Song for the Day: Hometown by Twenty-One Pilots

Posting a bunch of "before" pics today and I'll post the "after" pics tomorrow for my newest makeover-- that is, a literary makeover. I have this process for creating books I call "pitching", wherein I'll get all my ideas at once in a bolt of manic inspiration. However, most of these ideas are crap, so usually I'll either forget them immediately or I'll write them down in notes and they'll get lost to the archives. However, sometimes I come back to an old pitch and completely reinvent it, which is why I'm glad I have hundreds of these just lying around. This is what happened with the "beginning" chapter for this book, the acronym for which is "PANTA" (short for Pantamorphs, the main sentient species of their world). It's actually three books, entitled Feudal Phase, Imperial Phase, and Post-Imperial Phase. It's.... kind of messy and tenative for now. ANYWAYS the series has actually been "pitched" three times:

1) A dual-world system specifically for "sonas" where real-life actions mimic analogous actions on the plane above (ie if two people are talking over the internet their sonas would be talking, together, in real life). Really just a fluffy system for my friends and I to mess with for sona creation (this is where the last book's TSSWYL chapters came from), this obviously has zero book potential whatsoever. I flirted with the idea of having someone and their sona switching places but it was just messy and generic, so I gave up. (I am doing some kind of world-swapping story EVENTUALLY because I actually have a D O Z E N of them and the reason you guys don't know about them is because they're generally the first to get cut in development.) 

2) A post-apocalyptic where children mutate into getting cool powers instead of horrible deformities and all the adults are dead because we r/GONE out here. This is what the pictures below are. This has also been done before. 

3) The current deal with the Pantamorphs, which I will get into tomorrow.

All these pictures are of horrible quality but here ya gooo

I had a fun time dredging them up from hell. I actually think I might have to reintegrate some of these characters into the new draft because I forgot maybe half of them existed (Kite, 36, Lung) and I actually love them.

it's literally all so dark wtf

I only kept this one because it's the ONLY one with Dasher (top) on it and he's super important in the next draft even though he and Aster are not siblings anymore.

Kite's on the bottom, top left is a rudimentary Pascal and top right needs to be reintegrated. 

This would be Kite, Lung, and 36, all in one picture. 36 was one of the first to start mutating and she just kind of casually doesn't exist entirely in this dimension so she glitches like crazy, all the time. Her features are actually entirely normal but she doesn't map correctly onto her own body, spacially, so her eyes will be in several places at once. Same eyes, not a mirage (you can touch them and everything), just poor spacial mapping. It's got a small radius of effect. Needless to say she's really fun and I appreciate her, I just don't think she belongs in the next book. Idk what to do with her (weeps).

Really shitty image of the woodsman. I also wanted to do some mutations that serve no benefit so Kite is just very light and breakable. 

Better image of him. He's got holes in his heckin' arms. TREE MAN

Better image of Lung, my fourwing dragon girl. I want to spiff up her design sometime but I have no idea what I'm doing

MY GAL

Girl on the right is a witch in Draft 2 but I haven't drawn her yet.

A concept for TSSWYL I never used again. Really fun to draw though.