I was comparing your artwork for equivalent-to-newborn (Mercyplates "growth tube malfunction" timeline) and more-or-less modern-day age Papyrus. I'd like to write about how artists adapted Papyrus's appearance to little kid/baby proportions, and I think it would help if you talked to me about your design choices.
Baby Papyrus is sort of a unique little thing in fandom I’ve noticed, so I might as well write a post of sorts about it, haha.
But how you interpret a baby Papyrus kind of depends on how you conceptualize Papyrus’s head in the first place. Although even here this can be inconsistent… I’ll get to that in a second. But Papyrus’s head can vary from artist to artist… personally, I tend to view his head as having a separated lower jaw, so his skull and jaw are in two different pieces. Other artists however interpret his skull as one whole thing! So that can affect how he looks as a baby too…
Anyway, adult Papyrus generally tends to be a lot of sharp angles and harder lines, he has a bit of a boxy head to contrast with Sans’s round soft head. I touched a bit about how I construct his head in a post a while back. It can be a bit hard to baby-ify that kind of head though… so what I generally do is soften the edges of his cheeks, increase the size of his cranium, make his eyes bigger and closer together with his nose, and make his lower jaw smaller and less angular. That tends to bring him closer to a baby-ish look than his normal head.
However, and this is a trend I’ve noticed with other artists too actually, sometimes when I want to draw a baby Papyrus, or even just a generally cute or chibi or small Papyrus, sometimes I just… skip his lower jaw entirely. That leaves him just as a skull with little teeth on the bottom. Something about Papyrus being jawless just looks adorable to me, sort of similar to a mouthless look on certain characters in general? I’m tempted to do it all the time, haha.
The thing is, I’ve seen this with baby Papyruses a LOT! I’m not sure if someone started it and it just caught on, or it’s just something that’s generally appealing about more normal skele heads, but a lot of artists, even if they draw an adult Papyrus totally differently, like drawing a baby Papyrus without a jaw and just as a cute head. Baby Papyrus with no jaw doesn’t make sense when you compare him with his adult version who has a very clear and pronounced jaw but it’s just… so cute for some reason…
