Born to Fly

So here's the new blog. I deleted the old one because it was attached to my old Google account and I'd rather funnel all my socializing to this new one which is specifically set up for it. (Not that there was anything important on the old one anyway. :V)

But anyway, I guess I should post a little info here.

    Been a furry for a few years now but my character was actually created before that. Originally she was much older (About 12-13) and was meant for a webcomic I wanted to do about the adventures of an arctic fox that also happened to be a wind elemental. The original plan for the comic was an action-anime type thing but I didn't have the skill to draw it at the time, so I just used a little MS Paint pixel drawing of the character as my avatar on forums I went to and on my old Quibblo account, which I no longer use (Though they still send me spam. How nice.) Eventually, it ended up being my representation on the internet, a young-looking white fox with a scarf.

I don't have the original file anymore, sadly, but I made two avatar images of her after, and both were significant leaps from the last.

This was the image I used for the longest time on an MMO forum and as my MSN avatar. It's a pretty good likeness of the nameless white fox. (At the time everyone just called me Gale or Kaze so I guess that was her name.) The wing in the corner was something I came up with as my signature because I've always been obsessed with flying and rainbow-colors.

This is an unfinished version of the character, it was a pixel image I blocked out (Lightsource is still in-tact) and intended to shade with fancy Paint Shop Pro 8 methods but at the time I lost interest in art and fell into a slump. This was drawn after I decided to give her wings. I've always thought one of her unique traits was how her whiskers swept up to look something like wings, that was something I gave her early on so that it would add to her wind-elemental appearance. I'd also gotten a solid idea for how to do her hair besides a terrible imitation of Tails' 
bangs made to look like a whirlwind.

At one point, I drew a pencil drawing of her (Colored and shaded with traditional pencils, though that's not saying much since I was never a pro at it anyway) where I first gave her two new traits; the rainbow-colored wings that have become her main focus and a pair of glasses that look similar to mine. She was also completely naked in this picture (Nothing was showing, get your minds out of the gutter) and I originally drew her with five fingers (As I always have for all my characters, it makes sense to me) and four toes on each paw, and in this picture she looked more anatomically correct than I've ever cared to draw a character. (Again not saying much considering my anatomy skills are awful.)

After not drawing the character again for a long time, but participating in various RPs, I decided I'd name her Aria, since it means "Air" in Italian and was more original than Kaze (Which means "Wind" in Japanese) and because of its relation to music, which seemed fitting since one of her talents was to play the flute (Better than I ever could.) And I changed her from being a pure Wind elemental to being a creature similar to a nature spirit bot closer to a tangible, living being. She could speak to nature and make small plants grow, but she was young by her species' standards and didn't have a lot of talent with her abilities. My idea was that every member of her species evolved differently to become different elementals in their maturity. So whole she had talent with nature, the flow of water, and even light as an infant (By her species' standards, she looked about 12 and was nearly 500) she would grow to master wind and assist the balance of the world in another thousand years or so. But at that moment, she couldn't even fly and often hid her wings because (like all her species at that stage) she didn't know what she was and saw that everyone else around her wasn't that strange and found it easier to beg on the streets by playing her flute and survive in forests than to make a scene.

Then I went some time without RPing at all. In that time, a lot in my life changed, a lot of excitement and grief and a lot of change in preference in general... And a lot of accepting things about me that I didn't think related to me.

After I emerged from a relatively dark time (Not THE darkest time but relatively dark) in my life, and long after I decided to be a furry, I finally decided to better define my character, and I started with a complete redesign. The main reason being that the original design was too heavily based around Sonic style (I used to be a huge fan) and I felt that dampened her design greatly. I didn't want to be another noob with a Sonic fan character for a fursona so I did an overhaul.

After a few pencil scribbles, I solidified the key elements of her design in my mind and did this little MS Paint doodle when I was bored and had no access to a working PC for a short time. (This was done on a laptop.)

The design was made more cute and simple,  I was going for "Fun" at the time, and I wanted to make her look like she was falling after getting into some sort of mischief but I still wanted to keep a lot of the anime aspects. She no longer carries the wing-whiskers but that's more because I couldn't figure out how they'd work on her and still look good than any lack of interest. I thought they were an interesting trait. I gave her scarf scraggly-looking stripes (Miss-matched in this image) and now draw her with five fingers and three toes on a paw. I did this by accident and didn't realize it until  I thought about it. Then I just kept it because I've never felt the difference in three or four toes was as significant as the difference in four or five fingers (You actually need five fingers to do things like type or play a guitar so cartoon characters always having four is a bit of a peeve with me, it's too illogical for my tastes.) The character has always had a baggy shirt with wizard-like sleeves but the baggy pants were a new touch. Originally her shirt was dark-blue with some white lines around the cuffs and her pants were a light gray, I changed them to turquoise because I felt it was more colorful and interesting, and she originally wore gray shoes, but at the time I couldn't think of how to make them look interesting, so I just went with the traditional anthro look of not giving her any. More a lazy solution than a preference, mainly because feet of any kind creep me out and I still have a hard time drawing paws, especially the bottoms of paws, for any length of time without feeling dirty.

