#fern_thoughts

So unlike with my Ej refs i didnt number these ones because i forgot so we're rawdogging this one

My BIGGEST thing that i try to emphasize when i draw fern is his different body type/general shapes. In the show, we already can tell fern is much thinner than finn, hence why his hood stands out more and his hips are more prominent. Here I added a few things as well- a square torso, longer limbs, and bigger hands/feet. I've always associated longer limbs and a smaller torso with more nimble and precise characters.... something that I like to think fern leans more into for combat compared to finn. Also, his limbs being really long but wider at the ends is also partly in reference to tree stumps and roots. Another thing with this shape is that he sorta reminds me of a daddy long legs lol (not REALLY a spider- not even an arachnid- but i like to associate him with arthropods)

You might have also noticed the more prominent tufts on some of his joints. Those are actually there in the show, I just made them stand out more. Mostly just because it's fun to draw, but this is ALSO done because... tarantula......... tarantulas are very "fluffy". However, also like the tarantula, fern is by NO MEANS soft. At all. That fluff of his is made of grass just like the rest of him and if you were ever the type to play with grass a lot as a kid then you know how badly that stuff can cut you. Also very itchy. Not called grass blades for nothing. On top of that, I also really like to incorporate the number 3 a lot in his design. 3 tuft strands, 3 prongs on his hat tie (getting to that), 3 hand didgets (getting to that also). This is sort of meant to reference the fact that Fern is. a little complex. He isnt finn and he isnt the GD, hes his own thing. However, his "ingredients" are still there and a part of him- making his form. So you have the 1st one for finn, the 2nd one for the GD, and the 3d for Fern. Oh also the chest tuft is because dogs also have that and hes Big Dog Core to me (saying that as a guy who had 5 great danes once). For my adult design of him for my rewrite (...and also how i draw FC fern but i dont like him very much) the tuft gets bigger and makes his chest look more prominent. again NOT SOFT HES NOT SOFT (looks at my 2 mutuals who saw my fc design and said that theyd pet him) HE WILL CUT YOU

On the topic of the hat tie, He has a hat tie! See with Finn i draw his hat a little more detaile dbecause ngl i didnt know his hat was even supposed to be a bear until it was outright stated in the show and i think thats stupid So i made it actually resemble a bear. I gave it a nose (because they got the hat form skinning an actual bear and you keep the nose when you skin things) and made the ears rounder. With fern, his hat isnt any longer meant to represent a bear. It's its own thing. But i still wanted it to be detailed, so hat tie it is! This also works because, unlike with skin, a normal hat doesnt just hold itself together and a tie is needed. Also also, i REALLY like the idea of it being more of a bonnet actually... Not for any good reason admittedly i just associate that sort of thing with nature lol. The nubs on his hat are really fun for me too. I like to draw little swirls on the tops because not ONLY do i think swirls would be a good motif for fern but ALSO because i think the little nubs are formed like hay rolls. i'm not really. sure. if thats something a lot of people are familiar with. Ill get a photo

^^^ hay rolls

me and my countryboy life. anyway

So i like to think that his hat nubs are basically these but smaller, hence the swirl.

This also sorta ties into the cylinders that make up a ot of his shapes! Ofc from any given side he looks like a square, but his torso is actually ALSO a cylinder like this. just a silly thing.. hes sorta built like a scarecrow to me (both in build shape and composition).

His sleeves and pant legs on his shorts (...short legs??) are flared out a little as well. gonna be real with you i know i had a reason for doing this but i forgot. I think it may have originally stemmed from my SUPER old design of him having more triangular those things but eventually as my art improved and i learned how to actually draw those it became softer and less triangular. It's probably just because it makes him look more pointy. In fact i like to make most aspects of his design pointy rather than curved if i can just to show that

HIS HANDS/FEET ok. So you might ask me. you might ask me "why did you remove one of his fingers" and you might ask me "why did you give him an extra toe". I have my reasons. First of all, I gave him an extra toe because CREATURES WITH DIFFERENT NUMBERS OF DIGITS ON THE BACK AND FRONT LEGS MAKE NO SENSE THATS NOT HOW THAT WORKS. So i gave him an extra little digit and removed one on his hands. This happened to work out really well for a few reasons. 1: his tracks look like some cliché dino track, and thats cool. 2: makes him look like a goat (commonly associated with demons [no i dont think fern is a literal demon]) 3: his hands looking like that is really important to me. Not only does it make him look more off putitng (its less accurate to say that hes missing a finger but probably better to saythat its more comparable to if your index and middle fingers fused along with your pinky and ring finger. his fingers didnt literally fuse but if youre able to do that one hand trick then thats closer to what it looks like.) and weird, but it ALSO matches Finns mechanical arm

yeah that’s right we got hand symbolism here.

