OH BABY YES
WE ARE ABOUT TO EMBARK ON A MAGNIFICENT ADVENTURE
AN ADVENTURE THROUGH TIME
YOUR ESCORT ON THIS JOURNEY WILL BE JOHANN
PLEASE KEEP YOUR ARMS, LEGS, AND VARIOUS OTHER SUNDRY APPENDAGES INSIDE THE VEHICLE AT ALL TIMES. FASTEN YOUR SEATBELT SECURELY AND HEEEERE WE GOOOOOO
If you're here, you're probably from Artslam. Meaning you probably know Doctor Weiss fairly well. He looks like this, right?
He's a forensic pathologist for a paranormal investigation agency and does some monster fighting for them as well. He's tall, lanky, German, and well into his fifties. He's got a major physical mutation that results in myriad medical problems and an unfortunate shapeshifting/medium ability. He's got a lady friend named Vera, who he positively adores, and is in general a pacifistic, extremely intelligent, and gentle-tempered man, if a bit shy.
That's all true, right?
Well it is now
BUT GET READY TO HAVE YOUR MIND BLOWN
BY THE PAST
I GIVE YOU
THE VERY FIRST PICTURE I EVER DREW OF THE CHARACTER THAT WOULD BECOME JOHANN
ye gods alive in christ what is that fucking thing
Answer: that is my art circa...2003? 2004? If I remember correctly, I made him up around Christmastime in 2004, so this could be either late 2004 or early 2005. Fuck my younger self for never dating shit. I would have been somewhere between 12 and 13.
Anyway, back then his name was ~~~Yueh~~~ and he didn't have a last name. I don't think he really had a purpose for like, a while. He was just there. And he was bishie kawaii and had big ol' honkin wings. The first time I drew him he was (as you can see) as shimmeringly blond as the golden sun. I decided approximately the next day that he should have ~silver hair~ SO HMMM I NEEDED A REASON
And unfortunately a picture is missing here. I could not be arsed to find it in my huge bin of old, shitty art/possibly I threw it out but I doubt it. Anyway, suffice it to say that he had glorious ~silver~ hair because HIS FUCKING WINGS GOT MOTHERFUCKING RIPPED OFF.
So I drew him, in profile (profiles were my long suit then. Or so I thought), with fucking blood gushing out of his mouth and nose and horrified, shocked blue eyes, and the broken-off, shattered stumps of his wings protruding sadly from somewhere around the back of his neck for some reason. It was all in colored pencil. Except his hair and wings. I made my dad drag me out to Blick so I could spend my allowance on a piss-weak, useless piece of crap prismacolor metallic silver pen, which started leaking the second time I used it, and scribbled some long-ass shiny hair onto his head and then scribbled in some wing feather like things, for good measure.
The result was...
Stupid.
Anyway, I trashed that and just started coloring his hair white because I was a lazy little turd even back then.
Did I mention that at this point in time all of my characters had a set outfit that was a variation on a single, retarded theme because I could literally not care any less about research? All I cared about was that it looked vaguely Japanese/Asian.
Really it looked like a terrible polyester bell-bottomed women's pantsuit from the eighties. With a wrap top. Yueh's was black, with silver trim. At this point I believe he had "evolved" into an insufferable douchebag who was constantly angry, depressed, and probably kicked puppies. That was the only aspect of his personality. "Teehee someone you should be afraid of. ^^"
But honestly, other than that he doesn't look so bad, right--
Wait you mean I was so pathetic that I drew a vaguely decent thing once (this shitty picture of that character that became Ellie) and then just traced it like 20 times and added different hair?
YOU BET YOUR ASS.
If I could go back in time I would punch my younger self so hard.
Yay woo hoo he gets his wings back at some point yippee
no one could give less of a shit about this dude I swear to god. He was an angry, mean bastard, all the time, to everyone. For no reason. He had no family and no past. I think at this point I might have finally decided he was former-Ellie's ~mage teacher~ even though he was only like 19 and she was like 18. That would remain a constant for years but it would gradually get less lame. Kind of.
...
Oh my god can we just forget this exists
please
God ugh ugh ugh I thought this was so good urgh barf I FEEL SO DIRTY
But hey look I decided somewhere around whenever the fuck I made this that he has special purple eyes desu and they have white pupils and the irises are big like an animal's desuuuuu
Also super special snow leopard ears hurp de derp. My excuse was THEY R A DIFFERNT SPECIES AND SHAPESHIFT. He turned into a silver and white gryphon. At this point his full name was Yueh Moonswing, because I apparently came up with the last name in a dream I had.
younger self, you are filth
I did a whole series of these.
