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Chrysanthemum - Mountain Cottage

Published: December 3rd 2024, 10:14:25 pm

I drew these on an airplane! My usual sketchbook is completely full, so I grabbed a random blank notebook when leaving to fly to my parents' house for Thanksgiving, and I found that I really like the grid pattern on this one's pages.

These are some worldbuilding and visual development sketches for a short comic introducing Chrysanthemum, one of the characters from a much larger project: Sweet Pea's story. She was adopted as a tadpole (she's a member of a race of anthropomorphic axolotl people) by a reclusive human herbalist and gardener, and raised by him in his mountain cottage.

I want it to look cozy and utilitarian; Chrysanthemum's dad didn't built it by himself, but he's been living alone for many years. He doesn't care about ornamentation or flashy decorating, but he likes to keep a tidy and well-organized home. He's made most of the furnishings himself and has done repairs on a lot of the house, and maintains terraced gardens of medicinal herbs, which he dries himself and also refines further into forms and blends suitable for magical recipes. He makes his living selling these to various brokers who travel between the mountain and more populated areas, where licensed shops and pharmacies purchase his medicines and ingredients at a markup.

If you can't read my handwriting, you're only missing my rambling, contradictory thinking out loud as I iron out this world and story; any good stuff, I'll eventually type up and share.