A bunch of beings trying to survive in a broken clock
In the fungal chasms of the daemons' worlds, every mushroom is presided by some daemon. In one instance, a daemon princess looks over an expanse of them from her oddly colorful manor, as she eagerly waits for guests. A young one, she is quite playful, if wanting company than anything else, as with many similar revenants.
Aside from getting a character idea I've had out, this drawing was also meant to test out various supplies and design motifs I've wanted to do, and either way, both are steps in shaping Chimeric.
For supplies, I bought liner brushes since I wanted to play around more with using brushes for inking, and I wanted to use brushes suited for finer lines than spotter or round brushes. I was able to test them before, but I never used them for any Chimeric art yet, or even any of the brushes I used for ink. Doing this drawing, it lets me practice more control, and it lets me see if using thin brushes for inking will give more of that peculiar feeling come out. Alongside ink, I've also been meaning to do a character draw with better quality watercolors I've bought for roughly the same reasons. With watercolors however, I've also had ideas on how to approach using them.
For design, while I was studying how colors mixed, I got the idea of setting a character or a scene's color palette as some sort of tree graph. Illustrated by the graph below, the general rule is that if two colors mixed a certain way, they'd merge into one color which would be their relative base, and the rule repeats. From this graph, it's not only a means of finding odd, but effective color schemes, but also a means of abstracting a character in a scene to one color. Ontop of that, I have wanted to push the coloring more towards a stained glass or enamel inspired appearance to try getting the sort of gravity I want. Even though there's more to practice, I am satisfied with the result, even if I'm not sure if it's feasible to spend hours on the color texturing that went on here for comic panels. It would be really neat though, if I'm able to find a means to speed up the process for fifty or so pages full pages of art. Regardless, the gravity intended is meant to serve the potency of Chimeric.
For motifs, it's worth noting that there's a huge market for morbid designs. I show one design, and a friend tells me its very reminiscent to one dark fantasy IP. I show another design, and a friend tells me it reminds him of another dark fantasy IP, and so on. I'm not discouraged, but I take it as a sign to realize more of my approach to designing for Chimeric. I want to keep it adherent to macabreness as possible, but I want to invoke something more alien in emotion, as otherworldly as what I have for Chimeric is. Where gloom is invoked, a hodgepodge of other feelings and contemplation bubble up, and while potentially they lead back to gloom, they're majestic all around. I won't describe the concept in question here in further detail, since I can only describe so much versus practice. However, it ties back to the main idea here: another step in shaping Chimeric.
In all this pedantry, I wonder if I overthink shaping these ideas and, in turn, lose track of the throughline in the process. For the latter, it is why I am trying to peel away from characters. There have been ones outside of characters that I've had backlogged, so I may as well establish those first to anchor the throughline, and hopefully it clarifies whether or not additional ones are overthought. So, while this drawing was helpful in throwing out all sorts of ideas, I am still left to address what exactly the setting is itself.