Dat chin.
I think my favorite part of this is his plunging decolletage.
Y hello there same thing but flipped and slightly less shitty. I think this was a while after I finally got copics.
INEXPLICABLE PIRATE PHASE
God that fucking hand
Those weirdly flat, slablike pectoral muscles
HAIR HAS REACHED MAXIMUM VOLUME CAPTAIN I CANNAE GIVE IT ANY MORE but no seriously at this point his hair was down to his knees. Not even joking.
I blame this picture for why I still cannot draw cats.
It looks like he has a motherfucking wall-to-wall bed though. Which would be bitchin as shit
HEY LOOK I TRIED REALISM He was supposed to be pretty girly bishie desu. And a high-level mage, despite still being only 23 or something like that. He was like the most powerful mage ever or whatever but only on the full moon and his powers waxed and waned with it. You know, because "Yueh" means "moon" in Chinese.
The face is honestly not that bad for a generic prettyboy face, I guess, but lol dem ears. I remember being really happy that I had made his features "unique" and that he finally looked like how I imagined him to, but he just looks like some anonymous ladyboy. With balls of lint attached to the sides of his head.
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS THAT
No really it's looking at me and I don't like it. It has no forehead. I seriously do not know what is up with this because nothing I have ever made before or since looked even kind of like this style.
I think this was supposed to be my stupid little 14-year-old hot-topic loser brain's interpretation of how Yueh would dress if he lived in the here and now.
Look at his retarded hair thing and fingerless gloves
Can you imagine how hard you would elbow your friend if you saw a guy with a gold-leafed bun-holder and fingerless gloves
You would elbow the shit out of them
Okay we're starting to edge away from derpy anime now. I think he might have been a bit older here, maybe 26, and this was about the beginning of the old storyline, from before DPI, which was a melodramatic steampunk/magic-user political satire thing. Still early days though. He and Gabriel were essentially one in the same, though Gabriel was an unstable usurper-prince and ~Yueh~ his mage advisor. They hated each other, and everyone and everything else, and were bloodthirsty serial killers. How deep. But hey, he has a nose now! No more tail, either. The animal-eared "species" was some dumb made-up offshoot of homo sapiens.
Still though how I anatomy ribcage work like this? And how do his sticklike arms not break.
OOOOH SYMBOLISM LIFE IS FRAGILE YUEH KILLS PEOPLE OOOOH
2007 baby
This was probably around the time that I decided it didn't make sense for someone who came from a made-up country vaguely similar to Germany to be named "Yueh", and changed it to the very slightly less-stupid "Neimand," which at least has the benefit of being a German word, meaning "nobody." I think I chose that because he was horribly abused and abandoned as a child and blah blah blah was a nobody and his mother never named him.
What a failure I was.
Anyway his full name ended up being the supremely idiotic Neimand Uriel Rookwood, what the actual fuck.
CUE HUGE PLOT REVAMP Wherein the steampunk storyline was reworked into something a little less shitty and actually kind of interesting and original, and which I still have a little bit of a soft spot for. Neimand was no longer a supremely powerful serial-killing banished royal mage with a weird schizophrenic condition and a decaying twin in a mirror (don't ask), but instead a seer who used to work for (then prince) Gabriel and got too uppity and so was kicked out. He took opiate drugs to enhance his ability and range of seer-vision, and was a fickle, tempestuous, and unstable man, obsessed with revenge and at the same time regaining favor, who during the course of the plot grew more and more unpredictable. I think there was talk of him possibly having killed a few people and disposed of them via dismemberment. May have been just talk though. Fucked if I recall.
Anyway he was still former-Ellie's teacher, (she was now much more like her current form) but only because their stupid made up species was discriminated against so they had to find her a teacher with similar abilities who was also that kind of person. So she was kind of dumped on him and he didn't really pay too much attention to her. She thought him strange and nerve-wracking to be around, and she spoke French and he German.
Wow he looks like an actual person and doesn't have sameface syndrome and weird hair and dumb shit like that anymore!
also HOLY SHIT HE'S OLD NOW that happened really fast, I'm not sure when. He's even older currently.
There's probably some missing stuff around this point in time, but long story short we dumped that plot and now they fight monsters in the present day and Johann has a perfectly normal, respectable German name, and a sweet temper, and a real profession, and everything is very different.
YOU'RE A REAL PERSON NOW
SURPRISE
YOU HAVE COME INTACT THROUGH OC PUBERTY
Him and Ellie in the present awwww
Well now you have been assailed by that collection of glory.
WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO SAY FOR YOURSELVES.
AN ADVENTURE THROUGH TIME
YOUR ESCORT ON THIS JOURNEY WILL BE JOHANN
PLEASE KEEP YOUR ARMS, LEGS, AND VARIOUS OTHER SUNDRY APPENDAGES INSIDE THE VEHICLE AT ALL TIMES. FASTEN YOUR SEATBELT SECURELY AND HEEEERE WE GOOOOOO
If you're here, you're probably from Artslam. Meaning you probably know Doctor Weiss fairly well. He looks like this, right?
He's a forensic pathologist for a paranormal investigation agency and does some monster fighting for them as well. He's tall, lanky, German, and well into his fifties. He's got a major physical mutation that results in myriad medical problems and an unfortunate shapeshifting/medium ability. He's got a lady friend named Vera, who he positively adores, and is in general a pacifistic, extremely intelligent, and gentle-tempered man, if a bit shy.
That's all true, right?
Well it is now
BUT GET READY TO HAVE YOUR MIND BLOWN
BY THE PAST
I GIVE YOU
THE VERY FIRST PICTURE I EVER DREW OF THE CHARACTER THAT WOULD BECOME JOHANN
ye gods alive in christ what is that fucking thing
Answer: that is my art circa...2003? 2004? If I remember correctly, I made him up around Christmastime in 2004, so this could be either late 2004 or early 2005. Fuck my younger self for never dating shit. I would have been somewhere between 12 and 13.
Anyway, back then his name was ~~~Yueh~~~ and he didn't have a last name. I don't think he really had a purpose for like, a while. He was just there. And he was bishie kawaii and had big ol' honkin wings. The first time I drew him he was (as you can see) as shimmeringly blond as the golden sun. I decided approximately the next day that he should have ~silver hair~ SO HMMM I NEEDED A REASON
And unfortunately a picture is missing here. I could not be arsed to find it in my huge bin of old, shitty art/possibly I threw it out but I doubt it. Anyway, suffice it to say that he had glorious ~silver~ hair because HIS FUCKING WINGS GOT MOTHERFUCKING RIPPED OFF.
So I drew him, in profile (profiles were my long suit then. Or so I thought), with fucking blood gushing out of his mouth and nose and horrified, shocked blue eyes, and the broken-off, shattered stumps of his wings protruding sadly from somewhere around the back of his neck for some reason. It was all in colored pencil. Except his hair and wings. I made my dad drag me out to Blick so I could spend my allowance on a piss-weak, useless piece of crap prismacolor metallic silver pen, which started leaking the second time I used it, and scribbled some long-ass shiny hair onto his head and then scribbled in some wing feather like things, for good measure.
The result was...
Stupid.
Anyway, I trashed that and just started coloring his hair white because I was a lazy little turd even back then.
Did I mention that at this point in time all of my characters had a set outfit that was a variation on a single, retarded theme because I could literally not care any less about research? All I cared about was that it looked vaguely Japanese/Asian.
Really it looked like a terrible polyester bell-bottomed women's pantsuit from the eighties. With a wrap top. Yueh's was black, with silver trim. At this point I believe he had "evolved" into an insufferable douchebag who was constantly angry, depressed, and probably kicked puppies. That was the only aspect of his personality. "Teehee someone you should be afraid of. ^^"
But honestly, other than that he doesn't look so bad, right--
Wait you mean I was so pathetic that I drew a vaguely decent thing once (this shitty picture of that character that became Ellie) and then just traced it like 20 times and added different hair?
YOU BET YOUR ASS.
If I could go back in time I would punch my younger self so hard.
Yay woo hoo he gets his wings back at some point yippee
no one could give less of a shit about this dude I swear to god. He was an angry, mean bastard, all the time, to everyone. For no reason. He had no family and no past. I think at this point I might have finally decided he was former-Ellie's ~mage teacher~ even though he was only like 19 and she was like 18. That would remain a constant for years but it would gradually get less lame. Kind of.
...
Oh my god can we just forget this exists
please
God ugh ugh ugh I thought this was so good urgh barf I FEEL SO DIRTY
But hey look I decided somewhere around whenever the fuck I made this that he has special purple eyes desu and they have white pupils and the irises are big like an animal's desuuuuu
Also super special snow leopard ears hurp de derp. My excuse was THEY R A DIFFERNT SPECIES AND SHAPESHIFT. He turned into a silver and white gryphon. At this point his full name was Yueh Moonswing, because I apparently came up with the last name in a dream I had.
younger self, you are filth
I did a whole series of these.
