DevLog #9: Shunai

Every self-respectable fantasy world has a race of lizard girls... so I did one.

Shunai Final Sketch:

When I started sketching Shunai I remembered about my Sobek Artwork, so I was thinking a lot about a crocodile-based tribe. At the same time time I couldn't find proper use of head decorations from one of races in my old OC world (re Devlog 1), thus I gave it to Shunai after some thoughts. Later it made me think of Shunai as butterflies for some reason, so it explains a lot about their final coloration, and as a result they got a carapace-like skin (instead of pure lizard-type scales), something which originally intended for Ardem. Likewise Shunai design was affected by Drells from Mass Effect - at that moment I was replaying Mass Effect trilogy and Thane was as hot as I remember him. If you look carefully you will notice that Shunai abdomen is heavily resembles my drawing of Hornet from Hollow Knight... because it is the same tummy - I wanted to check how it might look and thus I tried first on her. I was thinking to add some old-fashioned dragon-spikes after sketching, but Tofar already had that feature in their design by that point, and it would contrast with colorful scutes too much anyway.

Herquistion headquarters are located near the See of Birth, and of two main Tummy tribes Shunai are the only ones who were befit to be heavily involved in its history. Thus Shunai Lore is... complicated and messy as much as the Lore of Herquistion and the Hegemony. All three are interconnected, changing many times because another one would change many time for random reasons. As well is Shunai personality is not what it was at first: it had many contradictions and reverse points, in general closer to Yamervas in some ways, but the key detail was always their zeal. A lot was trimmed and re-written to make sense out of it. If I combine all that was written for Shunai their Lore probably would be more than twice bigger of what you can read now. Most of cut out Lore was given to other Tribes, some was moved to a different topics (history, etc) and some was forever deleted.

Now I tell about their clothing design... I wanted to do cowboys... and pirates... but I couldn't decide a Tribe that would wear any of that, so I combined cowboys with pirates and gave that design to Shunai. Whatever I accomplished you can witnesses.