[APH OCs] From Chernozemie to Nisava

...talk about creative title. //I'm really hopeless when it comes to naming artwork

     At first I was tempted to submit this piece earlier but knowing that Sep. 24th(I live in GMT +6 so...always end up celebrating something earlier than official dA time XP) is the tenth anniversary of twinning agreement between cities of Kursk(Russia) and Niš(Serbia). , hence I 'intentionally procrastinated' on submitting this piece until today. XP 

     Not only today is the anniversary mentioned above, tomorrow (Sep. 25th) is also the city day of Kursk; this year Kursk turns 984 years old.   Thus it was a perfect excuseoccasion for me to finally draw my Kursk and Niš OCs together. The twist here though, is instead of them wearing their own folk costume, they wear one from the other's area.

     The Nišava costume that Kursk wears isn't complicated; I have drawn it a couple of times before, though on chibi characters. The one Niš wears on the other hand...is quite difficult to pinpoint where it originated exactly. While trying to hunt for references on google with broken Russian that I could mutter, surely I could find costumes from Kursk...except they were all female costumes. Orz Not a single good photo of male costumes that gives enough details of embroidery and such that I could find.

     Eventually, I settled with this costume from a neighboring oblast (which, again, is quite confusing as one website claimed that it's from Voronezh while another website refers it as originated from Belgorod  ). This is the closest I could find for now...until I'll be lucky enough to stumble upon some website that provides enormous details about regional folk costumes in Russia as I have found for Serbian and Croatian folk costumes.


     ...In the end, I chose 'Chernozemie' to use in the title because that used to be the name of a larger oblast (Central Chernozem Region) which included the territory of Belgorod, Kursk and Vononezh, for the fact that...well, this Russian costume belongs to one of these territories for sure. The title also reflected their relationship; according to the information on official website of city of Niš, Kursk was the one who initiated the idea of these two cities becoming twin towns.


CREDITS::
     - Paper texture used in BG by sinnedaria [HERE]
     - Coats of Arms of Kursk and Niš from Wikipedia

Done in openCanvas 5.5