lines. He hasn't had his Trial yet, so there's no back spikes.

"Why are they so big? They go everywhere!"

Inktober day 8 - gel pen and brush pen

You don't need a ladder, just climb up the giant.

I think I got Meruch and Violet's size difference wrong again.

Inktober day 17 - brush pen I've still been doing inktober! I've just been away from my scanner for a few days. Here's Violet with some Vrega of various heights. Khet, the one carrying her, is about 6' tall. Kind of short for a Vrega man.

Inktober day 19 - g-pen I had a 5-hour train ride back home after LICAF, so I inked and hatched this on a moving train. Then we were held up for an hour behind a breakdown after I'd already finished. Oh well. Visuk thought being carried by Meruch would be fun, but it turns out it's mostly embarrassing.

Inktober day 22 - ink and water Adventures in late night character design. This is the doctor on the vrega dreadnought where Meruch and Visuk work. He's also a priest, which is common. The long hair and vial necklace are worn for religious reasons. Vrega don't develop facial hair until at least their mid thirties, so he looks much older to the other vrega than he does to Violet.

Inktober day 27 - g-pen, ink and water Since I drew Chiihon I thought I'd draw her friend the devil boy too. He's a pre-Disaster vrega. Vrega wasn't a nice place to live back then. The light bulb is because my manager asked me to draw it in ink as a special challenge.

Inktober day 29 - brush pen Meruch likes to carry Violet because otherwise he can only see the top of her head.

Inktober 2015 - Day 12 : mapping pen and markers Visuk suffers from a skin condition that’s something like eczema and something like herpes. Flare-ups last a couple of weeks. Meruch is there to grab his hands if he starts scratching it.

Marker pens count as ink, right?

Inktober 2015 - Day 20 : brush pen

Violet taught Khet and Vekh anime poses, but they don’t look as cute when you have terrifying goat eyes. You can get away with adorable vampire teeth though.

I accidentally crippled myself copying up notes yesterday, so I could only manage a line drawing. No cross-hatching for you two. These two also don’t have the masses of piercings and weird haircuts that other Vrega have because they’re very devout Khukh-worshippers (Khukh is the god of nature) and are forbidden from cutting their hair or deliberately harming themselves in any way. Perfect for when the thought of detail work makes my hands cry. They opted out of the Trial for religious reasons (it involves ritual mutilation) so they’ve started adult life in one of the lower castes and work as general dogsbodies like Meruch (who took the Trial but performed poorly). The double canines and hourglass pupils are benign mutations that are pretty common in their clan, and are thought to be a blessing from Khukh. Violet likes these two because they’re some of the only people on the ship who can give a decent piggy-back ride (no spikes), and at ‘only’ 6′ Khet is one of the very few who are less than a foot taller than her.

Sammy and I did an inking swap at a café today! I drew Visuk for Sammy to ink, then she copied my picture in her style for me to ink. I think she drew his hair better than me, which is kind of embarrassing. Next time we’ll do it the other way round with one of her characters.

“In mine he actually looks like he’s scratching his neck and thinking, instead of like an underwear model.” - Sammy Borras, supposedly my friend.

She likes it up there, it’s warm and it smells nice.

Hah. ‘Use for ink warm-up’ then decide to colour it and don’t actually ink the piece you were warming up for. I can’t decide if Violet’s hair should be ‘white’ in the sense of platinum blonde, or actually white/silver. Her feet are a bit grey and blotchy here because her circulation isn’t great and her legs have been bent for a long time.

Damn it Meruch, I work so hard to get you in proportion and then your giant mop of hair makes it look wrong again. Get a haircut.

Anyone remember that really awful late-night sketch of the vrega doctor from 2014′s Inktober? Well I finally did a decent one! Although I did just realise I forgot the horrible scar I gave him on his right shoulder. The doctor is also a priest (of Khukh), and is usually addressed as ‘grandfather’ as a sign of respect. He never, ever raises his voice. General consensus is that he’s probably seething with rage underneath, and the scariest thing the crew have ever seen was him taking a deep breath through his nose and saying ‘...you are trying my patience.’ (They’re completely wrong about this by the way, if he ever actually ran out of patience he’d probably just go and sit quietly in his room for an hour, but he finds it convenient to let the mistake persist.)

Inktober 2016 - Day 3 : cartridge pen

‘Oh Meruch, you’re... so strong.’

Vekh, I hope you realise that if you embarrass him every time he agrees to carry you, he’s going to start saying no. (It’s true though, he is freakishly strong.)

I made a bad choice on how to ink this one! It looks fine now it’s finished, but it took ages to fill in the black areas with this pen. (I couldn’t swap to a thicker one because the ink wouldn’t match.) I have learned a lesson.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m fairly often guilty of designing characters with important colour schemes and then always drawing them in black and white, so here are some colour pictures of the Vrega. There are a lot of minor differences between them and the humans, but the only obvious one is that they’re greyish-purple in colour. (I suppose if you stood a load of humans and vrega together it would also be obvious that the vrega are bigger, but Violet is the only human on the ship.) Violet is too tall in that first one, let’s pretend she’s standing on tip-toe.