Brushes used, from the Clip Studio Asset Browser:

Soft shading: Oil Painting Brushpack (ID: 2094247)

Hatching in the 1st drawing, text in the 2nd: Messy Brush Set (ID: 2221797)

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Alright alright these two have probably the most concrete backstory of any of my OCs, so this is going to be a long one. Word count: 1,283.

Quick identity stuff: Linnet is completely gender-apathetic and goes by she/her purely because that's what people tend to call her. She's very aroace and sex-repulsed. Mirroring this, Kobi cares about his gender and is confidently a trans* man and goes by he/him, but is sexuality-apathetic. (*There's all kinds of societal gender nuance here, but "trans" is just the easiest way to convey what he is. He adopted the trans label later in life for convenience.) They're chronologically old as hell, but that nuance will get addressed later.

These two were designed by a highly advanced, now-extinct civilization. They were cutting-edge technology, blending organic and mechanical components. The biggest breakthrough was their bio-mechanical brains, but there's other fancy tech like their upper arms that are flexible and stretchy yet very tough, precision fine motor skills, and fingers that can super-heat for cutting and welding. This served a dual purpose. Primarily, they were designed as adorable little servants to perform a wide variety of skilled tasks, but their civilization was also hyper-militarized, so a lot of their tools doubled as weapons. Both are physically delicate, so they're mostly suited for assassinations. Linnet fights close and personal with high speed and claws while Kobi is a skilled marksman. They're also like a two-member hivemind who are in constant wireless contact. They can literally put their heads together for complex mental tasks. They have distinct personalities, but the line between them can blur significantly. They're greater than the sum of their parts, and they can't bear to live without each other.

Their civilization had a brutally strict caste system, and Linnet and Kobi lived in an unusual crack between the castes. Their creators were high caste and were basically celebrities for their contributions to science, and the twins were mini-celebrities by extension. But at the same time, they were servants and a sub-species. Their opinions of their society were complex as a result. Linnet with her dominant personality especially wanted to be taken seriously as a mature adult instead of a cute little maid. Kobi rebelled against being cutesy and feminine entirely and wanted to present masculine. Both were developing empathy for the lower castes. Their creators were starting to get a little concerned about this expectation-defying behavior, but they wouldn't have the opportunity to do anything about it, because their situation was about to take a turn.

(CW: Injury and death)

Their civilization was living on borrowed time. It was already very old, relations with other factions had soured from eras under its oppressive fist, and the lower castes were beyond their breaking point. It was rotting from outside and within, propped up only by the hubris and military strength of the upper class. But former enemies teamed up against a common foe, and the siege of their home planet was hard and fast. Linnet and Kobi became escorts for evacuating nobles, but their space shuttle was hunted down and crippled, and it made an emergency landing on an inhospitable jungle planet. They tried to hide there to wait things out, but the planet itself had other plans. The nobles were hunted by fauna, stricken with disease, and eventually succumbed to the elements. Leaving their perfect artificial lifeforms all alone. Servants with no one to serve. They got their wish for more independence in the worst way possible.

Things can always get worse. Eventually, autonomous hunter units were sent out to find stragglers. The unit sent to investigate the planet near the escape vessel's last known position found Kobi first. He's not useless in close combat by any means, but again, he and Linnet are fragile. Strike first or strike never, and the hunter struck first. It clawed him in his left eye, shattering it, then snagged his right arm as he turned to run away, ripping his shoulder out and shredding his arm cable. With their mental link to alert her, Linnet was on the hunter as soon as physically possible. She got a strong first strike in, but it still raked her across her side before she could cripple it.

Linnet had to triage Kobi's wounds before tending to herself. She got a hair's breadth away from not being able to stop her own bleeding in time. If she had passed out, it would have been over for both of them. Kobi woke up half paralyzed from a bad blow to the head that damaged both biological and mechanical parts of his brain. They didn't have the materials to fix his arm or eye, and even if they did, they don't have the knowledge of how to rebuild the cable. That documentation burned alongside their creators.

