#askento

ASK AND YOU SHALL RECIEVE (very late)

Very rare fully clothes Sal

Found an old wip of some alternate outfit sketches and had some fun with it. Sal tends to wear more human styles when actually clothed, so I wanted to play around with some hybrid fashion of Sal's style with some formal borrower outfits (Something you'll see a lot more with Tamius)

*pushes your favorite mug off the table*

I've had so much hand practice lately <3

Ahh this is such a good question!

I think Finding Strength has some really fun examples of this.

The borrowers (might give them their own fancy pants original name so TBD) have some pretty interesting differences from humans. One of my favorite is their view on skin. They get cold far easier than people, and showing excess skin is far more intimate and not casually done as a result. They have a practice of tattooing important life events, connections, blessings achievements etc... on their skin, and the location of which is important as well, with the closer to the core of the body being far more "important to ones being" and considered very intimate details about them (marriage, trauma, blessings, goals, mourning) whereas things on the extremities could be things such as representing slaying a mouse, a tattoo gifted from a family member to show their love etc...

Overtime this has resulted in untattooed skin being viewed in a variety of ways. It can be seen as innocent/youthful/naïve or inexperienced... or even be seen as naked in a way, like the person is uncovered. On the flipside, more negative connotations could be that the person is lazy/unloved/underachieved/lonely or even that they're hiding something. The negative connotations are less common and usually paired with some other indicators (specifically someone who is old and has no tattoos and no one really knows them?? sketchy.)

This makes it extremely bizarre and borderline inappropriate interacting with most humans-- the combination of how much more skin they're okay showing, the sheer amount of skin, and the fact that for many of them its untattooed is just unfathomably scandalous for the small folk.

BONUS

There is a lot of slang that Tamius will use in Finding Strength! I love giving him all these different little sayings and insults.

They have their own writing system. Its still spoken English its a 34 letter alphabet with one tone/accent indicator.

There are borrower specific cooking practices and recipes I am super excited to showcase!

They have their own style of traditional dance

Added bonus

This was buried in the bottom of my inbox from an ask meme I did years ago so I'm just gonna answer two random ones from this post, about Aedes 😭💀

Does your character have a human height equivalent? (Ex. How tall would they all be if they were the same size?)

Aedes is a surprisingly tall man. I've gone back and forth between 6'1 to 6'4 over the years but I love the idea of him when "human sized" still being a bit abnormal/out of place.

Despite the fact the man is vaguely 5-6ish inches, Aedes is actually used to being "big" - a concept that will get explored in coming chapters 👀

Something that your character’s different sized friends do that annoys them?

Aedes gets annoyed being "plucked" up, having his size (or lack thereof) mentioned, or being cooed over.

ACK! Too many. I think this is a nice opportunity to show off some wips/art of my mains 💕

Currently I have 4 ongoing stories (Which you can find here on my Masterpost)

Bite Me has Aedes and June

The Shadow We Cast has Mark, Sal and Betty (with another character to be introduced very shortly)

Finding Strength has Rose and Tamius

INSTAЯ has Dawn, Honey, Bram and Clyde

These guys are still going through designing, but I should get a design settled soon!!

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