oh i'd love to show this off! this'll be a big one so strap in and click on read more!

EDIT: added some more commissioned taur art at the end because i know thats what you're all here for :3

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the before times

i've shown off some my earliest "sona" art before

basically for a long time i drew feral wolf characters with constantly shifting markings, but mostly big, fluffy and blue/white, sometimes beige/white. and if you asked me at the time, i would say i wasn't a furry and also these weren't fursonas, but with the power of hindsight we can say, yes i was a furry and yes those were fursonas lmao

furry era

at some point around 2019 i decided to become a furry and i wanted to nail down my fursona design instead of constantly changing things (ed: he kept on changing things anyway, see, this post about changing into a samoyed taur)

i first ended up on this design

the face markings were kinda inspired by lycanroc, which i was a big fan of at the time. you can especially see this in the upside down V shape of fur on the nose bridge

i wasn't fully happy yet and wanted more colors in the design, so i ended up on this design change

which ended up becoming this ref sheet i drew

and that's it! for a few years, this was gabu! his design was fixed, i got a LOT of artwork of this design, and i even have a partially finished fursuit of him that i went to NFC2020 with!

3d modeling and redesign

at some point near the end of 2020 i got into vrchat and wanted to make a custom avatar for myself, and in the process i'd started redesigning him

his colors turned darker blue, i wanted to bring back the amber eyes from the old, old, sprites, and i wanted to add an extra shade of beige. you can also kinda see how i wanted to turn the markings around his eyes into a little more realistic wolf shape

anyway, it's so easy to just play around with colors on a 3D model (especially the way i did with with rough vertex shading on the RGB channels and then mapping those to specific colors in a shader)

and uh

oops

i had one taste of being a samoyed and i was instantly hooked. i've always loved samoyeds, they're my absolute favorite dogs. i don't really know why i never thought of making one as a sona before, it was just that i gradually moved from wolf design to wolf design.

and see, the thing is, one thing i noticed while fursuiting is.. i'm not very wolf-like, i hold my paws up and beg for attention and love getting my head scritched.. and i love doggie collars

samoyed era

after going back and forth and back and forth, i said FUCK IT. this is obviously what my heart desires

and so, i did three renders and drew over it to create samoyed era gabu's refsheet!

i... think i changed from wolf into samoyed, like.... ON MY BIRTHDAY??? in december 2020?

so that's the story of leaving behind my wild side and settling into being a domesticated sammy cloud :3

taur intermezzo

i love taurs.

EDIT to insert this: my love for taurs springs from a couple places, partially thanks to my very cute taur friends, partially seeing really fun taur art and finally, my zodiac sign is sagittarius, which doesn't MEAN anything but i thought it would be VERY FUNNY to be a sagittarius and have a taur fursona too

i wanted to try being a taur. so end of 2021 i made a snow leopard taur sona

i liked it so much that it stuck around and i decided i wanted to just make gabu a taur instead of having my taur-ness be a "side thing"

design cleanup

in januari 2022 i got accepted for a slot from one of my dream fursuit makers, Alpha Dogs Studios (thanks again fursuit mom <3), and so very quickly i did a refresh of his design based on some of the small issues i've had with his design, so that i could submit that instead of the previous ref sheet

you can see its mostly the same, except he's pure white (i didn't like how the light creme color tended to look "dirty" in commissions), his nose is black (looks cuter, little piece of coal in the middle of he snoot), the blues and pinks are more saturated

most important, up to this point he's always had the white pointy eyebrow circles, but artists often had trouble with them (or just, it really didn't fit in their style) and so i wanted him to just have regular black eyebrow lines

you can also see i got WAY better at drawing a good samoyed floof shape lol

four on the floor

finally, the moment you've all been waiting for, the culmination of 2 years of sona redesigning, in march 2022 i gave that quick refresh ref sheet to Den and commissioned her to make me a full taur ref sheet

(art by DenDen)

and there you have it! from that point on, it was four paw fun all the way. in this time i also discovered my love for floral shirts and that's basically become my whole style now (where wolf gabu had more of a "hoodies and jeans" kinda style)

from then on i immediately commissioned more taur art and that like.. totally sealed the deal for me. it just feels right and fun to be a taur. you get all the fun of being a little critter scampering around on all fours and still also have hands and a torso to wear cute shirts on

(art by Maukeiv)

(art by Adabear)

i get some art and YCHs every so often with two legged gabu, and also for ~Fursuit Lore~ he can be bipedal (i actually want to make a small prop of his taur hind legs "magically sealed away" that i can carry around while fullsuiting in the future) but 99% of the time i'm a taur now :3