Meet Tusaris the Dragon!

At long last! I can finally call this sucker finished.

I estimate it's been over 100 hours of work. Definitely the most challenging character design I have come up with yet. I love making characters, but it's the furthest thing from being easy... ESPECIALLY when I put so much personal attachment and representation into it.

Tusaris will become my new fursona! But I am not getting rid of Riley; I'll just have two main sonas. They are both super "me" and represent me to the fullest, just in different forms/universes. This character will be entirely replacing my older dragon identity, Tusami. That character represented me at a completely different time and place in my life and that chapter closed long ago. You can think of Tusami going through a phoenix revival if you'd like; I burned her to the ground and out of the ashes arose Tusaris, purer in form, and intended to be a serious representation of me from the beginning and less of a goofy childhood role playing character turned fursona. I talked about the character Tusami and why I wanted to replace her in a previous Patreon post, originally posted in June for higher tiered Patrons, which you can read about here.

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I knew I wanted Tusaris to be a shapeshifter of some kind because it's symbolic several ways in how I relate to my characters, transformation of humans to animals is the reason I got into the furry fandom in the first place (Animorphs, werewolves, Saturday morning cartoon episodes with the transformation theme), and it's also a representation of the new changes I'm making in my life right now in growing as a person.

So she's able to take human and anthro forms, as well as varying amounts of draconic/human hybriding (so think willful, controlled transformation over individual components, giving human form isolated features like transforming only her hands to dragon, or allowing her dragon form to be wingless) but I am not sure about her transforming into other characters at all. For example I don't think I like the idea of her being able to transform into Riley, making them become the same character. I kind of like them as their own distinctive things, yet I realize they really are the same character anyways because they are both me? But I guess she's kinda like me in a particular universe and Riley is me in another universe. And she just happens to use the name Riley in human form whatacoincidence.

I'm honestly thinking that she will just be draconic shapeshifter with restrictions to transforming between her two main forms, such as not able to grow extra features she didn't previous posses like growing fur or change her marking patterns. Only a range of human to draconic forms along a slider where each body part has a slider from 1-100% human or dragon she can control. But she wouldn't change to having a completely dragon body and a human head, even if it's technically possible she doesn't like it because I don't like it, lol. The rule of thumb is that she'll try and change in the most aesthetically pleasing way possible. Transformation can also happen quite fast as a shapeshifter, but can be controlled to be slow too. Her human form looks like me, naturally.

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But then I ran into some trouble with clothing...

I even considered giving her magical abilities to conjure clothing, or the ability to manipulate her physical form to a degree in order to wear certain clothes in anthro form. Unfortunately the only trouble with her unique special snowflake design, the wing membrane prevents any clothing from wrapping around her torso, hips, and tail. So I considered creating special clothes that wrap around her arms and attach across the back on the shoulders above the wings, kinda like a tactical shoulder holster for a gun, then a piece of cloth that hangs down the front of her body and attaches around the legs like a garter. But that feels like it would only work in fantasy setting or is the equivalent of lingerie since it wouldn't do a lot to cover her lower bits from the bottom/back side unless it was also attached halfway down the tail under the wing membrane which may look pretty weird. (Buuuuut she's a shapeshifter and has the ability to completely cover up and hide all her "bits" so clothing doesn't honestly matter at all for that purpose. In fact showing no bits at all is her natural and preferred state. I just like putting clothes on anthros in certain settings and I am hypothesizing how that would be feasible, if at all.)

Otherwise she has to either be wingless to wear normal clothes, have the ability to detach the wing membrane in certain areas along the body (which effectively punches holes along its length to allow modified clothing straps to slip in there and work), and/or the ability to shrink back the membrane completely along the lower half of the body/tail and only attach to the wing's elbows or only partially down her back above where pants would sit and negate the tail fins entirely, use magical powers to hold clothing onto her body despite the giant holes created where the wing membranes need to go, or the clothing is an illusion and it's actually part of her body/skin and just looks and feels like separate cloth. OH THE CONUNDRUM. Because shes'a a shapeshifter all of the above options are plausible. I just gotta test them out and see if I have a preference. Which do you like?

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So I guess while the main physical design is completed (but not the full reference sheet presentation, only the feral version is polished, the anthro is very rough made only to assist me in making sure the design read well in both forms, and I need to do a complete turnaround and mouth ref too) the character details are still a work in progress. I know I want to keep blue fire as her element like Tusami had. But a few things are still up in the air. I plan to officially reveal the character publicly either for New Years or on my birthday (Jan 12).

Thanks for reading! I hope you guys like the end result :)