Overdue, but here is a compilation of all the artwork I drew over the course of Naelus! Most of it is reposted from the Naelus thread, but there are a few things I drew towards the end of the game that never got posted which you'll see towards the end. There is also some commentary/reflections that are new, so it should hopefully still be worthwhile to skim the post even if it's all art you've seen before.
Game spoilers are unmarked.One of the
very earliest concepts I drew for the game was of Mother Nature- she went through several different ideas for her appearence before I settled on the jellyfish snake. For the folks who never worked out why she looked the way she did, I'll go ahead and tell you now; jellyfish are one of the very oldest types of complex lifeform in existence. Fossil evidence for jellyfish dates back as far as the Cambrian period, 500 million years ago, and considering how poorly jellies fossilize it's likely they're even older. What better creature for a goddess of survival to wear the shape of? As for the two snake heads, to explain that I have to direct you attention to the Aztec earth goddess Coatlicue. She is represented as having two snake heads that face each other. And to quote her wikipedia article "Most Aztec artistic representations of this goddess emphasize her deadly side, because Earth, as well as loving mother, is the insatiable monster that consumes everything that lives. She represents the devouring mother, in whom both the womb and the grave exist." Seemed appropriate for my representation of Mother Nature.
So remember
Twillie 's beautiful
map that she drew for Nealus? Here's the initial concept sketch I gave her to work with. I am sorry and eternally impressed and grateful that she managed to turn this incomprehensible scrawl into something so nice.
These are the three profile pics I drew during the game; I had them uploaded to a site that was set to rotate through them (the same one PFA uses for her profile) but as I'm sure most if not all of you noticed, towards the end of the game the site went bork and consequently so did my avatar. I eventually gave up on it righting itself and just went to using only the beech avatar through the rest of the game until the last day or so.
Mochi
Quicksnap
And Beech
And this was an updated reference picture I drew for Beech as a ghost. If you're wondering why it looks leagues better than her first alive-reference, to the point of almost looking like two completely different people drew it, that's probably because they were drawn months apart (Feb VS June) and Beech's first reference was only the second drawing I did with my tablet.
Profile pic I drew of
Avery 's character, Dog the German shepherd. A gewd doge who spoke entirely in I lik the bred poetry and went basically the entire game oblivious to the threat to the island. Carrie was convinced she'd get executed or corrupted early if not first, but Dog was actually the very last PC character in the game to corrupted before the sower's defeat.
If someone has a very different art style from me I'll often draw their characters in my own style to kind of get a more solid grasp in my head of the character's appearence when interacting with my charas. Thus it was that a doodle of @chasingstar44's Kopi and Tash happened~
Thorn 's character, Kohimu the taniwha. I'd never heard of a taniwha before the game, and no two pictures of them seemed to agree completely on what they looked like, so I did my best to approximate taniwha based on Thorn's descriptions of him. He ended up being pretty fun to doodle, and I drew him several more times during the game.
Reiqua 's Muuri! Another animal I'd never heard of before the game, this time a real one called thylacoleo carnifex or "marsupial lion." I believe that Reiqua confirmed that she picked this species before she knew she was the Lionheart, but I did
not know this until she said so after she was outed in game, so I assumed the whole time it was a Refuge In Audacity move. Either way, Muuri ended up being one of the most influential characters in the metagame, successfully preventing death not once, not twice, but on
four separate occasions. There was much rejoicing from the sowers when the finally managed to corrupt her and remove her Lionheart abilities.
Thorn 's Kohimu and
June Scarlet 's Roda made friends in Round 1 and continued to pal around off and on until Roda's exposure as a sower. This was a fun element for both of their arcs, because it helped contribute to Roda's motivation for questioning her sower motives (her friendships outside of just her own species) and the betrayal pushed Kohimu into the mindset of being slightly paranoid of most of the other characters. Ironically, according to Thorn the only characters he fully trusted after Roda's death were Beech (already dead) and
Svar, who was
also a sower. The irony there was not missed on Svar's player, Celes, who headcanon'd that Svar went along with sticking near Kohimu as a means to keep him ineffectual in stopping the sowers.
