More art from 2012! This time showing a bit of where Spotlighters diverged from, a concept lost to time. After Project LAYHR, I really wanted to do another adopt shop on Gaia really badly, and tossed around ideas for a While. One of these was the Viatori, dimensional wanderers with cool magic compasses, antykthera, that guided their paths. A lot changed and a lot was lost, but parts of them changed and were recycled into some ideas that are still bonking around today! They wound up looking too much like a cross between Kaerith's species, kyne, and layhr, but after a bunch of concepting around eventually the four ears, glowy ribs and tail stuck and found their way onto something else with Spotlighters, and I thought it would be cool to show a flowchart for kinda what happened there, since they don't look at all the same now!

Bits and pieces of them also got recycled into Alter (formerly gogglebeast)'s more monstery form, and I just realized that parts of the whole magic dimensional wanderer thing reflect both in illusionmasters and crownrooks in bits and pieces, though I think illusionmasters were already a thing then, just not very developed. Anyway, I remember thinking how you know, we see a lot of finalized concepts when we look at concepts and species and worldbuilding that people share, and it can seem really daunting as younger (or even not) artists on how they got there, because coming up with a fully polished idea all at once is daunting- we don't usually see everything that it took and changed to get there, these things rarely happen all at once and are often built upon in bits and pieces and I like to share when I can.