At this point, they resigned themselves to needing to wait a long time before trying to signal for help. They can hibernate, and so they did for a few years, only waking up occasionally for food, water, and to check on the solar panels scavenged from their escape vessel. After a while, they started sending an S.O.S. signal, and they waited. And waited. In and out of hibernation for a few hundred years. Their equipment started to wear out, and eventually they could no longer maintain the signal. Hope was lost, but they were too scared to die, so with nothing but time, they continued to wait and wait.

By the law of large numbers, eventually lightning will strike twice. A different ailing ship crashed nearby against all odds, albeit still around a day's walk through dense foliage. Kobi couldn't walk, so Linnet had to investigate on her own, well outside of their wireless connection. Despite everything that happened to them, splitting up to investigate an unknown crash was the most stressful thing they had ever done.

Linnet's first contact with the survivors was hearing a young Dayne (another of my OCs) being menaced by the local wildlife. (He had naively tried to scout around by himself to be helpful.) Linnet had to throw caution to the wind because she wasn't about to let their possible ticket off the planet get eaten. On one hand, this was good, because it wordlessly conveyed that she wanted to help. On the other, seeing a completely unfamiliar alien eviscerate the beast that was trying to chew your fingers off in a single calculated strike without knowing her intentions was possibly scarier than the animal. Not helping things were a language barrier and Linnet's completely decayed social skills after only interacting with her brother for hundreds of years, minus the time spent in hibernation.

It was a strained process, but eventually Linnet won the trust of Dayne's group through lots of mutual miming, pointing, and drawing. She conveyed that she would help with anything they wanted if they helped her bring Kobi over and let them come along when help came. For the sake of summary, I'm cutting out a big chunk of story here, but they all get off the green hell planet!

They begin to chip away at the language barrier, Kobi gets his eye and brain put back together, and— much to their chagrin— they go back to being mini-celebrities, because it's not every day you run into new highly advanced alien life. But extrovert Kobi had more people to talk to, and introvert Linnet had new planets to explore. She found Rayner after their spectacular conscientious objection, and she and Kobi made a project out of repairing them. They became a new found family member, and the twins stayed close with Dayne and his family as well. The family kept growing, they could go back to creative and scientific pursuits, they began the slow process of healing, and they were free. Both from that hellish planet and from their old caste.

During The Great Post-Art Block Art Style Reset™ I got super fixated on anatomy studies, and learning new things really reignited my passion for art! And now I've been doing lots of smooth shading because you can show form better and use more colors without it looking weird. I started and finished 2 different pieces between finishing the 1st drawing and the 2nd, and I can already see improvements! Downside of smooth shading is it takes forever, though. No clue how long the 1st drawing took, because over the span of 4 months I hopped between it and making 3D sculpt references (because my brain works so much better in 3D).

Meanwhile I did time the hug ""sketch"" and it took 28 hours 24 minutes. 💀 Good chunk of that was trying to figure out how to use a new brush set though.

Speaking of, have a bunch of Clip Studio Asset IDs!

SU-Cream Pencil (ID 1761353): Shading on the 1st drawing. A classic, to me.

線画用鉛筆風ブラシ (ID 1692270): Line art on the 2nd drawing. First time using it and I really dig it.

Tマーカー風ブラシセット (ID 1692034): Shading and texture on the 2nd drawing. My advice is adjust the pen pressure to be gentler for the love of your hands. I love the look though.

かすれ油彩■リメイク (ID 1776520): Also shading on the 2nd drawing, for the soft hue shifts.

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NOW let's talk about my kidsss. I basically have to re-introduce them because it's been so long and they've been rewritten a bunch. Have my attempt at writing short bios and backgrounds because I doubt people will read them if they're too long. They're probably already too long lmao rip. Disclaimer that NONE of this is set in stone, I change things constantly.

