Familiar Fuzzy Faces

more concept art for my newest project, Fuzzbutts! I've decided to focus on building characters up from a single unique shape, and I'm having pretty good results so far!

Not every character will make the jump from the Pandoraverse to Fuzzbutts, but many will. Here are a couple idiots y'all might recognize.

1.) Virgil (Male, Spotted Hyena). A mysterious figure from Sunny's past....who, unfortunately, quite likes reappearing in Sunny's present. He is maybe the only creature alive that can get happy-go-lucky Sunny instantly bristling and snarling. Virge is pretty flattered of that fact~

Frankie (Female, Rottweiler). Sunny's sister. Sunny's parents are quite wealthy, so when their tiny son started begging them for a sibling, they went right down to the orphanage and picked out a puppy for him. Dubbing her Francine, they figured she'd make a fine companion to keep their son pacified.....but little Franny proved to be a bit more rough-and-tumble than the labradors were used to, bossing and biting little Sunny and wrestling him into submission. They almost returned her, but instead opted to pick out another pup, who Sunny did end up actually enjoying (yet unnamed doggie Cloudburst). Frankie grew up the black sheep among dogs, often unjustly punished and written off as a problem child. But the more her family tried to mold her into a proper young lady, the more rebellious Frankie became, until she eventually moved out and never looked back. Frankie works as a mechanic and is deeply protective of the ones she loves, which includes her adoptive little sister and (somehow) Sunny. She is a big ol butch lesbian and pretty much a straight-up export of Phoenix.

Priscilla (Female, Sphinx Cat) Owner of a beauty salon and a connoisseur of fancy wigs. Lives in one of the nicer lofts of Bruce's apartment complex. Prissy, fashionable, vain, demure, in a deep love affair with string. A bite-sized package of sass and gossip. Extremely nosy and catty, privy to all local gossip. A tiny transbian. Her friendship with Bruce began the day they were both in the apartment laundry room. The washing machine was designed for larger animals and Prissy leaped on top to drop in her clothes, but slipped and fell in. This prompted a rescue from Bruce, who maybe didn't have the most sensitive remark upon tugging out what looked less like a cat and more like a shivering, wrinkly, half-drowned ballsack. Priscilla then attempted to claw his eyes out. After the scuffle, the pair shared their gripes about navigating a world not built for smaller animals, and ended up clicking. She and Bruce are best friends, though he'd definitely deny it.

Cupcake: (Female, Grizzly Bear) Cupcake, but she's a bear. This design ended up feeling a little bland to me, so I changed it.

2.) Cupcake version 2! >

I rounded out her bulky rectangle body and changed her color palette. Cupcake just doesn't feel like Cupcake without her cutesy-wutesy warm colors. She's a "blonde" grizzly bear, which exist in real life, while Penny's hair/tail are dyed.

Meet Pandora's little furry export, Penny! It's short for Pendleton, not Penelope, and she will get huffy if you get it wrong. Magic does not exist in the world of Fuzzbutts, but that doesn't mean Pendleton Pennigan Prosimian is your ordinary ring-tailed lemur.

I mentioned before that Bruce lives in an apartment complex with his roommate Sunny and various neighbors, but I decided to change it to a boarding house. Said boarding house is owned by Penny, who inherited it when her grandmother unexpectedly kicked the bucket, saddling Pen with a shabby old building and a gaggle of odd tenants. Penny was.....not happy about this.

Penny, you see, is an aspiring thespian! Or at least, she was. Turns out steady acting work is hard to come by, especially for a lemur. No matter how well Pen can sing or dance or tell a knock-knock joke, it seems audiences like an actor on stage big enough to actually see from their seat. Poo. While Pen has never quite given up her acting dreams, she still had bills to pay, so she went into a line of work that never has a shortage of openings- children's entertainment. Pen is a performer and a professional clown, and she can do everything from making balloon animal-people to juggling knives. While it wasn't the most fulfilling career (children like pulling her tail far too much), it was still fun and challenging enough, especially aided by her "bear-ry" best friend Cupcake, whom she met at clown college. Cupcake was studying to learn the ways of comedy, which Penny doesn't get, because she finds Cupcake hilarious without the bear even trying. Penny was actually settling into her life, feeling happy, maybe considering finally asking Cupcake out- when good ol' Granny croaked and left her stuck with a literal animal house.

And so, Penny became a landlady (land-lemur). It's a tough job, because nobody likes landlords, and Penny fervently, desperately needs to be liked. She insists on knowing each of her boarders personally and insisting on them all acting like one big happy family, complete with potluck dinners and birthday celebrations and movie nights- which tends to only annoy her tenants. She's got a lot of Michael Scott energy, for all my Office fans out there. As Penny once was a broke youngster scraping to get by, she purposefully keeps rent low. She believes in offering her tenants low-cost living......uh, in exchange for low-effort land-lording, of course. As Penny doesn't know jack shit about maintaining property or actually getting people to pay their rent, she brought Cupcake along as an assistant. Cupcake does minor repairs around the boarding house, cooks meals, terrifies the boarders into following house rules, and generally keeps Penny from doing anything too stupid.

Penny's gender identity is kinda ambiguous, and she refers to herself with varying pronouns. She is very, very, very queer, and as such her boarding house tends to attract all manner of queer animal-folk. She's 100% theater kid, melodramatic, excitable, and prone to bursting into song and dance. She is often found riding around on Cupcake's shoulder, discreetly eavesdropping on her boarders, and sunbathing on the roof. She's become quite fond of teasing Bruce, one of her newest tenants.

