Bonjour. Je m'appelle Linzer. J'ai une... um...

(what's the French for bat???)

Well, uh... *cough* anyway, remember Vespera?
(link 1) (link 2)
I made her back in 2017 (see link 1). I fleshed her out a bit in my head, but never drew her again except for Don't Break the Chain, where she appeared a fair few times and I slightly refined her design... and learned to draw a chubby body a bit better. Yeah, she was always supposed to be on the squishy side, but it's not very evident in that coloured pic. The only other time I drew her was that mini sketch page from 2018 (see link 2), where I again slightly improved the anatomy, and changed her markings, which I decided to keep for this new pic.

Well, recently I felt like redesigning her. I worked on this throughout the night, and now it's lunchtime and I'm posting it. And as you can see, in addition to making her hair, ears, general facial structure, etc look nicer, I also gave her a very different body type. The slightly chubby body never really fit with her story, so the idea was that this was several years later, when she'd spent a decade or so cooped up inside a house hiding from the scary humans (since she used to be human herself until a science experiment gone wrong turned her into a "were-bat" - it's all a bit '50s B-movie). And as a result, she uh... got a bit out of shape. But I felt that was just awkward, and if I want to represent that body type, I could make a new character who it would fit better. So this new, toned Vespera is her in her prime.

One artist I rather like is guoh, who has a great style with his (?) anatomy. He really strikes a perfect balance between realistic and stylised, and I like the sketchy lineart and black-and-white drawings that he does most of the time. So I was inspired by guoh for the execution of this pic, but also I used some of his pics for reference to try and improve my own anatomy. And the results are quite staggering - maybe you can't see a huge improvement over my previous anthro pics, and this is by no means perfect, but I was struggling a fair bit until the moment I started to more closely examine the way he does stomachs, hips, and necks and shoulders - and some of the ways he uses angles to make things pop. Then things just started to click into place and all of a sudden, I was really pleased with what was in front of me. Independently of that, the hair and face took a while to get right, but aside from some of the aforementioned angles, that was all me. This time, I decided to be a bit more faithful to the California leaf-nosed bat, which she was primarily based on, and actually make the shape accurate. I also put her ears in a folded-back position since I have plenty of characters with big upright ears already.

So yeah, very happy with this. I love the new hairstyle - like Harper's recent design tweaks, it fixes problems that I'd had from the beginning. ](And sexy too.) I MEAN, WHAT! WHO SAID THAT?! *ahem* It remains to be seen if this will make me draw her more, but this was eventually fun after the frustrating parts were over. Oh yeah, and I drew it in Krita with a pencil-styled brush, and added the tone and texture in Photoshop.

Oh, and here you can see the single-colour version of my new logo, which I'll use on simpler drawings with plain backgrounds.






NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA BAT AAAAABS