m0r1bund

[m0r1bund]

went through the art on your site and I absolutely love motu's mask . I fully was under the impression he was a guy with a animal head at first, out of curiosity what was your inspiration for its design ?

THANK YOU!! I love that he gives the impression of having a real critter head. He would be so indignant about this, which is great, because we have to keep him humble.

so Motu came about after I replayed Morrowind for the first time as an adult, and I wanted to port my player character, Roan, into Moribund. I had put a lot of time into her story, and I guess by that point it had drifted from the source material enough that it was time to wiggle out onto dry land.

Back then, Moribund was distinctly lacking in war and sociopolitical beef, so I needed a real guy-of-all-time to fill the shoes of Dagoth Ur and the Sixth House... which is to say that yeah, the fact that Motu wears a mask, the burnished gold/bronze color, the engraved rays in his sideburns, those are all nods to the og

The earliest iterations of Motu's mask were modeled after baboons and macaques.

couldn't tell you why I gravitated to them. I think part of it was because I had written off primates for most of my life. I grew up a wolf girl and I thought that any animal without prominent fuzzy ears looked weird. (oh how the turn tables.)

Then he pivoted to a chimeric, set beast-type critter. I was younger and I didn't have the language for what I was observing at the time, but I was drawn to cynocephaly as a cross-cultural phenomenon. I also liked the idea of him being a visual wordplay on "dog-headed" and "god-headed"

I don't remember if I designed boondogs concurrently with him or after him, but that's the in-world justification for why he looks Like That. his mask is modeled after them.

I also had Roan and Koda's masks to reference. they were early examples of the mask-wearing practice in high Asthaom, and I knew I wanted Motu's mask to mirror theirs.

honestly, I feel like his mask is still a work-in-progress. I have a hard time wrapping my head around the planes of his cheeks and eyes. I think they can be done better.

(i swear i've drawn it more recently i just don't have access to my sketchbooks right now)

this also isn't unique to Motu, but his colors/geometry/asthaom's identity/my art in general draw heavily from settler and indigenous folk art in the Southwest, folk art in general, and also the cultural exchange happening in east asia during the time of the maritime silk road. people were making cheap crafts for mass export to satisfy the tastes of a wide variety of people who had never seen this part of the world, but this was also before the colonial powers that be, so It's a bunch of cultural and material knockoffs of knockoffs of knockoffs in a way that's not... like... always benign, but Different, sometimes less asymmetrical, and endearing to me as a knockoff myself LOL. it's an excuse to learn more and make clumsy efforts to reconnect with whatever tha hell it means to be japanese american.

now that I think of it, this comes full circle with Morrowind taking heavily from Indian history and Hindu cosmology. really playing a game of telephone with another guy's orientalism all the way back to the silk road. motu would hate this regardless. totally ruining his illusion of a pure and static cultural heritage.

but what can i say. i love when we pass around the Creature

[shishi] [shachihoko] [inugami]

:)

[m0r1bund]

This Is The 15th Of November. The Year Of The Dragon, Twenty Twenty-Four. These Are The Closing Days Of The Holocene... And The Final Hours Of My Life

https://www.instagram.com/m0r1bund.1ore/

Do you have an instagram?

Oh no… I don’t have one of those either… :’^o right now this fool is just dA and tumblr

[m0r1bund]

Basedt update... 8 new pages... wanted to wait so this scene would be all together...

^^^ that link takes you to the first page in the chunk... take a look

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YES! YES! YES!!!!!!!

25 of them... .

sometimes they are on my ko-fi. sometimes they are on my website. how mysteriouse

[m0r1bund]

In other news, I feel like I’ve been working exclusively on things I can’t share because I’m under an NDA with myself about them. an NDA that is simply not real and I can break at any time. like right now.

Look at these frames from my twine, boy (working on it) (no ETA) (scope-creeped myself really bad) (having the time of my life)

[m0r1bund]

hello! I was catching up on reading NAKAQUOI! and the essay from the most recent entry was such an inspiring method of storytelling. enough so to make me reach out and ask about your website in general (if you're comfortable answering!). what is it like running a lore/gallery site for your work? how and why did you get started? and lastly, what about it keeps you going?

thank you, cheers! -Winn

😭 Thank you so much for the kind words, this means a lot to me. I really enjoyed writing that little essay.