—Dayne

Dayne is in his upper 20s and goes by he/him, but isn't strict about it. He's sort of gender-apathetic and presents however he wants, but that typically aligns with his AGAB, so he feels like he's not "trans enough" to use the label. The majority of his friend group is transgender, so they joke a lot about how he's an egg and doesn't realize it. He gladly plays into the bit, and isn't opposed to the possibility that he's "properly" trans, but at this snapshot of canon, he doesn't feel strongly enough about it to change anything. He IDs as pansexual or bi but prefers masc-leaning folks.

Dayne was born and raised on a nomadic space station, and he loves it and the other people living there. However, it gave him the subtle social pressure of "you need to be a productive member of the colony for our survival," but he never clicked with any job. What he's amazing at, however, is emotional counseling. He's great at reading people, understanding what they're struggling with, giving advice, mediating conflicts... but since that's not a job with tangible progress, he doesn't see it as valuable. And while he understands mental health well, he has a huge blind spot for himself. Between his family being well-known in the colony and his social skills, he became the epicenter of the social circle of all my OCs.

A random fact is if you ask him how he lost part of his finger, he'll improv you a new ridiculous answer each time you ask. Partly because explaining the true story over and over is draining, but mostly because he thinks it's funny as hell.

—Rayner

Rayner's age varies wildly depending on your metric but that's robots for you. In terms of independence and mental/emotional maturity imo, he's a little under Dayne's age. His pronouns are nuanced. Technically, he goes by anything except it/its (he would get paranoid that people using it see him as a tool), but he typically goes by he/they and generally prefers if you don't switch too often to lessen confusion (following context is hard). Gender identity-wise, his opinion is that he's not applicable and he's totally content with that. Uses the nonbinary label for convenience.

(⚠️ Content warnings for brief mentions of armed conflict, missing persons, and temporary suicide up until the "Their Relationships" section. 🟢 Means a safe paragraph, ⚠️ means CWs.)

⚠️ Rayner was a machine of war made by a faction hostile to the nomad group my OCs are a part of (I really need to start naming things). Long story short, they started cutting corners on monitoring his model's evolutionary learning, and in trying to better understand how his enemies operate, Rayner evolved a form of empathy. He rather quickly concluded his faction are the bad guys, actually, and decided to conscientiously object the only way he could: obeying orders to plant a bomb, but exploiting that he wasn't explicitly told not to warn his "enemies" first and not to get blown up himself. Linnet and Kobi found him years later and investigated, saw the code he evolved and the memories of what he did, and decided to repair him to see what happened. Another long story short, Rayner was granted free will & elevated from AI to AGI, started developing intense anxiety and guilt, and had a rough time adapting to personhood. But thanks to Dayne being aggressively friendly towards people in need of support, he mellowed out. Rayner is thankful for and loyal to his new community.

—Viviana

🟢 Vivi is in her mid-to-upper teens and goes by she/her. She took a hard look at her gender since a lot of her found family is trans, and her conclusion is she's staying a girl because being a girl hecking rocks. She thinks she's bisexual, but as the author word of god; lmao no she isn't. She's asexual but doesn't realize it yet. She's in a funny situation with her datemate Copper, because she might be some flavor of aromantic or demi-romantic as well, but neither realize it because Copper is also probably aro or demi, so both their perspectives are skewed. Word of god again is they're queer-platonic.

Vivi grew up in a farm colony with parents who probably weren't ready to have a kid. All three of them struggled with neuro-divergency, and to this day she's still the quirky autistic kid who gets bullied relentlessly at school. She still likes her parents though, despite their flaws. ⚠️ Tragically, as is somewhat common near areas of conflict, her colony got raided by Rayner's old faction looking to cripple a supply line. Vivi dodged the worst of it but got separated from her parents. The nomad space colony that was on its way to trade arrived to the aftermath, and Rayner, very motivated to fight his old faction, went planet-side to help flush out any attackers who remained. He stumbled upon Vivi, and after unintentionally scaring the hell out of her by being an older model of the robots that took part in the attack, he cleared the misunderstanding and escorted her to safety. The space colony couldn't wait around forever, especially not for one person, and with no word from her parents, she maked the hard decision to leave her past life behind and join the nomads. Thankfully, her new found family ended up being even better for her, but she feels horribly guilty thinking that. The lack of closure haunts her.

