Alright so while I was working on the Deldrys project, I got burnout and had to go do other things for a bit before I could come back with my dumb dragon OC stuff. My drawings of Delfir and Cydris were also breaks on that project and it was midway through the work on Cydris that I really figured out my current style for shading metal, I also had to do the server banner for my gaggle of Discord goofballs because it would have been lame to get all the way to tier 2 on a 20 something member server and just ignore it. But either way, before i had to pick up the server banner I had a dumb idea for these idiots that scratched my brain in just the right way that I really wanted to draw it, it's in a more rushed and stylistic format so it probably doesn't look super great (I mean I was so lazy that I used three strokes from Krita's impressionist brush for a gravel road) but I mainly just wanted to draw the concept so technical extremes on the way it was done was not really the goal.

Anyway this took me about six and a half hours and i actually have justifications for most of this.

I think I've only posted something from this group once, but if you'll bear with me being a dumb self centered idiot, the cloaked figure is essentially my persona that I got bored and wrote a little lore for, I got a neat idea and this poor idiot was the only character I had that it would make any sense on. In real life I actually have the entire outfit (I sewed the cloak myself, it's like an eccentric snuggie. Would recommend.) and my online buddies wanted me to have some representation of myself so I just picked one of my favorite and most distinctive outfits and then gave her void face, because my exact brand of stupid involves not comprehending or remembering faces very well and I honest to god do not remember what my own face (or anyone else's really) looks like and I don't really do that well at drawing human faces anyway. The plant, Filke, is inspired by this weird little quirk that runs in my dad's family where individuals seems to fixate on one thing so badly that they learn it faster and get good at it, but at the price of being compelled to do that thing and getting irrationally frustrated if kept from their hobby of choice for more than a few days. I started calling the concept "Hobbyist's Hells" and avoided sticking to any one thing for too long because I could feel myself starting to slip into this seemingly permanent style of thinking and that level of commitment was intimidating. Eventually, I got to a point in art where I could feel that risk of getting caught by a hobbyist's hell glaring over my shoulder but it seemed like a perfectly fine hobby that's sustainable and not overly costly and I was having a good bit of fun with it, so about nine months ago I just stopped avoiding it and let this odd little concept take hold. The first few weeks of it consisted of my brain essentially being rewired to understand and learn how to draw better and I was a disoriented mess because everything looked the same but registered differently. When I tried to think of a good analogy on what it was like, one of the first things that came to mind (and what personally made the most sense to me) was the idea of staying in one place doing something for so long that you get overgrown with plants until you can no longer leave, it didn't make any sense to most people but it still stuck on my thoughts like gorilla glue so I eventually adapted the concept to what I now call Filke.

Filke is this wack semi-nightmare of a plant that has evolved to depend upon a mammalian host for protection, warmth, braincells for higher thinking, and better resources; in exchange it provides the host with more advanced micromanagement of bodily processes (like balancing hormone cycles or alerting the immune system of undetected pathogens), contributing photosynthesized sugars and oxygen, and helping to filter out things that an animal body might not know what to do with (like making sure that the dumb idiot bones aren't integrating heavy metals that the liver and kidneys missed). I also slapped bioluminescence into Filke's species abilities because I thought it would look cool and give the character more capacity to express itself since plants aren't typically assumed to be thinking or have personalities, my craptastic lore explanation is that Filke can steal genetic information from other living things and at some point it got ahold of a firefly. This symbiotic plant burrows into the host and establishes it's equivalent to a central nervous system somewhere it thinks is fairly protected (in Filke's case, this is along Drawing Lat's spine inside the ribcage) and then branches out to interface with the rest of the host's body, especially the brain which it will skim information from and lightly use for advanced thought processing and hopefully not interfere with the host's thoughts too much. Now that might make it seem like my persona is actually just a glorified pot of dirt for a slightly intelligent plant that beat her in a fistfight, and to an extent this is true since Filke could easily make her miserable until she did what it wanted; but for the most part Filke isn't able to outsmart Drawing Lat and isn't physically strong enough to puppeteer her body around if she just decides she wants to try drinking weed killer and hoping for the best, and if either of them die then the other one is screwed and soon to die with them. If Filke dies, Drawing Lat has decaying plant matter woven through their body and a nasty case of gangrene and internal bleeding knocking on the door, if Drawing Lat dies then Filke is suddenly dropped to baseline plant intelligence in an environment that will soon get too cold to sustain it. Because of the whole "if I die, I'm taking you with me" relationship, these two actually try to protect each other and live peacefully because they both understand that fighting will hurt them both and have a mutual goal of not dying.

As you can see here though, Filke isn't bothering with leaves in the middle of the night. It understands that humans see and that sight is assisted by added light, so it's trying to emit light to help Lat see but it doesn't quite understand that light behind her isn't really doing much. What Filke is starting to pick up on however, is that humans assign meanings to colors in certain contexts and that it can try to use that to communicate with Lat, this is a revelation for Lat because she didn't think Filke was even aware of anything much less capable of understanding spoken English (Filke can pick up on Lat's understandings of stimuli, so when Lat hears words she understands, Filke also understands).