#dasha evers

Such a lovely surprise login into Tumblr! Thank you! I love making papercraft. The results and challenges that come with making them are so engaging. 

Ohhh, favorite OC lore? Let's go by the posts you liked. 

Una the green Tiefling creature papercraft is a fairly clever individual however, she falls for her best friend, Pickle's, misremembered phrases, names, and general concepts. For example, instead of Jimmy-rigging she'll say Timmy-pigging just like Pickle. She believes whole-hardheartedly that he's correct. He's very convincing. She doesn't love, but doesn't hate pickled foods. Without fail she'll always try and give honest reviews to her friend's newest pickle concoction. Here's them going on a swim at a local lake.

The two women dancing are Àiniàn 【爱念】 (left) and Michiru 【美知留】 (right). I use them to practice making sentences in Chinese while developing their relationship and personal struggles as adults. They don't really use pet names or terms of endearment. They either use their given names or already existing nicknames they have. However, Àiniàn developed calling Michiru, Mia. The beginning half of Mia comes from mǐ 【米】meaning rice since Michiru got on Àiniàn's case for not stirring and fragranc-ing her cooked rice before serving. "Ā" 【啊】 was gradually added. 【啊】 is an exclamatory particle in Chinese sentences. I think this is the best example of Àiniàn calling her Mia that I have on my PC (reads right to left).

The little furry creature that's my icon all over my Tumblr is Dasha H. Evers. She's arguably my oldest OC dating back in maybe 2005. She's actually a fox kit despite her cat-ish look. The little universe she comes from is very Bluey-eques at best to describe, so honestly nothing deep in regards of lore. To list a few things: her favorite color is teal and thinks it's the best of blue and green, a sticky nori is her favorite part of the onigiri, and her middle name is Haru meaning spring in Japanese even though she wasn't born in spring. I grabbed the name from the protagonist of Ghibli's The Cat Returns, which is my favorite Ghibli film. Truly child-brain inspiration. 

I've realized most of these lore drops are rather silly. I'm always up for talking about them like most creatives that have OCs! XD

A fun little rewind in time!

I’m looking at my old sketches of when I created my logo for my website and most of my social media platforms. I designed this for a class that focused on creating a professional brand or look for jobs in visual heavy industry like animation and illustration. It was really fun to do. I initially had an idea of my character, Dasha, poking her head out of a circle like Porky Pig, but kept exploring since it didn’t say much of what I do. I remember seeing a bunch of artists examples that drew themselves, made a design out of their initials, used their name for a play on words or incorporated a lightbox in some way for their logo and overall branding. I liked the lightbox idea since I previously tried the initial idea before without much luck. I also couldn’t think of how to visually make the jade stone or the word day as logo for animation.

I recall my roommate who was in the same class mentioned that the lightbox idea was over used or there wasn’t enough variety with it. Thinking what I could do differently, I remember drawing SwolCat parodying Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. I realized that the extra drawings could be the light (or onion skin layer) showing the red or blue pencil drawings from the previous or next frame of animation. It just seemed to all fit in place and was the perfect memorable logo. Bonus: it’s also a little on the silly side making it very on par with my personality.

You can see the sketches from my notebooks and some of the digital concept with color and a by-hand line work for the circle. For my business cards I made alternate version where Dasha is using the lightbox as a hamster wheel. In the end I only used three of the alternate drawings and ditched the one where she’s falling due to limited space. I personally want to animate this for my demo reel at some point.

Dasha and her reflection in the Cartoon Network color palette. From the Twitter trend asking to draw an OC lineless in Cartoon Network’s logo palette.

Don’t know what Dasha is exactly pointing at but she seem absolutely chipper about it!