Sketchbook (PAGE 26) (Patreon)

At the time of drawing this sketchpage Mazia was a focus of particular interest. How many civet characters are even out there in the furryverse? And how can I help fix this? Genets were actually my first love among the viverrids, but over time I was increasingly taken with civets maybe because of their bulkier, clumsier proportions, and they're not quite as immediately cute or sexy. Challenge accepted.

Mazia was originally just a friend and counterpoint to Topaz. The latter having warfare and displacement and all sorts of grim things hanging over her life, the former being generally easy-going, good-spirited, and I guess sexually liberated. Maybe it's telling that Topaz has scarcely appeared in any art over the past decade, which I guess I'd chalk up to her fairly tedious backstory and my changing artistic priorities.

The little scene in the upper left started as an exercise, seeing how quickly I could cobble together enough grayscale elements for it to read as an actual "scene". At the time I had a bad habit of getting bogged down in drawings that required anything at all resembling an environment. And I guess I enjoyed the result enough to try it again on the same page, and this is became "It’s Not About the Mangoes" (FA | e621).

I always hesitate to call "Mangoes" a "comic" because most of the pages are only a single panel, there's no consistency of size or orientation, and there was almost no planning involved. Ever since then I wanted make a real honest-to-God-type comic to see if I’ve got the chops for it. What's kept me from following through is the fear that if I actually sat down and wrote and story-boarded and illustrated such a comic, and it came out less memorable (or less soulful, spontaneous, etc), I'd have to wonder if I lost the magic already. Of course there's only one way to find out.

Most of the other sketches are in service of the civets and their evolving story. The exception being an abandoned idea with Juno sitting on a bench beside a much larger seal friend, apparently catching up in town. Yay for size-difference :)