This is going to be a weird and vulnerable sidebar, but I promise I’m going somewhere with it. Honestly, it blows my mind that anyone reads them. I think it’s because I’m still operating on the assumption that this form of storytelling is for n=1 (yours truly) and other people are merely tolerating it, LOL. I used to be way more sensitive about sharing my characters / stories / worlds, because the forms of storytelling that came naturally to me were often received as incomprehensible, dense, and unintuitive by other people. At a certain point I decided that I just had to accept this and become my own hype man. People could enjoy the pretty pictures out of context, and they could be a vehicle for me to journal about the pretend people who live in my head. Good compromise 👍

for someone who talks big about making weird art and finding the 6 people in the audience who truly get it, I don’t think I realized that this could include my deranged essays about things that aren’t real. And yet. AND YET!!!! I think this desire to present my work in a way that’s “more” than just pretty pictures with text attached to them has been simmering for a long time, even though I dismissed it and was kind of embarrassed about it. Which is wild. Because I grew up on bestiaries and warrior cats lore compendiums and video game wikis and morrowind. There was clearly a precedent. And Yet.

Anyway, this desire started rubbing shoulders with the technical limitations of blogs and gallery websites, and also a general disillusionment with social media during the enshittification of the internet. Like, yeah it sucked that my whole body of work could vanish overnight. But mostly I had worldbuilding neuroses that made me want to scratch at the walls, and I knew just enough html + css to be dangerous. In 2018, I had also finished some longer works that made me more confident in my ability to deliver a cohesive Moribund, and these works weren’t intuitive to share on social media… So… I guess that gave me the impetus to stop flirting with the idea of getting my own website and start actually working on it.

M0R1BUND.com used to be a pure html + css + js website hosted on Neocities. It was ideal and I miss it in a lot of ways, because yeah, that IS the most unadulterated control you can have over your webspace. Had a blast with it, experimented a lot, learned a lot, hosted galleries and twines and webfiction and digital collages and ARPG stuff and interactive maps and a webcomic. And it was mine as much as it was the work of kind people sharing sample code on stackexchange, LOL.

Eventually, I felt the growing pains of managing this by hand. Updating ate hours out of my day. There are definitely more intuitive ways to build and maintain a pure html + css + js website, but I was working with what I knew. I started learning wordpress for basedt.net with the hopes of automating certain operations, like posting art to a gallery or pages to a webcomic. It felt intuitive enough that I later rebuilt M0R1BUND.com in wordpress.

It took a long time and a lot of work, like almost a year? And I still haven’t mirrored everything. Wordpress has made things easier to maintain, but I learned the hard way that it doesn't avoid the pitfalls of simpler website-builders… which is to say… whatever it does to make life easier will also make life incredibly difficult if you decide you want to do something manually. And it’s never the stuff you expect.

These days there’s also the baggage of Automattic’s nonsense. Wordpress is open source, so I don’t think it will go anywhere, but it’s still the corporate clownery that I wanted to escape by making my own website. Blech.

Really though, I love running M0R1BUND and it’s the closest thing I have to an ideal “home” for my work. Going to a dedicated website is unintuitive and out of the way for a lot of people, but (indicates generally) what have we just learned about me. This one’s for n=1 and the, like, 6 people who pop in and say hello. You are my people...

Looking forward, things cook at the rate of 2937728839 irons in the fire, and they are all getting done, but they are all getting done sooooo slowly… I’m having fun. Besides having a general compulsion to make art and tell stories and be Understood, I think that’s what carries me thru this. I want to have fun. and I want to trick people into caring about my characters and also the Sonoran Desert. And as Bjork says, I have to get the wiggles out or else the dark times will come.

It’s getting late and I don’t have a denouement for this. Thank you for your kind words! Thank you for asking! hope this answers? hope this helps (???) take the best and leave the rest.

[m0r1bund]

Happy 1 AM. I have merch

Pleased to announce that my shop has more than just prints now. Shirts... A mug... Another print... Mostly just shirts and mugs and prints. I haven't ordered anything else yet, how mysterious

check it out...

[m0r1bund]

pakk attack

hey remember NAKAQUOI! . or the tower . well. here ya go.

NAKAQUOI! is my hidden bestiary of pakaquoia, or funnie little guys that haunt people who wear masks. once in a blue moon i remember it exists and i think to myself ohhhhh. time for another guy.

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another guy... Libytheana carinenta and Celtis reticulata, joining the others in the spirit of witherlings bestiary nostalgia. if you would like to put him in your pocket you can grab him from my ko-fi for 45 USD.

[m0r1bund]

the basedt update that was late because i broke my phone with my ass has a lot of people asking questions already answered by the basedt update

6 new pages... this links to the first page of the bunch... take a look

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Sadren pauses to recall the view east of the Rim. This was before metropolitan Lin Dai and the river Roan, now visible in the middle distance. These days he’s captured more by the smell of pine mingling with smoke and the sound of the wind through the rocks—hints of the desert below.

Rim country in high Asthaom is a shameless rip of rim country in Alĭ Ṣonak, which means this painting is a shameless rip of a photo I took at the Mogollon Rim looking south into the Verde Valley.

