#Out of all the characters I think Zooble and her buddy were the hardest to color-

[factual-fantasy]

Its finally here! The first look into my Amazing Digital Circus AU that I've been cooking up for the past few weeks! :))

The main thing that is obvious here is a lot of the abstracted members are back. Which is all thanks to Caines efforts in keeping the circus members happy and sane! More on that later I imagine- <XD

Some designs are going to be tweaked a bit further. Gummigoo and Kaufmo aren't quiiiiite where I want them yet.. but none the less! I hope this post made you laugh and I hope to post a bit more about them sometime soon! :))

[tadc-harlequin-au]

God your designs are so fucking good bro, I'd love to know how the design process went

lmfao, I can give some insights

Caine's design was mostly an accident. In the scrapped initial intro animatic for this AU, he had a placeholder design until I could finalize him when I went to clean up the frames

which became this, then this, then...

He literally got designed as the animatic went on, the coat on shoulders was a subconscious approach because I blame One Piece for making me a coat-on-shoulders whore. His final coat design is mostly taken from my own oc lol

up to this point, I had no idea how he would've been colored until I did this shitpost

Pomni's is weird too

She was partially inspired by both the Circus breach crack idea, Pauline from my Unexpected Reunion AU, and Mystery!Pomni because I do love women (in suits)

so if Caine was designed overtime within an animatic, Pomni's design spanned fucking AUs-

Ragatha was literally just me thinking, "hm. what if. hear me out. maid. but tattered skirt cus puppet revolution time"

this is her VERY first appearance and it hasn't changed much since leave me alone let me enjoy women being gay

Now, Kingr is actually the closest ANY design in this AU would come to it's base inspiration Lies of P, because AUGH King of Puppets my beloved

He started as a boss design from the get go then reverse engineered to look more friendly, because by the time I was designing him, I was already incorporating the idea of Pomni having to fight bosses so she could free them from these insane forms of theirs

This idea was recycled from my other AU for fnaf btw, the Eternal Eclipse AU where Freddy has to free the other Glamrocks from their "Primal forms" by fighting them WITH THE POWER OF ROCK AND ROLLLLLLLLLL (which are GIGANTIC and INSANE, sound familiar yet?)

back to the rest, I actually didn't really know what I wanted for Jax, aside from a Cheshire Cat motif from Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland because love that mofo and Jax's constant smile reminds me of him

I guess that's why his initial design was so unnecessarily cluttered and so hard to draw, because all I knew was that I wanted it to be loose, flowy, bouncy and airy, like an actual cartoon. But, still respecting the laws of reality somewhat

and then I had to switch the outfit out, because at around this time, The Patriarch's design was finalized, and I didn't want people to start to think Jax was associated with him purely due to similar palettes. So I sneakily swapped it out with an explorer's outfit (since I was thinking of Jax as the team's scout), and tried to play it off as simply a "oh it was hard to draw"

He was even supposed to have goggles in the newer design, but I scrapped it because I'm repeating the same mistake of making him too cluttered again.

Z is a pretty straightforward one, although they diverged from the initial idea. My first thought was making them a brawler of sorts because they were initially going to be Pomni's training buddy, so I looked up "Victorian brawler" and yoinked the outfit I liked.

The concept of Z being the training dummy was then recycled to be Kingr's role instead because Kingr was more of a tank character than Z, and in turn, she became the weaponsmith

Each part of Z was also inspired by something that randomly came to mind when I was trying to wrack my brain with what parts should they have:

the hook peg is from Hiccup, the other peg is from A series of Unfortunate Events, the antler is a reference to Mystery!Zooble but combined with the Minecraft Warden's palette, spiked chokers were taken from my own sona's eel tongue. The flexible arms are very much Doc ock

Gangle... She was the hardest to design that my brain is blocking me from remembering the process because it was so traumatizing /j

I just know that like Caine, her design was also mostly an accident. Iirc, she wasn't meant to have cat ears/motif in the first place, but after I finished the mask with the <:3 face I went like "fuck it we ball" and went furry mode

I think she was also meant to have painted whiskers, and the only reason why she doesn't is I forgor 💀

There was no inspo for her outfit except maybe Disney Cinderella because I was only putting what worked and discarded what didn't (not recommended)

The double ribbon arms was literally just me thinking the ends are her little fingies, and her "feet" is just me wanting to make her ribbons look like a part of her dress and looking flowy because ew feet

anyways if you can't tell, there's a pattern here: recycle ideas, take inspo, look it up or fuck it we ball when all else fails lol

the lesson here is to not follow in my footsteps because I keep stepping on shit /lh