So finns mechanical arm in the show only has 3 digits. Now, fern MATCHES that arm, which is sort of interesting if you consider that his right arm only has 3 digits because the grass sword ripped it off. More of a symbolic connection than a literal one (fern doesnt literally look like that to match finn) but it's still definitely something to be aware of. Also worth noting, this makes them now mirror one another in a way that isnt particularly shown here lol but for my rewrite, fern also loses an arm. His LEFT arm. And the prosthetic is wooden. Now if they were facing one another like a proper mirror, their missing arms would align, but also not really- because theyre missing opposite arms. Also they can hold hands better because they have the same number of fingers /platonic Oh and while i did say that ferns hands/feet were big to resemble bases of trees theyre also like that because he just Hasnt grown into them yet. his hands are big in general but theyre big on HIM too. When hes an adult he sorta evens out lol (like i said, big dog core. puppies have big paws compared to the rest of themselves)

anyways onto the topic of his hair. So i know we all saw his hair be all pretty and fine and not knotted but lets be real. thats not at all realistic this boy does NOT brush his hair. He's probably even worse about it than finn and we already knows HES really bad about it. #depression. Its ok hes still pretty anyway. Also I honestly dont really have a set flower or flower color I use for him, I just throw in whatever lol It's not super important yet. You may have also noticed with my Handy Dandy Arrow pointing to his head to a certain hair tuft. thats the baby version of the super long one he gets as an adult. little sprout

For his book bag, I actually make it pretty big compared to the rest of him. Not only is this just because the boy has like no torso but it’s Also because it makes him look more spidery. The bag is about the size of his torso if not even a little bigger and thus makes his torso seem bulkier and rounder but still centralized on that one spot. Thus, he looks even more like a weird little freak spider. Love that. The straps on the bags are also triangles usually when i draw them. This was done in his old old design ii had for him a while ago along with the triangle sleeves and short legs, however unlike with those, this never really changed or smoothed out lol it’s still the same. Evolution

For his teeth i have a few of them missing, as seen in the actual show. However, Also as seen in the show, his teeth have grown to become sharper and he has gained a full set of them in this time. What’s fun here is that his canines do actually get longer than the rest of the teeth that grow a bit too. In reference to the fact that my rewrite fern will have fangs that are much longer by default because he’s a weird spider. He’s a spider to me have you gotten that yet (he’s actually also a snake to me but that’s a little harder to show with his base design outside of the occasional forked tongue and hissing he does [the hissing is really great actually because tarantulas also hiss they’re so cutesy])

Lastly as shown on the page are his big eyes. I personally like to see his yellow yes as a sort of occasional transmutation.. Like he had normal eyes 90% of the time. When this happens, it’s a BREAK in the usual art style he is deprecated in. It’s supposed to be weird and off putting and shocking and- after seeing most people with dot eyes and getting used to humanoids having that shape of eye as normal- almost uncanny. He’s weird and uncanny and that’s the POINT. His eyes doing that shows that he’s not just some Green Human. Hes not a human. Close, but not exactly. So i think whenever his eyes do that, they actually straight up expand in their sockets and his pupils and up becoming slits (snake core). He’s so fascinating to me

Bonus: here’s a clear comparison between his design and Finn’s design

ok so you know what time it is. going to explain EVERYTHING. Firstly, why did i give him That outfit. Well, it basically stemmed from the fact that the first thing Fern EVER did as himself with the intent of figuring himself out was Biking. Specifically, motorbiking. I honestly think hed really enjoy picking that back up as he gets older (and would also improve at it. also, given his body coposition, its genrally safer for him than most other pepole lol). Plus i actually grew up around like bikers and stuff so i thought it was cool. All of his clothes are composed of grass still by the way because it makes the most sense. I dont care what fionna and cake made fern do his clothes are GRASS his biology litrally REQUIRES it. Youre telling me this guy made of grass who has an insanly high body mass only needs a tiny part of himself exposed to the sun in order to get adequate sun exposure. youre kidding me. wrong. no. NOT even how that works you wanna try covering grass with a tarp and see how long it lasts because ive seen that a thousand times and let me tell you it does NOT work. Anyway so yes his clothes are grass hence why everything is a shade of green to yellow but mostly green. Getting to the pieces themselves here, starting with his jacket. I took the design for this from classic 50's leather jackets and then simplified it some. Because fern can just "stitch" the opening back up when he wants to close it by weaving the grass back together, he doesnt need zippers or buttons or anything. he does mostly keep it open, however it is zipped up when biking (the jackets grass is much denser than the rest of his cothes and also his outermost layer of skin, thus providing more protectin from wind-caused discomfort than nothing would). he also doesnt have any pockets on it because he just stuffs his stuff inside of himself wherever lol. On the sides of the jacket, you can see that they are capable of opening up below the sleves (along with the shirt which is a sleeveless shirt). This is ACTUALLY so he can more comfortably do this:

yeah the drawings are gonna get lower in quality from here

ive had the idea for a while now that since in my rewrite the GD doesnt get killed off (it did. nothing wrong) that fern learns to become more, i suppose, aquainted with his own body and learns to get a better hold of his powers. One of those biggest ones being: having a much easier time bending, contorting, and just changing his body overall. he could ALWAYS do this even when he was younger, but as he became an adult and his body got used to itself and he got used to it, it became much easier for him and thus became more owerful overall. Oh and uh yes also as pictured directly above: that yellow fluff that was shown on FC fern is much more prevelent here because. i like it. also because it makes him look more like a taranrula (an animal i heavily associate both him and the GD with). Also also because when i draw kid fern he is already like sorta fluffy so here it sort of just changes color as he ages to become more clear. These "fluff" clusters are: on his wrists and around his ancles, on his major joints (elbows and knees), and on his chest. Theyre also in less dense spots are are most spread around in places any human would normally get hair, like on the shoulders or upper arms, however this isnt obvious enough for me to both even drawing in. Also worth noting, those patches to sort of faintly trail into one another, giving him a cool pattern i Dont really feel like showing that much

anyway off that tangent back to the jacket. So his jacket sides open up for tha purpose yep. he'll also just leave them open normally when not biking or something (so basicaly by default) just because he thinks its more comfortable lol he liked the air exposure. plant behavior

Secondly: his hat. Yyyyes i did just take huge inspo from that one concept art for FC fern. Why? because the idea of fern without his hat is weird. It has nothing to do with him trying to "mimic" finn because fern at his DEFAULT isnt trying to mimic finn thats just. what he looks like. Thats HIS hat. In fact i think his hat perfectly shows ferns character: it shows a resemblence to finn, but it is undoubtly NOT the same. It is very different. It is undoubtly FERNS when you look at it, not finns. Thus, he keeps his hat. its an iconic part of FERNS character and im keeping it that way. he doesnt have to drop every part of his younger self just because its a little similar to finn in order to be more "himself" thats stupid. sorry yes rant ive just seen this a lot. anyway. So with this hat i decided that changing it a bit would be a good idea so like i said i went with that concept art design. i thought this was fitting because with the way I draw younger ferns hat normally, i give his hat 2 little ties on the bottom in order to make it more like a bonnett. With this older design, its sort of fun to think of these ties as just bigger versions of those ties. They grew up with him lol. Because of that, his hat no longer compleatly wraps around his chin and instead just sorta sits on top of his head. Now, you can also prpbably see from my little Thing there that his hat changes shape. It true! It does do that ! This was actually done because even more biker!fern reasons. See, ive noticed that fern is just as susceptable to blunt force trauma to the head as any other being and so i figured that if he were to crash (...not unlikely, at least at first) that hed probably get knocked out. Now, the chances are low, but if he were to get knocked out while, say, his engine catched fire, hed Probably Die! While I do think that he is FOR THE MOST PART functionally immortal, fire and acid can 100% kill him so. him being knocked out while that happens isnt very good for his survival odds. Inorder to fix this, I decided that he should just be able to change for form of his hat. in doing so, he would: make it more angular, close the opening up (protects his face), and also make it much more padded (similar to his jacket). Also fun tidbit: looks like the GK when his mask it open just slightly . you cant really see it i didnt really draw it but trust me it does (and it.. heh..... looks a little like the roaring knight.. if youre awesome........)