🟢 On a lighter note, Vivi's random fact is she's missing a front tooth. Fell out of a tree and flat onto her face right after her adult teeth grew in. Also, she's a scardy cat and suffers from many common phobias, yet she LOVES heights and climbing. This stresses overprotective Rayner out immensely.

—Their Relationships

Freshly free-willed Rayner acted like Dayne's formal bodyguard for a while, since that was the friendliest relationship he had experience with. But Dayne treating him like an equal shifted that into a casual friendship with time.

After the initial scare when they met, Vivi glued herself to Rayner since he was the first person willing to protect her. While that was stressful as hell for Rayner at first because he had zero experience with kids and overthinks responsibilities to a crippling degree, they grew to love each other possibly more than anyone else in the universe. Their relationship doesn't easily fit a nuclear family label, but my best description is it fluctuates between parent/daughter and adult sibling/kid sister depending on Rayner's experience with a situation.

Much later, when Dayne saw how caring and gentle Rayner was with Vivi, he started having thoughts like, "Man, I'd love to have a family with someone like that... ......hold up... oh no... My mom's going to think I'm a freak." (His mom knew Rayner and how close they were, so beyond the initial "dating a robot? what?" she, in fact, did not think he was a freak.) Rayner didn't know how he felt about romance, but after some time to process things, he agreed to try out being in a relationship. With their chemistry and both of their tendencies to openly communicate their feelings, it works out great for them. Also, because they both have low self-esteem yet care deeply for the other, they lift each other up.

Dayne and Vivi are even less nuclear family. They're not like siblings, they're definitely not like parent/child, cousins are too distant, etc. They're just close family! Plain and simple. Dayne's experience with psychology and mental health helps Vivi greatly, and they bond over both enjoying comics & visual novels. Vivi because art is her special interest, and Dayne because of the nostalgia of being a huge comic nerd growing up.

I referenced a few different versions of this meme, but this is the one that had the most of the images in it. I still have no idea what depressed nihilistic person is sitting on— or crouching on?— so I simply didn't think about it. <3

August 26th

Bonus Maverie doodle to better show off her head shape, that she has a lil' tail, and to practice drawing tumby in profile. Not the happiest with it, hence why it's in read-more purgatory, haha. Her hair was fun though.

Dunno how long the reference drawing took since I ricocheted between 3D sculpting and designing and that's hard to time, but the Maverie doodle(?) took 6h 45m and the nihilism meme took 12h 24m. Those are pretty fast by my standards! Especially with smooth shading. I've also gotten better at "I see things I want to tweak, but that'll take time and I'd have to re-export files, so I simply won't. <3" Perfectionism is healing...

Iiiit's brush time! Let's see if I remember all of them, I used a lot... On the Clip Studio Assets browser:

Modified version of the default Textured Pen: Line art on the reference drawing.

Default Design Pencil: Shading in the reference drawing and on Maverie in the nihilism meme.

Raku Drawing Texture Pen (ID 2199256): Line art on the doodle(?) and nihilism meme. Watery version used for shading on the doodle(?). (I really like these brushes. Got them while they were briefly free and I'm sad folks can't easily try them out.)

ザッサラ絵筆油彩風 (ID 1751444): The flowers on Maverie's Hawaiian shirt.

Chunky Triangle (ID 1851789): Water on Maverie's Hawaiian shirt.

Freya brush // watered down ink (ID 1855154): Shading on Copper in the nihilism meme.

Default Gouache brushes: Copper's nihilism background.

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Okay, it's OC lore rambling time. My condolences these ones got long, LMAO.

