Making a mockery of the year of the tiger

Oh, Nasha, you kind, neglected soul. In Momentum, he is the ultimate supporting character. Nasha is the charming and hard-working friend who tackles the chores around camp to give the primary members of the team time to go off to the side and create plot points! Canonically selected as The Hero, because he runs a Habitat For Humanity-ish group to provide infrastructure to vulnerable communities, the ultimate wingman is here to help! And that leads to the test, both in-story and in the meta: Do you dare take a reliable good guy for granted?

(If you're reading this post on the Patreon of a former daily cartoonist, who fell from grace and lost his ability to provide reliably and for free, losing a mission to offset sadness by adding as much joy as possible, *you* have passed THAT test. Congrats, you are living the moral of the story!)

Of course, *I* failed poor Nasha. I let him slide to the back burner with the other support hunks, while I focused on the main squad (plus the lone support role who was a cute lady) and made it worse by panicking and running away from character design struggles!

It began with a quick assumption when turning Nasha from human to anthro, and ended up a hole I had to dig myself out of! But before I go there, he also suffered the greatest disrespect of the Momentum nine: Dude had a placeholder name (Nula, which always had an "I'll replace it LATER" note attached) for 25 years, cuz I always chose another aspect of the Momentum worldbuilding project to play with! (In some balance, Aaron, Tijo, and Kimban don't have set surnames in the Precociousverse story. Nasha did have that, if only because I'm kind of a jerk.)

When it came time to Precocize the Momentites, it was... no, wait, let's go back. In 2005 I learned my horrible brain just had untreated ADD, and one Ritalin pill allowed me to complete a thought for the first time in 25 years. I finally understood it WAS possible to plan and learn! Before, existence required me to keep all knowledge in ACTIVE memory, with the need to do everything perfect on the first try, as I'd never be able to trick my brain into coalescing enough to craft a report for a second draft. Every task was 50x as hard as it should've been, and that means my eternally-shameful B- average was somehow an impossible achievement beyond my capabilities, considering! I wanted to make comics, even though consistency and simplicity were my weakest attributes. Since I was going into entirely new ground, I chose animal cartoons because I'd drawn maybe 10 animals in my life. Plus, I'd been lured into webcomics by Kevin and Kell, so my webcomic introduction was accidentally made of a lot of anthro stuff (I had no idea there was a firm subculture division!) Extra bonus: There are infinite ways to draw cartoon animals. They're not REAL. We all know they're toons, so the mind is extra forgiving when looking at them. I could find my own look without triggering anxiety spirals over "this is a bad representation of a human" and craft a separate comic realm, where I control the rules! All naïve choices, that I'm darn lucky didn't explode in my face immediately. 

Anyway, long before I could draw Precocious characters, I had to learn nuances of the animal people forms. I started at zero, remember, and going in with an intent of "I'm drawing comic characters" over "I'm drawing ANIMAL PEOPLE" was another accidental saving grace and/or eternal sin. Eh, I was just learning to think at 25, and did absolutely everything wrong. But at least I set aside four years to get as much wrongness out of my system as possible before launching the comic. If I went into drawing Precocious early, all the worst from initial sloppiness might get stuck along for the ride and ugly the should-be-cuties into my destruction. Nope, that's what MOMENTUM is for! They are my placeholder crew - to experiment on, then toss back in the bin after refinement allows the proper characters of a project to emerge! Remember how I said initial sins from a clueless Chrispy could cause long term issues? Just a couple sentences back? YUP!

Nasha Raj's theme is stripes, as 15yo Chrispy’s story said he would tie a strip of cloth taken from the towns he visited to his walking stick or jacket. And human Nasha was designed as Indian-Ethiopian. Stripes and Indian heritage? Obviously that means he should be a TIGER! It makes perfect sense!

