Author notes

pg 50

daidaishar

on Feb. 9, 2006

so, now we've got a good look at phoenix. I did this page a while before the others, so his skin-tone is a little funky. I also colored this without inking it first, I just put transparent layers over the sketch. Now sure how I feel about this approach. i mostly tried it because I really liked the sketch and didn't want to risk it too my still tenuous inking ability.

anywho, now for why I hate Phoenix:
Phoenix is inteligent, power-hungry, manipulative and arrogant. Normaly I like characters like this (to an unhealthy degree, ask Cersie). I find them infinitly more entertaining than honnorable heros. I also had alot of fun with Phoenix's design. I'm not used to avian wings, so those were a bit of a pain, but I had fun making his ears weird and love doing facial markings. Also, because I'm using the western phoenix myth, there is only one phoenix, and this lets me evade two difficult points: one, I'm terrible at naming characters, but there is only one phoenix, so any furthus identification than "Phoenix" is unnessesar. Two, manga drawing styles have difficulty with differentiating between pretty boys, and girls. With Phoenix, this is not a problem. I animal=no mates=no reproduction=no gender. That's right, Phoenix is genderless, although he prefers the pronoun "he." That means there's no problem if he starts looking more masciline or more feminine. nice, huh? In short, I should love Phoenix, but something about him rubs me the wrong way. It's quite a mystery to me.

Phoenix gave me a lot of trouble on this page. It wan't drawing or coloring him that was difficult, it was adding text. I'm not sure how he managed this, but any text I placed near him was vanished, flippeds upside down, or pushed off the side of the page. Brat.

Anyway, ummmm, when I finished this page I realised that these two are both dark-skinned. This is not a racial commentary or anything, I just thought that since I'm basing the fae off a butterfly, I should make her body dark, and since Phoenix has lots of sun symbolism, he should be tan.