His pants arent really that special tbh. Theyre just near black pants. Uhhhhhh... I mean i guess its worth noting that i made them long black pants because most bikers (SHOULD) wear longer pants when biking in order to protect their legs from high winds and also from burning themselves on their own bikes. I just decided to make them real dark green because trust me light green looked stupid

Few misc. design things, speed around:

The bumps on his main joints are from the fluff patches underneath pokeing out + making him look more skeletal AND arachnid like so thats cool

he doesnt actually have boobs hes just REALY fluffy on his chest and it makes him look like a figure (liked that idea because. yay fluffy but also because even though his chest only showed up a few times in FC because it was an animation error, i still liked the idea of him having a bigger chest because t matches will with his short torso. Like its make sense for that to be the concentrated spot for his shape language if that makes sense)

The flowers in his hair are dandilions and clover flowers. both edible weeds. Not only do i personally love both flowers very much but they also represent (in my mind) resilliance and being a flower despite their enviornment and what everyone else associates with them. Plus clover flowers tend to have a white tint to them and dandilions are yellow so theyre nods to his brothers. The forgetmenots in FC ferns hair were cute but i like these more

His glowy yellow eyes arent shown but theyre basically they same. He can also just use them whenever

I didnt feel like drawing it in too much detail but his feet are more pointy now. or like his digits are more pointy

his teeth:

he got his fangs! I was on the fence about hos FC fern had all his teeth in and were sharp but theyve grown on me. However ven before that I likved the idea of fern in my rewrite becomming more spider like or generally more animalistic in his own way because his GD melds more with him rather than dies. Because of that, fangs! They can remain stationary, or move, as shown. I really love fern with fangs also because theyre both spider AND snake like (another animal i heavily associate him with). All of his teeth are grown in naturall actually. he just started growing them back in at some point. it freaked him out

he has jewlery on because thats the only non-grassy sort of decor i could in good consiousness give him without going against my own rules. My fern design is supposed to be really, i guess you could say versitile, with what he looks like. His hair can change, his jacket (and this general torso look) can change, his hat can change, and you can change his jewlery. Its supposed to sort of be because of fern now being really good at self expression now. I mean this guy has been working at it for his entire life now so id HOPE hed be good at it. He wears al that jewlery because he cant wear clothes in colors other than green-yellow without either depriviing himself of sunlight or draining his own energy over time by forcefully changing his clothing color like how he mimiced finn (thats not his "default" looks and thus it will slowly drain him). He has bracelets and neclaces and earrings and what have you. Mostly arent pictured but really youre supposed to throw whatever you want on him thats the point

ok you might b wondering why his left arm is wooden thats because in my rewrite fern loses his left arm from perma-decay magic and cant regrow it normally until he DOES regrow it all wooden. he just keeps it that way though he doesnt get a metal replacement or anything he just keeps the wood. uuuuuuh i honestly dont reall yfeel like explaining all this again im just gonna like my kid fern ref here where its explained lmao. Should be known that this arm: cannot summon the grass sword, nor can it bend. That arm is fully disabled in terms of his "magic"

k and some current story stuff. so basically he ended up studying The Blade more professionally to become more proficient with it. Not only was this useful in general but also because it taught him how to think more before he attacked and how to control himself when he was doing more destructive suff etc etc. he is by no means a pacifist, hes just a now less violent opritunist with a bit of mischeif about him. He also picks up a lot of unviolent hobbies, such as pretty much most art forms you can think of. The guy has a lot of time on his hands to do whatever and he can go just about wherever he wants so its not surprising lol. Its generally good for him and his mental health but he does also find it fun. Plus, he can never be BAD at it, so thats a good thing. he does specifically pick up the bass though. Him and marci would hang out a LOT i mean a LOT (if you couldnt tell by his style at this point) and they ended up bonding over her teaching him to play and then playing together. He's been on stage with her quite a few times and has actually ended up doing a handful of his own things, thus accumulating the fan or two. good for him

on anyway last little thing. smoking comes in here

my singular good panel. happy birthday fern

fern DOESNT SMOKE. he isnt a smoker. However i will state that smoking isnt nearly as harmful to him and it instead does this when he does do it. he just doesnt do it himself because it Smells bad to him (plants are very sensitive to smell), it Tastes really bad (same logic), and also it cloggs his throat up (uuh plant stuff yes theres a better way to explain this im not just just pulling stuff from nowhere i just havnt made my diagrams yet). Anyway so yes i really did just wanna redraw that one fish thing with fern BECAUSE ! his rhespitory system functions very similarly. In VERY short terms i came to the conclusion that he must breathe out in some way from this one like 2 second clip we saw so i decided that logically placing "reverse gil" like structures around the neck would be a good placement realistically. From there any air he breathes in gets filteres out from there so he only intakes whats needed. So in a sense he CAN breathe. only in though, because everything else just comes out through the gil things on their own. this isnt a new thing or adult fern btw ferns always been able to do this