I also just decided to name her Kaze, because that's what everyone calls me. Although her nickname is Kaz, which is mostly because of a story reason being that one character gave her the nickname Kazeakuma (Wind demon) for her habit of causing trouble by accidentally unleashing some wind magic, and the only part of that word she could pronounce was Kaz. :V

I also modified her story to be more fitting to a less serious atmosphere but still being substantial to base a plot around. I also bumped down her age to 6 and made her more of a support character, or someone who would be in need of one, because I've always liked playing the sidekick with an interesting backstory for some reason. Probably because in video games, I prefer the protagonist to be silent and for the other characters to share their history with them, and for their friends' plots to be as much a driving force behind the story as the main plot, so I based the character around that preference. (Because I also like the idea of inserting a little interpretation into a main character, especially in an RPG or Adventure game like Zelda.)

The new story is somewhat the same with her having some talent with making small plants bloom and being able to manipulate the elements, but her development is less planned-out in years as it was before. I haven't yet determined the time it will take for her to mature but I don't intend on making her grow up soon. Instead of being shy and hiding, she's more open and hyper, and has a tenancy to find trouble, as most kids do. But she maintains an air of innocence that makes her so adorable. The more serious and deep side of her personality comes from her uncertainty of her origin, of her abilities, why she has wings and why she can't yet fly, and who her parents were. While not a character to brood, she does have that natural curiousity about these things, especially since it's evident to her in many subjects of life (Like seeing a mother and father ith a young child and wondering what that's like.) It's this aspect of her design that I feel has the potential to drive her plot, such as ways of her raising these questions to the adults in the story, thinking with that expected naive innocence that they would have all the answers, and this offers an opening for said adults to ponder the same questions, and for her to decide she wants to (Or has to) find them on her own. From here, I could go in many directions with the story for a comic, if I ever gain the initiative to write said comic.

My envisioning of an adult form for her is basically a larger, more mature and developed version of her, with a very calm and content expression, and wings that radiate light. She would never need to land (And would prefer not to. She grew to be a powerful air elemental but being in contact with the ground makes her weaker and uneasy) and she could conjure, or prevent, windstorms at will. Her place in the order of things would essentially be to maintain a balance of energies by either creating or preventing various storms or other disasters of her element. She circles the world, drifting carelessly and often playing music that would make the wind howl to the tune, and communicating with the various creatures in the sky, but rarely coming in contact with another elemental unless their tasks overlapped or there was a dire need. (I had a pretty good plot for her to meet up with a chronomancer after another character jumped through time that she knew in her past so they could resolve the imbalance together) I'm not entirely sure if that form will ever be shown in the plot, it hasn't in the pieces of the plot I have planned out.

Add some more tweaks and I came up with this. While there are a lot of things I'm not happy with, like proportion of head to body, flatness of hair, and how the eyes were done (as well as anatomy being weird) I rounded out the ears, put some ear fur on the insides, changed her scarf color, experimented with the wings a bit (In a lazy fashion, I'm still a learning artist and wings are something that eludes me) and gave her whiskers. Those actually came from playing LittleBigPlanet where I tried to create a Sackboy likeness to her and ended up giving her whiskers. It stick, and I think it gives her another unique quality.

I'm definitely not happy with the tail. I've always seen her tail as being massive, at least the width of her body and 3 quarters as long, but I can never manage to draw it properly.

I'm still tweaking her design a bit. Experimenting, mostly. This was an experimental sketch I did, though now I'm considering scrapping it.

As well as try to give her shoes, I tried making the wings look more detailed and resemble bird wings, as well as shape her ears a bit more and align her face a bit better. I tried to give her back her wing-like whiskers as well as the catlike whiskers she has, but I'm not so sure I did it in a favorable way. I definitely am not a fan of the shoes now that I give it some thought, they somehow make her look older, I'm not sure what it is. And aside from anatomy problems (One arm is longer than the other) everything else is the same. And yes, I know sleeves don't work that way. :V I started to ink this, and I might just finish inking it, and I did fix a lot of the weird things, but in terms of design ideas, pretty much all the changes are concept.

I did manage to make her tail look right to me though, nice and fluffy without looking like it had no volume. Ironic, but it's definitely a start. Practice is always good, I guess.

So that's the long tale of a fox who's born to fly and how they came about. I certainly love hearing myself talk.

I haven't given up on that comic, I just feel like I need more practice. This was originally a concept I did for a potential cover. The blue fox isn't my character, he's a friend of mine and he's supposed to have five tails, but my idea for him was that he bunches them together to make movement easier for him and because it leaves more room on a panel for me.

Maybe someday. Maybe someday soon, even. Who knows, really.