Cupcake was adopted at a young age by a family of tiny circus animals.(Adoption is quite common in the world of Fuzzbutts. As so many animals can bear multiple offspring at once, many end up in the foster system). While Cupcake looks like a grumpy bear, she loves her family dearly and has learned to restrain her immense strength to handle them all with care. As she loves them and admires their work (and the joy and laughter they bring to their audiences), she naturally aspired to follow in their tiny pawprints someday. Unfortunately....Cupcake just doesn't grasp comedy. She can tell a joke, she can slip on a banana, she can honk her clown nose just fine....but it's just never very funny. In fact, no matter how hard Cupcake tries, most children just seem afraid of a big lumbering grizzly bear. Clown college was her last hope of shaping herself into a decent entertainer. Her studies proved to be fruitless and frustrating, though a silver lining appeared when she met Penny. The pair quickly bonded over feeling like misfits at their chosen profession (Pen is too tiny to be a good mainstream actor, Cupcake is too scary to be a proper clown). Penny and Cupcake vow to become the best performers they can be- and after a lot of trial and effort, they manage to create a show that's actually decently successful. Penny plays the wacky clown, while Cupcake plays the straight man to her silly antics, often taking a pie or a squirt of water to the face. It's a hit with kids! Children love seeing a kooky little lemur get the better of the bear. Cupcake should finally feel happy....but she doesn't.

One day, their clown careers are put on pause when Penny learns she's inherited the boarding house. Although Penny is frustrated and overwhelmed by the demands of managing property and keeping the tenants happy, Cupcake finds herself....secretly loving it? Doing repairs around the house, clearing out the cobwebs and filling the shelves with knickknacks, picking vegetables in the garden with Bruce, listening to Priscilla's tips on home decor, cooking meals for the other boarders- watching bashfully as everyone gets starry-eyed at a triple layer cake she baked....It's all quite different than anything she's used to. Dear Penny is always so anxious with her, ardently apologizing and saying soon they'll be able to offload the boarding house onto someone else and get back to their act- but Cupcake privately wonders if THIS is where she's meant to be. Where they're meant to be.

3.) well of course these two chumps made it into Fuzzbutts. For all my frustrations with Moondancer, I'm still awfully attached to his twerpy twinky self. Although in this story he's no longer a serial killer, he remains- quite dutifully- a huge bitch. Meet Lune and Victoria.

Lune (pronounced "loon". Male, Red Deer). Lune is a professional ballet dancer that has become the indie darling of local theatre. While it is indeed a glamorous, deeply fulfilling career, it doesn't pay beans, so he and his sister share a room at Penny's boarding house. Lune has something of a love/hate relationship with dear Pendleton. As fellow theatre people, their natural instinct is both be catty and competitive at each other, while occasionally having an impromptu sing-off of Skimbleshanks The Railway Cat. Lune likes to think of himself as above Penny's childish antics, yet often ends up roped into her shenanigans. He does maintain that she is a terrible landlord, though he has a much more amicable relationship with Cupcake. Lune is impatient, curt, and honest in a way that often comes off as insensitive- most people write him off as a spoiled ice queen diva. But he's a nice buck, deep down- uh, Victoria swears.

Lune has a rare genetic pattern called leucism, giving him that white pelt. He's pretty and he knows it, quite enjoying the attention he gets from ballet fans and admirers alike......except when said attention comes from Logan. Urgh.

Victoria (Female, Red Deer) Mostly goes by "V", please don't call her Vicky. Lune's headstrong younger sister. Victoria is a kind, confident doe with a strong sense of justice. Her studies thus far have focused on social issues, and she hopes to go into local politics someday. For now though, she's content designing costumes for Lune and his various theater productions, as well as painting sets, crafting marionettes, and hosting puppet shows for children. Victoria is a deeply creative, passionate person, and Lune wishes he could provide her with more than community college, a dingy local theater, and a cramped room in a shabby boarding house. Guilty and concerned, he often urges her to return home, back to their parents, but Victoria insists she's having fun, and that there's nowhere else she's rather be.

Lune and Victoria are both estranged from their family for reasons unknown. Lune is overprotective of his little sister and often lacks faith in her abilities, which pisses Victoria right off. The siblings are known to butt heads quite literally. Fortunately, Victoria is the only person Lune can manage an apology for, and Victoria will accept it with a sigh. Because she loves her brother, even if he is a huge bitch.

Like Lune, Victoria also has an unusual genetic pattern. She's piebald, resulting in those white splotches. The two siblings certainly stick out in a herd of red deer.

more notes:

-Although Victoria did not study ballet to the degree Lune did, she's a pretty skilled, graceful dancer in her own right. The two siblings sometimes dance together whenever Penny insists on hosting a talent night.

-Both sibs frequently forget to eat, mostly because they both suck at cooking. Cupcake is forever sniffing both of them out and intimidating one or the other into eating a meal she made, be it oatmeal and berries or dandelion salad or strawberry cake (that last one actually gets both sibs stampeding into the kitchen, forks at the ready).

-Victoria is a disaster lesbian, Lune uses no particular label, but will accept "queer"

-Both siblings speak fluent French. They swear exclusively in French when angered.

-Victoria has a very prominent stammer when she gets nervous. It's common for herbivores like deer, who are known for their "freeze" instinct in response to perceived danger. Lune will gore anyone that makes fun or tries to rush her to spit the words out.

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mo fuzzbutts mo problems:

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