Tiger 's Xsabaskis and
Kozma 's Lackintell hold down
Nova 's Makell after she becomes corrupted in round two. Fun fact! A couple people admitted to me that they were wondering if Xsabaskis giving Lackintell stinkeye in this scene was an Eagle Eye hint, but dismissed it was just being Xsabaskis' personality. The reason this was hilarious? Tiger
was the Eagle Eye, Lackintell
was a sower, and yes, it
was entirely coincidental and just Xsabaskis' personality.
In her initial appearence as a ghost,
Celestial 's Morag and
Tiger 's NPC coelophysis question Beech (about if the corruption is some sort of poison IIRC). This entire scene was a blast to do, because I managed to
completely blindside everyone with it. A lot of the other things that happened at least a couple people guessed or got close to guessing, but my breaking the tradition of first-to-die-NPC being never spoken of or heard from again managed to legitimately surprise people and it was awesome.
The albino trex NPC, Thunder, who went on a rampage in Round Four. She was supposed to be a one-off...
Then
Avery 's Dog adhered himself to her, and she made several more appearences later; brooms man.
Tiger 's Soaitsae shortly before Thunder went on a rampage. The critter he's fighting is an amphicyon, one of an extinct genus of mammals nicknamed "the bone-crushing dogs" or "bear-dogs." He was not having a good day and was understandably grumpy with his kids later for ditching him without a word. Proof of his badassery though, he still won the fight on his own, even though the amphicyon had a few grey and/or dire wolves as backup.
Tiger June Scarlet This exchange was pretty entertaining, and fairly indicative of Roda's personality in general. Situational awareness, what is that? I shall insult this giant crocodile's best friend while sitting on his back! Fortunately for her Quicksnap is both a strict fish-eater and was too hurt to move well in this scene. Driftstone chided her for her rudeness, which gave me a perfect segue into the subsequent narratorpost...
Wherein Roda attempted to corrupt Driftstone and got caught and killed for her efforts. Though not before giving a fun, defiant little villain speech that she would end up sorely regretting later when it turned out her sister didn't approve of wholesale carnivore genocide.
June Scarlet and sorta
Tiger considering Driftstone's talons are pictured lol.
And then sadfeels between my Beech and
Tiger 's Taakeyrr. Nobody had a good time while Taak was corrupted, least of all Taak herself, but it made for some heartstring-tugging scenes once we finally pried her off the back of a giant hell pig she was trying to murderate. Fun fact, the name of the google doc Tiger and I collabed this scene in was "Taakeyrr, Let's Take You Somewhere You'll Be Less Bitey." Every subsequent time we used the doc again for other collab's we'd subtitle something along the lines of "there isn't even a Taakeyrr in this scene, the heck??"
There were a lot of fun character dynamics that built up over the game. A noteworthy one was
Liou 's Renpi and
Celestial 's Svar, who both served gods of their respective pantheons, but anybody who knows anything about Set knows he has beef with Horus, one of the many Egyptian gods who played hot potato with the sun disk over the centuries. Renpi enjoyed snarking Svar whenever the opportunity presented itself as a nod to this enmity... but Renpi's eventual reaction when she learned that Svar was a sower and that he had been killed was legitimately feelsy, and very fitting the characters. It was a really fun frenemies relationship to watch develop during the story.
Kozma 's Lackintell getting the blessing of intelligence from the Spirit and renaming himself Bayne.
Lizica 's Verso and Recto and
Coaster 's Genevieve, were both witness to this baptism (as was Beech but I left her out of the drawing because her reaction wasn't as entertaining). I would later use this scene as an excuse for why Verso and Recto got corrupted- they approached Lackintell about thier riddle for the corruption, which he took as them sneakily confronting him about his sower status.
Mochi the moon rabbit (mine) gets stuck in a corrupted thorn bush during the attack of the thorns.
June Scarlet 's Julaine helps get Mochi free. This would continue a trend started in round three of, as Liou described it, Mochi incentivizing people to talk to them by getting into danger and needing a rescue.
In the same round,
Rabbit ♠ 's Kopi seeks help freeing Tash from my Beech. This lead to a hilariously tone-dissonant scene where Beech (a ghost if you'll recall) had her head, forelegs, and chest phased into Kopi's underground warren, while her backlegs and rump were still above ground.
And the award for most out of the box take on corruption goes to Verso and Recto! Having two heads, at first both were equally corrupted, but after they got knocked around and knocked their heads together, the corruption started to bounce between the duo at random intervals. This would lead to Recto beating the stuffing out of Verso, then the reverse, the back again.
