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StrandedAlien — Tkallu Posing in Color
Published: 2012-09-23 17:12:16 +0000 UTC; Views: 432; Favourites: 2; Downloads: 2
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The last drawing of Tkallu (the WIP one) didn't work out well. I tried inking it and messed up. In retrospect, it also looked a little stiff and heavy to me. So I tried drawing Tkallu again a few times, and kept on failing. Then this time, I sketched a circle for the head, then gave his body a line for his pose to follow, and gave him a nice little leaning-against-a-wall pose.I kept sketching in the details to a minimum, adding them, wherever possible, last. For the clothing patterns, I decided to not use the inks for outlining clothing patterns (except for the hem on his yellow and black vest thing.) nor for the body paint, and I looked at a color wheel to find colors that would fit or at least look interesting, as well as be bright and showy, since Tkallu is a bright and showy guy.
I also started a new writing system for the critters, one I find more interesting looking, though so far the corpus is limited to Tkallu's given name.
NOTE: hat-tip to for suggesting giving my uwan eyes with visible pupils. They look really good on Tkallu!
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Comments: 6
Oh, and what's he doing with his secondary arms? Fluffing up his chest? That camera-whore.
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That's exactly what he's doing. All the better to show how fluffy and luxuriant it is.
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Good idea for a process. Head with a line. Dynamic balloon. I'll have to try that. I like what you did with not inking the clothing and skin designs, they look more like decoration now, and not integral parts of his biology.
As for the writing system. Are those symbols phonetic? If so, they're awfully complicated. Alphabets with limited numbers of symbols tend to get simplified over time, even if they started out as complex. Compare Hieroglyphic Egyptian to Hieratic, or Chinese Hanzi to Japanese Kana.
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They are phonetic. It's an abugida, to be precise. Each consonant has an inherent vowel which is modified or silenced by various diacritics. I've seen some pretty complicated looking alphabets/abugidas. It's also a rather conservative system and will even have letters no longer used outside of specialized context (like what sound like two W's, but one was actually a V, but they're now pronounced the same)
I imagine that there'd be at least two different versions, a stylized "printed" version like this, and a simplified handwritten version. I actually considered putting a simplified version of the bottom symbol after Tkallu's name in Roman letters, but decided against it.
Only the top third are phonetic. The bottom third is a semantic sign/determinative meaning "male uwan", as opposed to something or someone else named Tkallu. They're kind of like the disambiguations on Wikipedia. (Such as: Bat(bomber), to indicate a bomber called "Bat", Bat(goddess) to indicate the Egyptian goddess by that name, Bat(heraldry) to indicate the use of the bat in heraldry.)
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I like the idea of determinatives, like in Egyptian ([link] ).
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Me too. That was the inspiration, actually. 
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