The new and improved Phyress 2.0, now with added chirping features and three new settings to make your snow dragon building experience that much more chaotic! Orders your today, and we'll throw in a free teddy plushie so she doesn't tear the entire house down to find it!

SHE'S FINALLY HEEREEEEEEE! The new Phyress ref is all ready, and it's just absolutely gorgeous and I love it so much <3
For those of you that's been here a while, and have seen a lot of this gremlin, or maybe are just checking the older ref out of curiosity, you might be wondering what's different ?
She doesn't look all that different, has she even changed, you might ask.

The answer is, yes, yes she has! But not in any super drastic ways, because at the end of the day, I still wanted it to be HER, since I really do like her design.
Instead, it's more subtler ways, with the goal of simplifying parts of her design, mostly patterns, that were a bit too busy/complex, to make it a little easier on artists that have to draw her, as well as trying to incorporate the phoenix theme into her main design.

It's subtle, as I said, but if you compare the two side by side, you'll see what I mean! Overall I'm super happy with the changes, she still very much feels and looks like her, but it's just a little more streamlined and thematic now, and I honestly can't wait to commission people to draw her! Very excited to see her drawn in her new style! I've actually been sitting on the redesign since May, so almost half a year! That's how long it took us to get around to actually get started on the ref, since I had other ideas I wanted to be done first, Aspen is completely innocent in that regard. Once we started the ref, they've just knocked it out of the water, which is good because parchment doesn't do well in water, so probably saved it as a result c':

And of course, can't forget to mention the lil' proud face on the right! That's right, her phoenix form is now properly official on the ref, which was one of the main goals of this remake, and she looks absolutely adorable and super proud of her lil' scroll <3

I also really do appreciate the thematic attention to detail, that I'm sure some of you have noticed, where the main ref is all worn and damaged, not in the best condition, while the phoenix part is all pristine and nice looking! This was a suggestion from Aspen, to act as a lil' nudge to the fact that the two characters, even though they're of the same origin, are different in nature! We decided to give the phoenix form some light healing magical capabilities to also further separate the two in that regard!

If by chance some of you read the text on the ref, you might have noticed something that wasn't on the old one. Namely, the mention of their inner magical cores, a chaotic and unstable one for the main form, and a stable benign one for the phoenix.

I wanted to go a bit more into detail about these, especially for the main form, but we already had to trim the text to avoid it being too bloated with info, so the plan is that all of her ragey fire stuff, will be split up and get its own separate reference sheet, because it is a bit of a complicated beast to explain, so it really wouldn't fit on this one.

The short version, is that Phyress has an unstable chaotic magical core inside of her. Not like a physical core like in a planet type thing, but more so it's all throughout her body, and is responsible for keeping her well and good, and under normal circumstances, it's entirely harmless. She is actively suppressing it to avoid it growing more unstable, and so long she keeps doing that, which thankfully she's very good at, it'll remain as is. This is what causes her tail to be on fire, that's the magical energies manifesting themselves, and that happened to be where it's able to escape.

Now, when she feels threatened, that's when trouble arises, because her focus will shift to defending herself and putting up an aggressive display, and in doing so, she's unknowingly releasing her control of the core, which means it'll start growing more unstable. Up to a point, this is all reversible when she calms back down again, but if it gets beyond that point, well, that's what the second part of the ref will be focused on!

But, I can say, it looks a little something like this

That's the gist of it!

Also also, maybe some of you noticed her teddy is looking slightly different! There'll be a lore explanation for that later. Yes the teddy gets lore, no it won't get its own look at me ref sheet.
Even though that sounds absolutely hilarious. Anywho, it's already something we've talked about, hence why we just included the changes now, to avoid having to revisit and change the ref later on <:

Anywho, that's enough rambling from me haha, sorry!
Thank you for reading all of that if you did, I hope it was interesting and made sense!

Phyress is mineeeeeee
Artist is  Aspen (Bluesky)