Harrowhark Nonagesimus. The Ninth Saint to the Serve the King Undying, the Reverend Daughter of Drearburh and Heir to the House of the Ninth.
Also known as Desiccated Mummy of Hate, Gloom Mistress, Sunshine, Hideous witch from hell, Bone Empress, Skull-Faced Fruitcake, etc...
Oil paint on canvas panel, 30x40 cm.
Seriously, The Locked Tomb is one of the best book series I've read recently. It's complex, funny and Harrow is an awesome character.
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Nico grabbing an enemy by the wrist before they can strike down on him and it would be easy to steal the life from the pulse beneath his fingertips, turn the air in their lungs into his own, but there's a myriad of fighters around him and one life isn't going to power him enough to blast away them all when he's already so tired as it is. He wishes he was bigger, stronger.
He squeezes his hand tight around the wrist he holds back. It shatters. Their sword clatters to the ground. It's not a human noise they make - well, it is, they're human.
Until they aren't. Until boney spikes rip through their clothes, emerging sharp and dangerous from their spine. He squeezes harder. The skin around their skull ripples, like bugs crawling underneath. Then bursts blood and spit and flesh as their jaw unhooks. Teeth pitter-patter onto the ground as larger, sharper, whiter fangs emerge violently in their place.
Their face splits just above the nose as another jaw grows around their eyes, as their esophagus snaps and elongates upwards, as blood and flesh and viscera pour like an unholy flood, arms tearing, legs cracking, flesh hanging off bloody bone, nothing but a monster left behind.
Nothing but a nightmare.
It croons at him. The soul beneath is twisted, ugly, beautiful, spread thin across their new body, new bones, like the veins of their now still and battered heart. It pulses like the lungs torn by their feet once did.
The world has silenced itself in the emergence of Nico's new pet. He squeezes the new wrist, the bone firm and clean beneath his touch.
"Defend me," he whispers.
It croons again, shuffling back on four feet. The world quakes as it turns. The world shivers as it regards them, predator to prey, standing larger than them all, and far more dangerous as they ever recalled it to once be.
And the world screams when it lunges.
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I feel weird giving out unprompted permission statements because I'm making a big assumption that anyone's going to want to use my work. That said I also know people do like to build on other people's art and can't always work up the nerve to ask, so: Anyone is free to use this design if they want to for any reason- I don't own this character anyway. (Although I am hopeful that you do not, you know, monetize it, because i cant do that and if you do that its not fair ;_; ) Feel free to remix, improve, use as basic inspiration, etc. I would appreciate a tag/mention if you use it so I can see what you did!
This design has evolved a little since I first started drawing it, and I will see people reblogging the original design notes and think 'oh no! those are out of date and I don't have new/accurate ones!'
Reblogging the old one is still an honor- and the first take on a design just sometimes has a different appeal because it's less refined and more chaotic (especially with a character that should be chaotic), so I suspect some people will just prefer the older drawings & they'll still get shared, which is great! But I felt as if the project was a little bit incomplete without an update, since I think I've reached the point where if you see that old post & then come to my blog and look at my current content, there's a noticeable difference.
Also I kind of like making design notes.
If anyone's wondering why things changed, the answer's really simple- 90% of it is just the result of him settling into having more consistent anatomy and facial structure so that I can keep him looking accurate across different angles and poses. If you look at the old drawings you may notice that Gollum has an inconsistently shaped squishy head. That's fine for a concept post but doesn't work as well for maintaining him across different comic panels or in an animatic, at least not the way I work.
In the same vein, while my art is still & will always be heavily stylized, I started giving him more structured semi-sorta-realistic anatomy so that he wouldn't look entirely out of place next to less bizarre-looking characters such as Aragorn. (I feel that's also helpful in nudging Gollum into the uncanny valley where he ought to be, rather than leaving him so abstractified that there's a risk you won't see anything wrong with him having noodle arms.)
He also acquired the new-style 'garbage bag' outfit because I found a reference in LOTR to his arms and legs being bare/exposed (it's in one of my favorite passages, the 'an eagle would think Gollum was dead if it came by right now' passage in The Two Towers):
Not even an eagle poised against the sun would have marked the hobbits sitting there, under the weight of doom, silent, not moving, shrouded in their thin grey cloaks. For a moment he might have paused to consider Gollum, a tiny figure sprawling on the ground: there perhaps lay the famished skeleton of some child of Men, its ragged garment still clinging to it, its long arms and legs almost bone-white and bone-thin: no flesh worth a peck.
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I truly honestly understand what the hell Ashton was thinking in that moment and cannot find myself to be mad at them. When you spend your life in pain already, there is no threat or fear of more. It's all the same, really. Especially when this way you could use it to help the people you love and, finally, make that pain worthwhile.
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Characters I claimed as aromantic based on minimal evidence ‘cause lord knows we don’t get real representation:
Sasha James (The Magnus Archives)
Diana (Market of Monsters) —this series does have some canon ace characters though
Lee Ping (Detentionaire)
Katniss Everdeen (The Hunger Games)
Arthur Lester (Malevolent) —this one’s a pretty widely accepted headcanon
Ororo Munroe (X-Men)
Sam Manson (Danny Phantom)
Raven (Teen Titans)
Enjolras (Les Misérables) —just listen to Red & Black
Bethany Walker (Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle)
Kira Yukimura (Teen Wolf)
Tiger Claw (TMNT 2012) —I can’t even begin to explain this one
Coraline Jones (Coraline)
Wybie Lovat (Coraline) —gotta love that aro solidarity
Elsa (Frozen)
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