12 Months of Dogs Of War - June (Myst) 04

I've run out of things to say about Myst, but here's a picture anyway. Posting four pictures a month for each character was a goal I wanted to achieve in the first place. Also taking the opportunity to practice my Photoshop colouring skills. Still got a ways to go. Especially with blending.

That wraps up the good guys showcase. Next month - we start to see the bad guys. Oo-er!

12 Months of Dogs Of War - June (Myst) 03

An idea that I've been playing around with recently is giving Myst a butterfly 'pet'. I say it in inverted commas as it isn't a living creature, but a little robot, built for Myst as a birthday present. She likes butterflies and this is something of a physical extension to her personality. It has practical uses as well - as a robot, it contains cameras and for all intents and purposes fills the role of a small surveillance drone. It can spy on the enemy without drawing too much attention. Well, as long as they don't look at it too closely. 

While it does have a few personality traits - courtesy of its AI, I'm not intending for this to be considered an additional character for the team, but the idea of a robot butterfly pet presents itself with a few gags to use throughout the series and I feel it's interesting enough to merit inclusion.

12 Months of Dogs Of War - June (Myst) 02

Myst was the last member of the good guys that I came up with, first appearing in an abandoned episode idea. The Halo Blades (bar Peter Edgewood) had been captured and Pete gains the help of four other dogs to rescue them. Myst was one of these extra characters. I can't remember if this was related to it, but another idea involved the HBS recruiting a few dozen extra auxiliary members for their team. I felt that the HBS needed a much larger force to pull of the successes against a powerful militarised foe. But this aspect was eventually relegated to the cutting room floor as I was ending up with a ridiculous amount of characters.

The next phase of including Myst came about in the first episode of the second season. She was to be a new member for the bad guys (who we will begin to see, starting from next month). At this point in development for Dogs Of War, I had the idea that the bad doggie characters undergo extensive genetic engineering and cybernetic enhancement between seasons one and two. The HBS convince Myst to join the good guys, using the argument that the bad guys may force her to undergo similar modifications, which she didn't want. This was another concept I abandoned, freeing up Myst once again.

Finally I just had her be one of Stylene's friends who joins her to help fight the good fight.

Myst had also been imagined as being the 'sexy' female character. This is something I had hoped to achieve whenever I created a female character, but each time I tried to sexy them up, my drawing style couldn't match what I had wanted. I'm much better at drawing now, but the sexiness factor has since fallen out of favour. She was also going to be a love interest to Peter Edgewood, but I later had other ideas for Peter and made Myst a love interest to Sledge instead.

12 Months of Dogs Of War - June (Myst)

This little cutie is Myst Sheppard. She probably has the most thoroughly developed personality out of all my Dogs Of War characters. She's a bit of a free spirit, she's an environmentalist, she's spiritual, a little bit feminist, has an open mind about the world, is a positive thinker, is into astrology - you get the idea.

You might be wondering then, why oh why would someone like that be brandishing an assault rifle and a willing participant in a story about war? Well, while she cares about the environment, she believes all issues stem from overpopulation and that war is a speedy resolution to the problem. She also adopts a 'survival of the fittest' mentality. She won't hesitate passing up an opportunity if it benefits her. This doesn't mean she's completely without morals - it mostly manifests itself at battlefield looting.

Not that it really matters and I'm sure you don't care anyway, I've slightly misrepresented Myst's dog breed. Regarding animal characters in my Dogs Of War world, I try to adhere to their size relations. By that I mean characters based on small and large animals remain small and large respectively. Myst is a Shetland Sheepdog. These are small dogs, roughly terrier sized. This would mean she should be as tall as Stylene (a fox), however she is reasonably taller than that. Mainly this is because she is also Sledge's girlfriend and I didn't want there to be too much of a size difference between the two. The other misrepresentation is her intelligence. Shetland Sheepdogs are actually rated in the top ten smartest dog breeds (No. 1 is the Border Collie - Peter Edgewood's breed, incidentally). Myst isn't stupid by any means, but not super intelligent as her breed would suggest.

Design-wise, I'm still on the fence about whether to have her wear a skirt or trousers. Trousers would be easier for animation, but a skirt helps to differentiate her from the other characters.