Dat chin.
I think my favorite part of this is his plunging decolletage.
Y hello there same thing but flipped and slightly less shitty. I think this was a while after I finally got copics.
INEXPLICABLE PIRATE PHASE
God that fucking hand
Those weirdly flat, slablike pectoral muscles
HAIR HAS REACHED MAXIMUM VOLUME CAPTAIN I CANNAE GIVE IT ANY MORE but no seriously at this point his hair was down to his knees. Not even joking.
I blame this picture for why I still cannot draw cats.
It looks like he has a motherfucking wall-to-wall bed though. Which would be bitchin as shit
HEY LOOK I TRIED REALISM He was supposed to be pretty girly bishie desu. And a high-level mage, despite still being only 23 or something like that. He was like the most powerful mage ever or whatever but only on the full moon and his powers waxed and waned with it. You know, because "Yueh" means "moon" in Chinese.
The face is honestly not that bad for a generic prettyboy face, I guess, but lol dem ears. I remember being really happy that I had made his features "unique" and that he finally looked like how I imagined him to, but he just looks like some anonymous ladyboy. With balls of lint attached to the sides of his head.
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS THAT
No really it's looking at me and I don't like it. It has no forehead. I seriously do not know what is up with this because nothing I have ever made before or since looked even kind of like this style.
I think this was supposed to be my stupid little 14-year-old hot-topic loser brain's interpretation of how Yueh would dress if he lived in the here and now.
Look at his retarded hair thing and fingerless gloves
Can you imagine how hard you would elbow your friend if you saw a guy with a gold-leafed bun-holder and fingerless gloves
You would elbow the shit out of them
Okay we're starting to edge away from derpy anime now. I think he might have been a bit older here, maybe 26, and this was about the beginning of the old storyline, from before DPI, which was a melodramatic steampunk/magic-user political satire thing. Still early days though. He and Gabriel were essentially one in the same, though Gabriel was an unstable usurper-prince and ~Yueh~ his mage advisor. They hated each other, and everyone and everything else, and were bloodthirsty serial killers. How deep. But hey, he has a nose now! No more tail, either. The animal-eared "species" was some dumb made-up offshoot of homo sapiens.
Still though how I anatomy ribcage work like this? And how do his sticklike arms not break.
OOOOH SYMBOLISM LIFE IS FRAGILE YUEH KILLS PEOPLE OOOOH
2007 baby
This was probably around the time that I decided it didn't make sense for someone who came from a made-up country vaguely similar to Germany to be named "Yueh", and changed it to the very slightly less-stupid "Neimand," which at least has the benefit of being a German word, meaning "nobody." I think I chose that because he was horribly abused and abandoned as a child and blah blah blah was a nobody and his mother never named him.
What a failure I was.
Anyway his full name ended up being the supremely idiotic Neimand Uriel Rookwood, what the actual fuck.
CUE HUGE PLOT REVAMP Wherein the steampunk storyline was reworked into something a little less shitty and actually kind of interesting and original, and which I still have a little bit of a soft spot for. Neimand was no longer a supremely powerful serial-killing banished royal mage with a weird schizophrenic condition and a decaying twin in a mirror (don't ask), but instead a seer who used to work for (then prince) Gabriel and got too uppity and so was kicked out. He took opiate drugs to enhance his ability and range of seer-vision, and was a fickle, tempestuous, and unstable man, obsessed with revenge and at the same time regaining favor, who during the course of the plot grew more and more unpredictable. I think there was talk of him possibly having killed a few people and disposed of them via dismemberment. May have been just talk though. Fucked if I recall.
Anyway he was still former-Ellie's teacher, (she was now much more like her current form) but only because their stupid made up species was discriminated against so they had to find her a teacher with similar abilities who was also that kind of person. So she was kind of dumped on him and he didn't really pay too much attention to her. She thought him strange and nerve-wracking to be around, and she spoke French and he German.
Wow he looks like an actual person and doesn't have sameface syndrome and weird hair and dumb shit like that anymore!
also HOLY SHIT HE'S OLD NOW that happened really fast, I'm not sure when. He's even older currently.
There's probably some missing stuff around this point in time, but long story short we dumped that plot and now they fight monsters in the present day and Johann has a perfectly normal, respectable German name, and a sweet temper, and a real profession, and everything is very different.
YOU'RE A REAL PERSON NOW
SURPRISE
YOU HAVE COME INTACT THROUGH OC PUBERTY
Him and Ellie in the present awwww
Well now you have been assailed by that collection of glory.
WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO SAY FOR YOURSELVES.