Periodically, I remember how absolutely fucked up the necromancers in TLT are meant to look. Like, necromancy does an absolute number on people physically.
Harrow is "rather small and feeble".
Necromantic Ianthe is "the starved shadow" of her non-necromantic twin.
Our first description of Palamedes is "a rangy, underfed young man" who is "gaunt".
Silas is "knife-faced...He had a necromancer build."
Ianthe parodies make-over scenes in House novels with "if the hero’s a necromancer it’ll be described like, ‘His frailty made his unearthly handsomeness all the more ephemeral'"
Jod acknowledges to Wake that even small children with aptitude would look odd to non-House eyes: "“I have access to any number of cute pictures of necromantic toddlers with their first bone. They don’t make for fat-cheeked roly-poly babies, but they’ve got a certain something."
In As Yet Unsent, Judith brags about her previous physical fitness: "I could run a kilometre in ten minutes, which was among the fastest for my adept group in the junior reserves." Which is about double the time you might expect for a physically fit woman her age.
In non-necromancer-friendly New Rho, Harrow's body is mistaken for a child's and has to be explained as a result of starvation and trauma to seem plausible: "Pyrrha explained without missing a beat that what with everything Nona had gone through she had been ill and still didn’t eat very much, which was why she was so knobbly and undergrown. The nice lady said that yes, many of the children had problems like that, but it was still hard to imagine Nona was anywhere over fourteen, wasn’t it?"
Tamsyn Muir's descriptions of the Canaan House gang on Tumblr back this up: "Judith is somewhat less completely scrawny than other necromancers on the cast, though she should be less built than Marta is", Palamedes is "seriously underfed" and "bony", Harrow is "scrawny".
And that's just what I can think of off the top of my head - I'm sure there's more.
Anyway, necromancers aren't slender in a conventionally attractive way, they're gaunt in a concerning way...and probably the only reason no one instantly clocked that Coronabeth wasn't a necromancer was because they all just thought it was par for the course that a Third House princess would have had a lot of plastic surgery flesh magic.
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Animal reference photo compilation concept test!
I've been saving this project for a new website I'm planning, but that's been delayed by the grindstone of capitalism, so I'm going to set up this part early. This is the concept test for a repository of reference photos of a whole bunch of different species of exotic animals.
For every 50 or so photos I take of an animal, there's generally only a couple that I like and are also in focus and also framed correctly. But that led me to realize... all those slightly blurry or off-center photos are probably a great set of references for people interested in general shape/form/movement for their art! So I'm setting up of the idea before fully committing the time into making it happen.
I've been going through my photo backlog and pulling out the shots I think will be useful for art references. Lots of them show posture, facial movement, close-ups of feet or eyes, and walk cycles, but also other behaviors like jumping or drinking. They're not perfect - there's often stuff out of focus or reflections on the glass - but I think they'll still be useful for art?
The link below is to the Dropbox where I'll host these photos until I eventually get that new website/project up and running. Right now I've got folders of four species uploaded for this test: California Condor (CW for carcass feed photos), Jaguar, Komodo Dragon, and Moose. Please go check them out and tell me what you think!
~~WADTT Animal Reference Photos Dropbox Link~~
What I'm looking to learn from y'all is:
Is this type of reference photo repository useful / worth doing?
Do these photos work or are they too blurry/wonky/there's too many?
What things would make a project like this better? (Caveat, it has to stay on Dropbox for now).
If this turns out to be as useful as I'm hoping, and the photos work, I've got a whole bunch more species to upload.
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