[m0r1bund]

Updaté... 4 new pages for the month... hold the Hand, cherish the Hand, forfeit all material possessions to the Hand... take a look

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Gift art for @snoodls of Chief Pact Medical Officer, Doctor Ophyrra Faithrazor. I love that Ophyrra is friends with Vax, because any time they inhabit the same space it’s like this.

I love nothing more than to listen to one or two songs on repeat when I’m drawing, so this July’s gift art came with government-assigned playlists. guess which one matched to which… LOL:

Let’s Get This Over With by They Might Be Giants

Various Kitchen Utensils by Skybox

Lollipop by MIKA

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Artfight gift art for swordsandspectacles, featuring their Commander Mórgacht Gormean and LANDSEER‘s Commander Varro Hawkpaw. I am not immune to co-commanders hahaha, gw2 story is elevated by playing together!

I love nothing more than to listen to maybe one or two songs on repeat when im drawing. So, this year’s gift art comes with government-assigned playlists. Here is maybe an inordinate amount of whimsy for the Brink:

Mischievous Alchemy by Amos Roddy

The River by Mitchell Pasmans

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Gift art for my friend @aghastro of his character Charon. I've wanted to draw Charon for a dog's age now hahaha... moon has a tremendous talent for visual storytelling and it shines through his characters. tender and bittersweet and splittingly funny and sometimes all of the above at once. He Has The Range! Please look at his work!!

As is customary, I love nothing more than to listen to maybe one or two songs on repeat when I'm drawing. So, this year's gift art comes with government-assigned mini-playlists:

Watermark by Sleeping At Last

Heart of Stone by Iko

そのいのち／Sono Inochi by 中村佳穂／Kaho Nakamura (the live version also kicks ass!)

[m0r1bund]

I want to step aside and say I'm grateful for everyone who has shared my adoptables, bought 'em, enjoyed them with your eyeballs, or just hung around in general. I don't like to mix money with art, but these past two months I've been in a tight position where I needed to to make ends meet. I didn't want to lead with this because we're all broke motherfuckers out here, and you know how it is. being poor can be the most shameful and humiliating thing in the world, even when you know in your forebrain that it's not something you can necessarily control.

Thankfully, this is a transition period. I'm lucky to have the support of really cool people who have made it possible for me to secure some work doing what I love. 🤞 with any luck, we will be out of the woods soon.

As much as I hem and haw about making money off of my art, this has been an encouraging experience. I've enjoyed being able to act on design ideas that wouldn't fit into my own stories, but are really fun in someone else's hands. I also learned a lot during this brief return to the adoptable market, which I will share below, in hopes that maybe it can help others who find themselves in the same position.

I've been strict with pricing my work hourly, rather than just slapping on a price that "feels right" for the perceived complexity/finish/originality of the design. It's like pulling teeth, because I'm always slower than I think I am. I try to hold onto a piece of advice that I heard somewhere, which I will paraphrase poorly. Basically, even though your instinct might be to make a lot of small, affordable things, so you're not putting all your eggs in one basket or setting yourself up for disappointment if there's no bites, it's sometimes more "efficient" to do expensive jobs that are few and far in-between. there is... obvious... tension between this and my feelings about accessibility. one thing wins over the other when you're in survival mode, for better or worse. but i feel fortunate to be able to eat today so that i can pay it forward tomorrow.

i've tried to be conscientious of overhead, platform fees, and invisible labor. I probably would have made more money if I had conducted sales as auctions and exchanged money through direct invoices, but I chose to use ko-fi and fixed prices because that meant there was less friction between sharing my work, conducting a sale, exchanging money, and distributing the files. This might seem like a deranged tradeoff (surely it would be more worthwhile to just exchange a few emails) but it reflects the state of mind I was in before I received the news about my new job. If I wanted to keep doing this for what seemed like an indefinite amount of time, I needed to make it as simple as possible.

in line with the above, I chose to make adoptables rather than open commissions because the risk of losing time without any financial return was acceptable to me. time and technical effort was not my limiting resource, haha... I really respect commission work, but it's challenging for me to do. maybe you can guess from my desire to use ko-fi that it takes more effort for me to translate a client's vision into visual art than it takes for me to spitball an idea and hope someone will like it enough to take it home. I already prioritize this more "intensive" work as part of my (current) dayjob, so it's better for me to pick the path of least resistance in this case.

all of this rides on having a following. honestly, i wasn't sure things would work out here on tumblr. i have traditionally sold adoptables over on deviantart, where I have a larger following. dA recently enshittified (again) so this blog became an impromptu experiment in critter sales. I'm happy that I haven't had to touch dA, in the end, and I really owe that to you guys. thank you! (again!!)