Title: Bits&Bobs: Meet The Kits
Traditional. Pencil, Color Pencil, Ink. 3 hours 20 minutes.
Sven's little league team, The Kits. Also his main friends and social group.
Torvald, Helmer, and Cadence were first mentioned in The Princess & The Pirate as friend's Sven could have gone trick or treating with but didn't. At the time I did not know anything about these characters, not even their species. However, I knew that it was important to show that Sven had a sizable male friend group. Where as Sven can't talk or make friends with girls to save his life, this isn't because he is completely shy or anti-social. I want to show that Sven is actually quite well adjusted at making friends with members of his own sex. This is in contrast to Kyaw who has the exact opposite problem, perfectly able to make friends with the opposite sex and almost completely incapable of making friends of the same sex. This is important. It means that Sven isn't friends with Kyaw because he has no friends. Rather this is about Sven making a friend outside of his comfort zone, outside of the kinds of boys he would normally associate with. In a sense a certain betrayal of his surrounding expectations from friends and family.
We see here that Sven, actually feels very connected to his friend group. Kyaw was not someone Sven would have gone out of his way to know. But because Kyaw expressed interest in him, and because Sven is actually a loving and understanding fur deep down, he wanted to let him in and give him a chance. But this can't help but conflict with his prior identity.
This is something I'm planned to explore in upcoming parts of The Mischievous Mistletoe. We've only seen very little so far of these other friends and their relationship with Sven. Torvald was drawn over a year ago now, but I've been thinking about the other characters for a long time.
I'm very happy with how Helmer and Cadence came out in this picture. I had been thinking that Helmer should be a fawn for a while, but wasn't 100% sure since this is a prey animal, and I had considered the idea of making Sven's friend group exclusively predators. Another hesitancy was that there was another character planned to be a fawn and I try to avoid species duplication. However, I'm really happy how Helmer came out and I think it's perfect for the character. I might keep the other character a fawn or change it, but that remains to be seen.
Cadence species was largely undecided. Then I decided that since Kangaroo's, wolves, and deer, are all large animals (when compared to rabbits), it made sense to choose another large species. Specifically I wanted a north american species, suggesting that Sven is the odd one out, being the only non-native species. In fact I now plan to have it as an important part of Sven's back story that he moved to The Valley and was the "new kid on the block" at one point, but quickly got accepted into the group. Torvald and Helmer were likely friends before they even met Sven. Anyway, for Cadence I finally decided an Ocelot was a good choice. Reasonably large north american predator with a distinct look from a wolf.
Torvald underwent some design changes. The original sketch was not terribly good and not up to the standard of the other Bits&Bobs cast. He also was too generic in appearance I felt. I eventually decided I need to make Torvald more wolf-like by giving them a longer snout. My character designs usually feature very short snouts, which works well for most species, but really doesn't communicate much in the way of wolfiness. I definitely like this version better than the original, but he may still change. For the time being though this is definitely a much better design.
In any case I think Helmer and Cadence are really cute here and I'm happy with those designs. I'm also very happy that Sven came out super cute here, easily the cutest of the bunch, and it's easy to see why Kyaw would fall in love with him.
There are other members of the team, but these are the ones who are closest to Sven. The one's he'd consider to be his friends, or best friends. I also know they have a rival team called "The Cubs". We might not get to know much about the other Kits or The Cubs, simply because they won't be much needed for the story. Creating additional characters and backstories is time consuming, but I felt it was important to build out this detail of the lore so that we can start to understand where Sven is coming from and why being friends with Kyaw is such a concern for him. Why it is such a dangerous move for him socially. Also to understand Sven did have a life before Kyaw, and a good one at that. Kyaw has been something of a disruptive force in his life, but one that Sven seems strangely drawn to, despite apparently having everything a boy could want (save for a girlfriend).
I may at one point make a similar friend group for Kyaw to parallel Sven's friend group. These friends will all be girls of course. Primarily I may eventually invent his friends from ballet class, to compare and contrast to Sven's baseball team.
This image was made in preparation for Part III of The Mischievous Mistletoe, which is still under development. So look forward to seeing these characters make a brief appearance in the upcoming storyline.
Zivrshka
Keywords
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Published:
2 years, 2 months ago
25 Jan 2023 20:38 CET
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