hello hello!! its a big giant post about my beasts and their designs! ill be going over the different inspirations and thoughts i had while making these designs, alongside the talks I had with my beta reader Bea about them!
lets talk about my choices and such first. the beast have been in the works for longer than the ancients, actually!
first we'll cover the whos and whys! it took me a little bit to chose who exactly i wanted my beasts to be. i knew i wanted rye, pie (though at first it was going to be stardust), and bright right from the start, but it was figuring out silence and (at the time) deceit that was giving me trouble. before I settled on BR, i actually considered crepe to be custards beast, until my lovely bea pointed out that BR would be perfect for the role!!
cant exactly remember why we chose dozer in the first place, but i think it stemmed off of this joke. ironically, many things that happen in my stories tend to stem off of a joke.
but in the end, the biggest reason (outside of spoilers) i chose dozer to be silence was because of this phrase
okay now the stuff you actually want to see!
around the same time i was writing the dream a little dream of me arc, i was figuring out how our beasts would look! coincidentally, daldom was also our first look at BRC (or the lack thereof)
most of it was just musings at first, deciding that bright would be a fairy (later fae), pie would have her ribbons be snakes, raisin would be based off of mourning practices, etc. after that it was a matter of figuring out what exactly each beast would wear and stylistic choices.
when this blueberry pie costume for ovensmash came out, i was absolutely ecstatic because!! that was the look i was going for! ofc i didnt want to over complicate my designs so, while i was inspired, I made the outfit a more simple hanfu, which leaned more chinese than korean, but i thought it looked better! i really liked the colors they used for the costume so i did Yoink that, because it was pretty and the gradient of her original dress... wasn't my favorite. I also used similar colors for her eyecings, keeping her original color for the base.
i also loved the pose they gave her and i wanted her to be holding her snake, so I did my best to replicate it.
the reason i went with snakes is a reference to the story of the Garden of Eden and the snake who lead Eve to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Since she was the Archive of Knowledge, I thought it was fitting. and also its cute to theres that.
her soul jam placement took over the gem she already had. she was such a perfect fit she already had a place for me to put Futility. love u pie <33
with gingerbright, I later went with her being fae. now the thing about fae is that traditionally, they dont have wings, but without them she just looked sort of... empty? i was actually convinced in my decision to keep her wings after i was on a walk and i saw this gorgeous butterfly that had pink details on its wings. everybody say thank you random butterfly.
bright was... ridiculously hard to pin down for some reason? i went through about three different iterations before i finally came up with a design i liked.
i also tried multiple variations of her soul jam placement and shape, before just going with the ESC shape and crown because its recognizable and i liked it.
moving on to black raisin cookie. the first few ideas i had for her were overwhelmingly colorful and just didnt fit.
toraja is a colorful and beaded look, using a lot of reds. because brc was going to be purple, the colors would often clash, no matter what I tried.
antyeshti had the same sort of issue. the white and the flowers gave her a very wonky look and i struggled to make them fit the CRK sprite style. so i kept her very simple, relying more on what she already had with a few spruce ups! youre perfect as you are, BRC <33
the wings on her head, while matching a future awakened design for custard, are also in reference to Seraphim, who are often depicted with multiple sets of wings and eyes/are faceless.
her soul jam took on the design on her eyecing in her original form, both as a callback and for genuine lore reasons.
rye... is a cowboy. shes a cowboy! i like cowboys! im southern! ive had a lot of cowpoke characters in the past, so it was pretty easy to adapt her to my liking.
with rye, it was more a matter of adding details to her design, making her poncho more eye catching and balancing out the yellows (because in her og design its uneven and its pissed me off for YEARS!)
i couldnt find a good photo of chaps, so everyone say thank you fallout wiki (another favorite game of mine). i thought adding in little details like that would bring out the Soul Jam more, which I did make into a belt buckle, because cowboy.
i made her a lot sharper, with her shoes having longer spokes and having her hair be more wild and her braid shorter and less flowy. it gives her silhouette a more unstable look.
also! her eyecing is a reticle! an aiming apparatus!
finally... my sweetest boy. dozer. it is INSANELY difficult to turn a character with three colors into a beast cookie, let me tell you. i was genuinely hitting my head against my desk trying to figure it out. he doesnt even have normal eyecings (┬┬﹏┬┬)
the most i had in mind for him when it came to designs was that i wanted him to be in a night gown and i wanted him to look slightly similar to saint b.
it was @summerdoddles idea to cover dozer in moss! (amazing little doodle of him which inspired the better pose for his sprite.)
i was also have issues with colors, especially when it came to balancing the blue of his clothes with the moss. so i went looking for color ideas on the cr wiki (thank you cr wiki) and found this landmark from the wind archer update that had the perfect greens i was going for!
thanks again summer for being a great sport and listening to my ramblings. but the end result was absolutely perfect!!
and thats that ☆*: .｡. o(≧▽≦)o .｡.:*☆!! woaw! i had to cut down a bit because i started rambling and going off about random shit and you guys dont want that, you wanna know design stuff!!
