Etsy’s fees now cost me up to a quarter of my earnings and my etsy views are way, way down since the site’s quality has consistently degraded, so I’ve experimentally moved half my enamel pin stock to Depop.
I OWN 10 OR FEWER EACH OF THE FOLLOWING DESIGNS BEFORE THEY’RE ALL GONE:
I have 15 of the parasitized snail left:
DESIGNS WITH PLENTY OF STOCK LEFT FOR NOW:
These pins have a minimum factory order of 100, which costs up to $250 per design, so once a design is sold out I can never make more without gathering preorders for a second run - which usually fails! There’s a couple I might try to remake again, but for the most part I’ll probably switch to only doing new designs.
This is easily missed in some of her dialog but Magdolene is really in love with her own boss, Tori, whose “arms” (the humanoid configurations we usually see) were also an influence on the shape Magdolene prefers to take :)
with Tori’s physical manifestation being a network of veins and magdolene’s being a swarm of the idea of maggots, their material vessels could easily mesh together and occupy the same space, which Magdolene thinks about both frequently and at length.
Miscellaneous trivia: as the concept of maggot therapy, Magdolene is a counterpart to Dinea, the concept of leech therapy, but I wrote Dinea as more of an old lady while Magdolene has a mindset like someone middle aged at most, because while both practices are ancient, maggot therapy was validated by medical science a lot more recently than leeches were.
Sold out all my hagfish pins after a couple years, I can restock them if enough people preorder one and you can also get a limited bundle with lamprey, firefly squid or all three of them
(signal boosting helps, this type of thing has been my only income other than patreon for years now)
Dreamt I was trying to draw an idea I had and it kept coming out wrong. So here is a correct drawing of the idea I remember thinking was so important
This update is the last we’ll see of Cheryl, her dolphin “friend” or her terrible little dog for probably a good while
Years ago I went through and maid high resolution “Main” artwork for a bunch of my webcomic’s major or just popular characters, this isn’t all of it but it is some!
A lot of it also has alternate versions in the same silhouette, which I made use of when I did some charms/standees, which maybe I should do again someday?
For Mortasheen, I remember you established a “4 limbs only” rule with Arthropoids, but Catasterpillar doesn’t follow that rule. When are exceptions made?
It’s actually an exception in the other direction!
Most of a caterpillar’s little feets are not derived from legs of any kind, but are growths of its underbelly, elaborate suckers that evolved into pseudo-legs.
Catasterpillar keeps those, and also has a pair of giant arms whose fingers are just more of these suckers.
The giant hands might constitute one pair of true limbs, having bones inside, and any other “real” limbs it would have had are atrophied away completely :)
One early sketch put tiny dangling ones right behind the true head, though, and I might still put those in.
Out of all the little critters you've made, who's your favorite freak?
Thematically a giant nonspecific “germ,” my favorite genre of character design.
Anatomically based on a barnacle, maybe my favorite group of animals since learning as a child that they’re upside-down ingrown crustaceans.
Aesthetically themed around ticks, another favorite animal group and the only animals I was ever afraid of (so they’re personally special), with warts resembling embedded ticks, claws resembling tick legs and the body color of a bloated wood tick.
Biologically, Scrabies like all the “Fectoids” in Mortasheen is an amalgamation of fungal tissues, bacterial cells and protists/algae, all things I love and combining them together is a similar principle to lichens, which I think are some of my favorite non-animals besides possibly slime molds.
I also think of it like a sticky seed pod, which is a miscellaneous fixation I always had with plants, love annoying little sticky seed pods.
Attacks by controlling swarms of insects and arachnids, my favorite kind of “superpower,” and specifically controls any that feed on blood.
There ARE goose barnacles with orange stems, but for Scrabies’s “arm” or “tail” I specifically color picked from a photo of a giant orange leech, and gave it a slicker shinier annelid-like surface to match.
Face is just eyes in darkness, a feature I can’t get enough of (and have to try and resist overusing) plus I most love monsters with silly-looking eyes.
Eyes are also inside what I consider its mouth, which is my favorite place for a monster’s eyes or face to be (though the “teeth” on the “lips” are just more little ticks)
All in all, I designed this monster as if it was kind of a symbolic mascot of ectoparasitism and “bug bites.”
This is probably the maximum number of favorite concepts and visuals I can blend into one thing and still feel it has one simple, coherent design to it, so if we all had just one personal monster summon or monster transformation I guess mine would be this thing or very similar to it.
It’s being included in the first mortasheen rpg book which also gives every monster an accompanying gameboy style pixel sprite
I posed the sprite upside down to show that it can run around on either set of limbs, and to kind of evoke a skittering facehugger.
Probably not the only monster design with that many motifs I could pick out though
This is the end of a three year side story I could have sworn was just two, and was already feeling bad about that because I originally intended it to be at most a three month side story, but to be fair, we are now entering Year Eleven of what was originally going to be a three to six month series entirely.
Not counting that side story, which came out to 56 pages across those three years, we are now on page 1,019.
I can’t keep very good track of which Mortasheen “dex entry” images I’ve put on tumblr but you can see them all so far on the mortasheen instagram.
There’s also an alternate cartoony doodle of this one that appears as page filler in the (not yet for public sale) book:
Their anatomy is really more squid-like than anything else. Everything above the eyes is mostly “mouth and stomach.”
