Hands from Disconnect, now with the info I was supposed to include in the first place :<
Elim is left, and Julian is right, because just about every aspect of history until recently doesn’t think left = good. Latin word being where we derive our word ‘sinister’ and all that. /left-hander rage
There are some black splatter marks on Elim's hand painting on purpose, because I liked the idea that it was not clean as Julian’s. It’s not enough to make them stop looking like a matching set, but it’s dirtier enough. (It also offsets that Julian’s image has the black marks of writing on it.)
Elim’s writing was done with a lot of chanting to myself - “one, two, three, line, hook” - until I got the general feel of these things. I started making the characters with ideas from taking Japanese in mind, as well as just the natural ways someone might be taught to make these shapes, like how we cross t’s and f’s. We don’t try to make the cross on the t and the f as part of the stem in one motion, you know? So I let the letters break themselves up a little.
I did notice that for reals (“For real”. Are you listening to this?) this language should have the letters merging - almost in a cursive - but I thought if Elim wanted Julian to have even a hope of translating hand-written Kardasi/Cardassian/whatever, he would 'print’ it. I also let the 'truth’ bit (which is the horizontal) fade a bit at the end, and be a bit messier, like he wrote the 'i love you’ part and then later felt he needed to clarify as he stuck the note in the book. Maybe wrote it while it was stuck in said book because Julian was coming back from where ever he was that he was not watching his books.
Other notes include confirmation that I have the world’s softest hands, because I used my hand to model holding that little vial and then had to add a lot of folds and lines and a bit of thicker skin to my general shape when I compared my hands to Garak’s in Empok Nor.
Fun with my brother too, who I talked into being Julian’s hand for me, since his hands are so long and blocky. I was really tempted to coach the placement of his fingers when we took his pictures, because I tend to… sort of shoujo manga my own hands? I just do little elegant sorts of motions with my own hands when I pose them, and thus when I pose character's hands they end up a bit shoujo too, but it was actually really appropriate to use my brother’s straight up heavy un-complicated hand. I’m glad I just let him hold the stupid paper rather than fuss with his fingers, it looks so much more like Julian, especially compared to the Elim one, which, since I modeled it, is a little more 'posed’.