Except it’s an anthro disaster. A tiger, with stripes, who wears an outfit that… also features stripes??? And notably different types of stripes. Uh oh. This... may not have been as clever a choice as I thought. Now, the lack of Jerrod lion sketches already shows I absolutely cannot draw big cats in the Precocious style yet - Who remembers Jerrod exists, and is a lion? No one, cuz I've been a coward and ignored him as much as Nasha! - so I’ve failed Nasha so many times over already at this point! Finally, I clued in and gave up on the tiger. As the year of the tiger comes, letting all those hopeful furries down with this theme failure. *sad trombone*

Here’s a mock-up of tiger Nasha. Oh, it defaulted to image caption text again. Right? Whatever. Patreon app, you untamable beast.

I used an Indian animal for try one, so let's look up Ethiopian animals for the next go. Enter the African wild dog! That’s… potentially messy? But only if I’m dumb enough to point it out? (Oh no. Let's dodge issues with ethnicity and anthros, on grounds of working in good faith, ok?) These painted cuties have unique ear shapes, which may be identifiable enough that folks can recognize him in a simple comic style like mine, even when I’m super shaky, giving him visual separation from his dhole (Kimban) and maned wolf (Tijo) compatriots. While that's a big risk, it also gives Quincy a second cosplay option! I already changed Meret from a Klee Kai (a tiny husky) to Siamese for Kaitlyn cosplay. I'm committed!

Here is try #1.5 of African wild dog Nasha. Not worth sharing a super sketchy first go.

Btw, I did also test out a caracal design, but the angles and shapes somehow felt much more Aaron-ish, and I have redesigned enough Momentites. Aaron can stay a Russian blue. (He may technically be a redesign, since human Aaron’s nickname was Black Cat, but I made him dark gray for practical reasons from the start.) This does show a base design for what I imagine Nasha’s stipe-inspired clothing would be.

And there's a tonal fit too: Nasha does have a deal where he’s the kindest dude, but keeps having his surname, Raj, mispronounced, making him MISTER RAGE. He’s not a wild man, so the cringe labeling actually works! Stripes placed over splotches won’t look good either, so I reduced the stripes - which, again, was the core guide that started all of this - to strings and beads. Stripes were a dead end! I'm free! So, there, after all these years, I have a Nasha form that might stick!

Check it out this messy try at figuring out splotches for this dude. Even vastly oversimplified he’s super intimidating! I also gave him a dredhawk for extra separation from Tijo’s maned wolf design. The chest heart is because any anthro design that CAN have a heart splotch, will. And because, once I’m happy enough with his markings, I may never draw him topless again. The heart taunts you!

Um… I think the Patreon app has locked me into caption text now? I don’t know how to break out for regular article text! Help! I don’t know HOW this will display for you. The Patreon app has real limitations. All I know is what I call “caption text” displays as black no matter what - so it’s invisible when my phone is on dark mode, while “regular” text will alter to white-on-black.

Anyway, uh, I’ve had terrible health issues due to the holiday season costing me many vital physical therapy appointments, and my response was to force myself to try taking sketches to inked or colored finals. You know from the top image I succeeded, even if imperfect, so here are the steps, included cuz I snapped pics, and they’re already shared on my Twitter.

It’s less about quality and more about just completing something. The bar is so low for me, and I only clear it about three times a year!

It is TRAUMATIZING to ink a sketch, because every shake, and all left-handed skew, is locked in. I assure you I tweak all this phone pics to undo the skew the best I can.

To conclude, STILL IN A CAPTION (unless I go back and edit on the desktop later), this is still only wild dog Nasha design attempt #2, and color attempt #1. You can compare inks to the colors up too to see I made some extra tweaks for looks already. This would be a work in progress if Momentum were a proper project. (Edit: It added spaces after the pics when displayed on my desktop - the opposite of captions? - and I don't know what is going on. Gonna ignore it unless someone complains.)

But I may just abuse Mister Rage’s kindness a bit more and let “close enough for now” hold the line while I make up for lost time with every other underserved Momentite. (And that’s all of them.) I’m sorry, friend!