Another silly animation test/practice. This is a small crop from a painting of my sylvari reaper I started a while ago, and it’s been on my back-burner to finish it sometime – dug it up today to practice more with Krita’s timeline/animating with frames instead, haha.
Articles from: 2025
Trahearne Animated Panel Test | August 8, 2025
This is a very, very rough test – but contemplating adding slight animation to the final page of chapter 2.
I should probably be using fade/opacity transitions for this and not frames, but, I both don’t know how to do that in Krita (yet, if the function is there), and I’m also partial to frame animation to probably a detrimental degree, haha.
Edit: August 9, 2025
Decided to practice a bit more with this (separate) test, and also widened the aspect ratio. I’m not planning on finishing this because it was mainly unplanned practice, and the way I set up the file is pretty messy. Mainly after the initial sketch, I made a layer and just drew on top of each keyframe – both the character and the background. This would probably make it too time-prohibitive if I wanted to try and fix every error and make the frames motion read more smoothly, haha.
Really fun to do though, and it gave me a good sense for how Krita’s timework works now. Should make it easier for me to add some small animation to Chapter 2’s final page at some point!
Anyway, earlier WIP versions in the full post below:
Caydren Paintover | August 4, 2025
Felt like doing another “paintover” practice of one of my older paintings as a warm-up today – which I inevitably spent more time on than I intended. I wouldn’t consider this a “finished” painting, but I’d considered it “finished” as far as its intended practice. :D
This is my “spellweaver” Nightmare Court sylvari from Guild Wars 2, who is one of the main characters from my not-yet-released “Nightmare’s Embrace” project (a future short comic, separate from The Harbinger’s Path Trahearne & Malyck comic). His loyalty to Nightmare is what the quote refers to – like Cadeyrn before him, he believes Nightmare represents the “true” nature of all sylvari, and that the Dream is a corrupting force separating all sylvari from their true selves.
The full version of the original in the full post:
“Mist Stranger Trahearne” Paintover | July 29, 2025
This is a 2025 practice paintover of one of my older paintings of Trahearne from 2021. I’ll put the original at the end of the post, and you can flip between them for comparison (and judge me on how much I’ve improved or not since, haha).
I remember thinking this fan theory quite fun at the time – it is not my fan theory, and I believe I saw it mentioned on both Reddit and Tumblr occassionally, at the time. (I can’t recall if it originated from one person, or multiple people – if you happen to know, feel free to share and I’ll add this info into this post). Edit: Found some links from the time! On Tumblr and Reddit. Thanks to @scarlet-briar on Bluesky for the Tumblr info (it is their theory and Tumblr page in the link!).
The general theory is that the Mist Stranger might be Trahearne, perhaps from an alternate timeline. While the idea doesn’t fit into my “headcanon” projects for The Harbinger’s Path and Nightmare’s Embrace, it’s still fun thinking about alternate possibilities people cleverly speculate on. Especially as, this one involved the possibility for the character reappearing again in-game.
For this painting, I remember being fond of the overall composition, or perhaps the concept of the composition – but when I randomly saw the file again over the weekend, I realized the composition had some problems. Some visually awkward moments. The full version is a horizontal composition – which I think I’ve improved slightly from the original, though I still prefer it as the cropped portrait version at the top of this post, instead of the full canvas above.
The main thing I wanted to try was some of the techniques I’ve been using in The Harbinger’s Path comic pages, but applied to a painting/illustration. Quite fun!
Below (in the full post) is the 2025 paintover, followed after by the original 2021 version for comparison:
“Nightmare’s Embrace” WIP Preview | July 25, 2025
Small preview from “Nightmare’s Embrace,” my second Guild Wars 2 comic I’ve been chipping away at here and there. This is an early color test from a few months ago.
Originally, I was planning to start working on “Nightmare’s Embrace” after I’ve finished “The Harbinger’s Path.” I might still do this, but I’m also thinking about perhaps working on them side-by-side – mainly depending on how long Harbinger runs.
Maybe I’ll do something like, one chapter of The Harbinger’s Path, then one chapter of Nightmare’s Embrace. Still considering which to do.
Here’s a fuller shot of the panel – I need to fix the arm proportions in the final.