Starbus - Tumblr Posts
It’s Semra!
She’s a plant person called an Oviran. They live on a forest world and worship the sun as their god. But just THEIR sun. Other suns are bad, so she has to wear a hood if she goes anywhere other than her homeland.
She’s usually pretty uptight, but here she is just chillin’.
I plan on putting her in a story I’m working on. Hoping to put more stuff on this blog to flesh out some of these stories.
It’s Poi!
He’s a bird boy with slick hair and lots of makeup. His clothes and feathers have really bright multicolored patterns on them. He gets hella chicks this way.
Sometimes he’s worried that they only want him for his plumage and not his personality, but that’s okay for now.
He lives in the same apartment as Semra and they don’t get along. Something about all the seeds he eats and wearing flashy clothes, I dunno.
This is Rinnae Shelasae. Her friends may call her Rin. You are not her friend.
Rinnae has a sort of sourpuss attitude most of the time, and she can be seen sulking and skulking and lurking and lurching all around the apartment building where she lives. Nobody is really sure what she does for a living.
She’s a Runa, which is kinda like a hobbit or an elf type deal, about three feet tall. They have those weird antenna things sticking out of their heads, which they use to sniff out magic.
Runa are notoriously shady about a lot of stuff, and they’re usually not above using magic powers to mess with people or get what they want. Don’t worry though, she’s not like that. Probably. I think.
It’s Bamath!
He’s a big guy. Around 9 feet tall, actually. Door frames pose a significant problem for him. Septhire are a warlike race - think Klingons if they looked like giant demons with big horns. He’s an accountant, but unfortunately he’s the kind of accountant that needs to be reminded that hand-to-hand combat is not the proper way to resolve financial disputes.
Despite this, he’s a pretty cool dude. He likes gourmet coffee and wrestling. He wishes he could wear hats.
Starbus!
So I’ve been working on this thing for a good while - it’s an idea for an animation that I’m pretty excited about. It’s called “Starbus” (a working title) and I’d love to share some of it.
These are three of the main characters. Diane over there is our protagonist (kinda a crappy drawing tbh but whatever). She moved into the same apartment building as her best friend Sara and Sara’s boyfriend Michael. So what’s the twist?
The apartment is on an alien planet.
So the show would play out sorta like Seinfeld meets Star Trek - every episode would have the characters meet some other alien/fantasy/sci fi species and have to deal with comedic misunderstandings and such. Here are some more characters!
Poi (self absorbed bird man), Semra (very religious plant), and Mr. Tenno (old sailor turned businessman)
Rinnae (magic elf shut-in), Qarada (hyperactive fish girl) and Bamath (huge scary-looking accountant)
Jelly (chain-smoking, penny-pinching, squishy landlord), Ian (absurdly androgynous alien who likes Diane), and 66 (a robot obsessed with “upgrading” things)
I like these guys and have a bunch of stories planned for them. To say nothing about my many, MANY other projects, I plan on doing some finished stuff and submitting a storyboard/script as a pitch to some very neat people sometime in the next month or so. I’ll post my progress and some more sketches as I do so!
It’s Qarada! (pronounced “!radha” with a click)
She’s a hyperactive, happy-go-lucky fish girl who works with Diane. She has big webbed hands and feet, pointy little shark teeth, and scary eyes. Still cute though.
She’s an Aqiras, so she can survive both in and out of water. But being a fishlike amphibian poses some accessibility issues. She needs to wear special pads on her torso to keep her gills damp, and carries a water bottle LITERALLY AT ALL TIMES OR SHE’LL DIE GUYS, FOR REAL. (she’ll live, she’s just super neurotic about it)
Qarada is always super-excited to try new things and meet new people, but it’s tough being a fish in a mammal’s world.
Diane model and expressions
Here she is! Working on trying to solidify my drawing style and figure out how I wanna draw this character in particular. More pics below, grouped by expression type.
For the love of God I can’t quite figure out how to make that hair/ear/chin/neck meeting point look decent, but oh well. Practice, practice, practice. I’ll do similar stuff for other Starbus characters at some point. As always, I’ve got too many irons in the fire.
A couple quick sketches - going to be making more of these for all the Starbus characters, showing the sort of things they like doing in their spare time. It also gives me a second to think about the space in their apartments and the sort of stuff they’d put on their walls. I plan on posting the rest of these here, then following it up with finished versions.
So we got Semra meditating under a sun lamp since she can’t get her sunlight from outside (lamps are cool as long as they’re blessed by an Oviran priest). She’s got lots of books and potted plants around to remind her of home, and the round thing on the wall is a memorial to her Mom.
On the right is Bamath taking a moment to enjoy some coffee before work. He’s a big coffee drinker, and thinks a nice cup can solve just about any problem. The sword and banner on the wall are from when he won a tournament a few years back. Apart from that, not a ton of decorations.
I really enjoyed doing these and I hope to work on more of them in the future, so if you like this sort of stuff look forward to that
Went a little simpler with these - been playing around with possible design changes. Rinnae went through the most change, making her smaller and cuter (she’s still mean though).
Speaking of, Rinnae is sitting in her favorite comfy chair reading a book about... well it’s certainly about something, anyhow. The chair is the biggest one in her room. It’s big enough for a Human or similar-sized creature to fit in, and it’s supposed to be for guests. She rarely has guests, so it’s just her reading chair. The crest over her head is her home country’s flag, although she’s not all that patriotic, really.
Poi is brushing his hair and feathers as part of his morning routine. On the sink are various products, makeup, skin creams, hair gel, feather oil, and he goes through a ton of these in a month. How does he pay for all that? Anyway, like all birds, he loves mirrors. Messed up on this drawing and didn’t realize how much bigger he was than the bathroom vanity... oops.
More Semra!
She gets nervous.
“geehhhhhh~”