My submission for Onta's contest http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/1265010/ &c.
I feel like a sucka, trying to develop a character to give away in a contest, but exposure is exposure, no? Part of me hopes to not win -- as quotidian as this is, it's still the best character I've done so far. Still nothing to write home about, this is no paragon of visual character design. Regardless, with this piece, I made strides in composition, costume, pose, multitexturing, anthro anatomy, rendering, and speed, so in its own personal way, this is a work of which I can be proud. Time taken: 9 days' free time, two of which were weekend days. Yeah, sadly, that's a speed improvement, though it gets markedly faster each time as I gain xp. A wild-ass guess of 40 hours of work is about the point where I start to get restless to change projects. As I become more proficient and efficient at the craft -- modeling, sculpting, lighting, etc. -- I hope this leaves more brainwidth for the art, the more human elements (lol human).
Blender 2.49b, Luxrender 0.6.1, GIMP 2.6.8. <3 Free Software

Theme for this submission: http://hypem.com/track/1048951/Huss.....+Dan+Oh+remix+

Casey went by "she" in his younger days, back when little boys and girls were little boys and girls because that's what adults called them, and nobody thought about anything over-much. Back in those days, before he realized that the power to define and rebuild the self comes from within the self, he was sometimes called a tom-boy. He never liked the term, because he wasn't /trying/ to be boyish. Just, some other people -- a lot of other people -- saw him that way, and he certainly didn't feel like it was his job to change his clothes, or his hair, or the way he carried himself, in order to make other people more accurate in their preconceptions. He was always down with the alt crowd -- even went to a yaoi con once that his friends were working -- but didn't really "get" the draw of the whole thing.
He does well enough in school, but his passion is the bass. Frequently overhearing listeners exclaim "I thought she was a guy!" -- because of his man-hands, large feet, ambiguous dress, and (at the time) feature-obscuring hair -- he thought it would be a fun twist to project a male persona on-stage. When he finished the set that night, he didn't particularly feel like dropping "the Act" -- as he calls it to everyone but his close friends -- and hasn't dropped it since. To his utmost surprise, this revelation had little effect on his daydreams, which continued to feature Casey with dudes. After a year of expecting this aspect to change, and seeing nothing of the sort, Casey went out and got a tattoo -- "Plus ça change" -- and kept the area fastidiously covered for two months until his fur grew back in. Now, you can only tell what's there if you know how and where to look -- just like Casey himself, inside and out -- and that's just how he likes it.
The Act leads to a lot of uncomfortable interactions with fans -- when they discover he's female below the neck -- leaving him pretty disappointed in people, their lack of flexibility, when reality doesn't match their expectations. Whenever he meets people through music, they've usually built up such an image of his persona that all the straight girls and gay guys that buy him drinks go into psychic shock when they discover anything about who they're talking to -- at least when it goes deeper than what bands he listens to. Because of this, he's somewhat of a loner, keeping people away in order to not burden himself with their confusion piled on top of his own. He despises the gender theater that he participates in whenever he leaves the house, but it gets people to treat him the way he wants to be treated, and that's worth it by itself. At least, until they find out he's packing cotton. Then, it's a pain. The fact that he's able to so greatly influence others' perception of what's right in front of them is just icing on the cake.
Casey finds his naturally monochromatic fur boring, sometimes to the point of jealousy, and is a little anxious, especially when pushed. Because of all this, as a ritual, he dyes a tail ring before every show to try to calm down. Sometimes he wears his tail around his waist like a sash, which helps to mask his figure.