Your borzoi ocs fascinate me very much. Learning a bit about their story has put a lot of your artwork of them into far more context, and made it all that more impactful.

I was hoping to learn a bit about their names, if you're up for it. Are there any particular reasons you chose the names Skoll and Earendel? Do the names have any specific meanings which suit their story or the like? I'd be keen to learn!

Hi! Thank you for the question!! It all happened in this order: first I heard the name Skoll, and only later did I find out that it actually belongs to a deity. Actually, I thought it was a girl’s name…. Then I learnt about the story of Skoll and Hati, and decided that my Skoll would also try to gnaw at the sun, so, at first, yes, the name really did make sense. Skoll was the one who feared the sun, who stood against it. Sometimes I depicted this as a solar eclipse. But then that image became too boring; you could say I’d outgrown it, because I’d come up with the greyhound-Skoll ages ago—I probably wouldn’t even find the first drawings of her now—and I’d grown tired of that whole mysterious, mystical theme, bordering on self-loathing. I wanted simpler, more down-to-earth things, because, well, you know, the world is complicated enough as it is. I thought about changing the name, but you know, I’d already got too used to it :) And with Earendel, it’s a different story: originally, I wanted to draw him with a little star on his forehead. Well, I learnt the name Earendel itself from Tolkien’s world; later I found out that’s what they used to call Venus, the first planet visible in the night sky, so I thought, why not? Later on, as you can see, I ditched the star as well, so I wouldn’t have to bother drawing it every time. Actually, you can see how I’m simplifying all the details more and more each time, because, well, you know, the fewer there are, the better… look how they’ve changed over three (maybe more) years! I suppose that makes it clearer why I named them that way. Well, these days their names are just names!