—Copper McCoy

Copper is 18 years old, agender, and goes by they/them. They prefer gender-neutral terms if possible, but if not they lean femme. (i.e. Call them pretty instead of handsome.) They think they're attracted to girls, but word of god says, "Tee hee, not exactly. They're somewhere on the aro/ace spectrum but haven't realized." They're in a "romantic" relationship with Viviana, who is ALSO aro/ace but hasn't realized, making it harder for EITHER of them to notice something's up. Both are queer-plantonic partners with Maverie, who has accurately guessed that "they're probably QPPs with each other too," but wants to see if/when they realize themselves.

In space with multi-solar-system societies of billions and billions of people, eventually the law of large numbers throws you some anomalies. Copper is one of those anomalies. Their eyes are completely blind, but they have a sense of "sight" that relies on a secret 6th sensation instead of light. To them, things "look" like untextured 3D models. They can view surface texture in amazing detail, can see in the dark, and can see behind them, but there are drawbacks. They can only see surfaces, no color or transparency. So screens and printed pages are blank slates, windows are walls, and rain... oooh, the rain. They have a full-blown phobia of rain because being surrounded in fast-moving "visual" noise in high detail causes unfathomable sensory overload. They can't just close their eyes either, it's inescapable. They were relieved to find a space station to live on.

Speaking of, how did they get there? They spent most of their life in a research facility after their parents surrendered them at a young age. After all, some anomalies are dangerous, and their parents were cowards that didn't even give them a chance. There's obviously lots of resentment from Copper there. As for the facility, it was... fine. There were no cruel experiments or (too much) violation of consent, but Copper hated it anyways. They felt they were treated as a potentially-dangerous novelty instead of a person, and they were trapped with little control over their situation. And they're a very, very rebellious teenager. Their "sight" gives them a huge stealth advantage, and eventually they worm their way out and run away. Now they have a problem though. They're an extremely sheltered teenager with zero life skills trying to live a homeless life. This goes about as well as you'd expect, and their continued existence was touch-and-go through most of it. Until they bump into another runaway; Maverie. They become fast friends, and Maverie has decent survival skills and could improve their situation somewhat. They were still homeless though.

Eventually, the two sneak their way onto the nomadic space station that's the main hub for basically all of my OCs. They get found by Albaer, Dayne's and Elliott's not-exactly-father-figure-but-close-enough, who cares deeply about helping people out of tough situations. He sees right through Copper's and Maverie's lies about what they're doing on the station, but he plays along and helps them for a while to not spook them away. Once enough trust was built, he fully confronts them but lets them know he can help them build a life here if they wanted. And thus they enter the larger story of my OCs.

Copper is extremely cagey about their past and anomalous nature. Even their last name is one they chose for themself. They've only told their absolute closest allies about their anomaly, and their deadname is SUPER dead.

—Vue Na Maverie

That mouthful of a name is because, in Maverie's culture, you just get like 3-5 names. No family names, just hopefully enough names in a specific order to be a unique identifier for you. You can call her by any of her names. (FYI, "Vue" rhymes with "True", and "Na" sounds like the ending of "banana." (I can't think of a better equivalent lmao.)) Maverie is 20 years old and cisgender (she/her), and she's a somewhat aromantic lesbian.

Maverie was a weird kid. She's morbid and unsettling, so other kids tried to bully her. However, instead of being hurt by it, Maverie's response was to get even creepier. It's less fun to bully someone when every interaction with them makes you uncomfortable. Thwarting bullies like that makes her feel powerful, but as a side-effect it pushed away potential friends. But with enough time, occasionally folks would pass her "weirdness test" and like her because of it instead of in spite of it. They were few and far between however, and due to moving a lot, she could never keep school friends for long. When she met Copper, they passed her weirdness test with flying colors. Copper is dark and morbid as well, after all. Now that she has full freedom over her life after running away, she clings to that friendship with everything she has.

Maverie is somehow even more cagey and cryptic about her reason for running away than Copper. The most you'll get out of her is that the reason is a good one, and that she liked / likes the adventures of runaway life better anyways, despite all its challenges. Some folks half-joke that she's anomalous as well, given her creepy tendency to know too much and luck her way through difficult situations, but is she actually? Who knows. ;)