Weird order, I know! I felt like doing this one first before 0.2.1.
Birds
There were some specific choices of bird design here. Some were for aesthetic reasons, one was for both political and aesthetic reasons, and some were just what people (ie. “””westerners”””/anglophones/vaguely British people since that’s my point of reference) are used to.
The eagle was intentionally diverted from the Bald eagle. I think America’s use of the Bald eagle is dull and trite and as previously expressed in other aspects of this emoji set, I don’t want to consciously perpetuate the US’ cultural dominance. So I replaced it with another eagle because I liked the look of it and it wasn’t native to North America – the Steppe eagle, which is native to Middle East, Africa and Asia.
Other intentional bird species:
- Owl: Long-eared owl because I think it’s really adorable.
- Crane: Red-crowned crane because I saw it in a nature documentary once and I like it’s colours and head markings.
- Parrot: Hyacinth Macaw because I thought it was hella cute and the bright, vivid blue would make a nice change.
MutStd sketch 2018.05.07 birds
I love the job I did of the Owl. I think I really captured the cuteness of the long-eared owl.
Both crow and raven were suggest to me, but they’re both corvids that look very similar, so I decided on just publishing the crow.
I’m also super-happy with basically every bird here.
MutStd sketch 2018.05.19 birds 2
The peacock was challenging because I wanted to make sure the spectacular features were included, but I had to colour them and the head in a way that made the head’s silhouette roughly visible. There’s room for improvement but I did the best job I could think of at the time.
MutStd sketch 2018.05.05 claw hands
I figured it would be fitting to finish the claw hands at the same time I was introducing birds <3.
As I was working on the claw hands, I was freaked out by a strange rendering difference when it comes to cutoff square-edged corners in strokes from when I last made claw hand emoji to when I was making them now. (hence the ‘WTF!??!?’ comment)
It seems like something changed in Affinity Designer without me knowing, yet the previous files are just as they were before. I’m assuming it’s a bug and I just carried on and did some manual corner editing that nobody probably noticed.
MutStd sketch 2018.04.16 Dragons
(The dragon emoji design from 0.0.6 – 0.2.2. In hindsight, it doesn’t look that bad, but it looks worse at lower sizes IMO.)
I’ve been trying to improve the western_dragon design I’ve had for a while now and at the same time make an eastern noodle counterpart. I’m still not 100% about these, but I think they are significantly better.