Lizica was off on a trip at the time the two were corrupted, and expressed some sadness that she wouldn't get the chance to write for their corruption as much as she wanted... and then almost immediately thereafter the lionheart was corrupted and killed the healer, leading to no small amount of hilarity was Lizica was like "No, no I take it back!"
Though
Twillie had to leave the game for a while after Kasai was killed, she eventually returned to the story after
Lizica was outed as Kasai's Papa Wolf Pup, and the story the two of them told together was extremely funny, sweet, and cathartic. I did a sketch of Seishin, Kasai's surviving mate, and liked how it came out so much I ended up coloring it in later.
An unlikely friendship between
Rabbit ♠ 's Kopi and
Tiger 's Xsabaskis. Xsabs knew Kopi was the healer before even Tiger did because stubborn character gonna stubborn, and Rabbit
knew Xsabs knew even if Tiger didn't, which lead to some fun conversations of both characters saying stuff that meant things only Rabbit and I were actually privy to the real implication of. (And yes- I totally drew this
after Kopi was rolled to die but before the narratorpost went up, knowing he was going to die, to troll the heck out of Rabbit and Tiger and anyone else who liked the friendship. You're welcome. 83 )
So when
Celestial 's Svar accidentally killed Kohimu, he sunk into a very deep depression for a round and refused to move.
Liou 's Renpi and my Mochi tried to coax some life back into him only to be rebuffed, with Svar commenting (as he so often does) that his feathers bring misfortunate and they're better off without him. Mochi fired back that oh yeah, well as a rabbit they have
lucky feet so they aren't leaving Svar alone. As Celes noted "there is just enough refuge in audacity for that to work." It was a pretty fun bit to write and definitely one of Mochi's best character moments.
I... don't remember entirely the context here, something about Quickdraw Quicksnap needing to have a cowboy hat and
Tiger's Driftstone on his head wearing said cowboy hat. I'm pretty sure it was
Liou's fault
Around the time that a lot of the major in-game reveals started happening, I got smacked over the head with a very sudden move. (As in, one week I was looking at places, two weeks later I was getting keys to an apartment.) Suffice to say I was both extremely busy and extremely tired. I had basically no free time during this period and was doing most of my roleplaying and writing for the game from my desk at work. Sooo when it came time to do the BIG EPIC REVEAL of Mother Nature, I had a sketch of the artwork but no time at all to line or color it. Thankfully,
Celestial stepped in to save my butt, taking my sketch and giving it lineart, color and shading. Thank you muchly Celes!
Thankfully things finally calmed down enough re: the move that when it came time for the big reveal of Naelus'
other god, I had some time to work on it. This was a very tricky drawing to do because of the lighting, the scenery, and the just... sheer
scale of everything. And it took me a loooong time to do, as you might imagine. XD The Spirit of Naelus was one of the first designs I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it from early on after I crystilized Naelus' plot. In very early drafts when Naelus was a mountain valley instead of an island she was a deer-thing, but I canned that as too obvious and derivitive. Later, when I changed Naelus to being an island, I considered making the spirit an island turtle, then went "wait, prehistoric animals... a plesiosaur-island-turtle! BRILLIANT!" And so the affectionately nicknamed "Plesioturtle" was born.
Rabbit ♠'s Tash discovers that Svar is the final sower, but has some issue convincing Te Tai of this thanks to the Kohimu-voice in Tai's head denying it vehemently. This scene was super fun to write, definitely the sort of climatic grand final stand the sowers deserved to go out on.
After
Thorn 's Kohimu comes back to life, he and the now land-based Te Tai share some taniwha cuddles! This was pretty fun to draw, despite the character's mutual unconventional anatomies.
Me: I should draw Alive-Beech as an icon for the last two rounds.
Moving Process: Lolz, with what energy?
Me: But, but, but...
Moving Process: Nope!...Okay fine.
Me: Well now the game ends in
a day but you know what? drawing anyway.
The feathers she's wearing in this image are a reference to something that was said in the epilogue, that she's started collecting feathers and that the raptors would help her adhere them behind her ears with tree resin as decorations. There's a macaw feather, a blue feather I forget what it's from, and two protofeathers that are probably from the dilophosaurs if Tiger's cool with that!
