Digital Art

Illustration Work-in-Progress | February 27, 2025

Digital Art, Personal Art, Work-In-Progress
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Crop from a digital painting where one character is holding the other by the chin. Flame-like wisps emerge from his open palm, snaking under the other's jaw and throat.
Detail crop (in-progress).

Wanted to post some progress on this illustration I’ve been fiddling around with! Corveil and Arquel again here.

The loose idea behind this one is, “Not your voice, not your vision.” This is also another of the ideas that I sketched a while back, and didn’t add to in a while – though not as long ago as the previous “Don’t Listen” illustration. This idea looks like it was first sketched last year, in May 2024. I think this was another one that wasn’t turning out as I liked at the time, and I set it aside to prioritize other things.

While sometimes that results in a pile of ideas which risk remaining untouched and unresolved, for this and “Don’t Listen,” these paintings surprisingly benefited from being set aside.

Full composition where we can see both characters in a forest-like environment. There are winding trees and what appears to be a fallen stump. Both characters stand in shallow water, painted a crystalline blue.
The full composition (in-progress).

Here’s how the full composition looks – haven’t added clothing yet. Or more hands, haha. There will be both! I promise.

Same crop as at the top of the post, only cropped more narrowly.
Another crop!

And one more detail crop that’s more narrow.

Edit: February 28th, 2025

Added a few more thoughts.

Sketchpage | February 20, 2025

Digital Art
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A few crops from a sketchpage warm-up from earlier today, plus one I started refining a bit more for fun. Corveil and Arquel in these:

Hrmmm I should probably take down the link to this sketchblog from my portfolio site if I’m going to post sketches like this one, haha. Even though it’s technically SFW, I can see how it might look questionable at this stage of the drawing, where neither are yet clothed, ahah. I’ve been planning to take down the link there soon, in any case – only haven’t had a chance to yet.

Well, I’ll compromise for the time being by just hiding this post from the front page (it should be visible everywhere else). I guess I’m still somewhat self-conscious, even here.

Aaand in this sketch you can barely make out the weapons both are holding to each other’s throats, but I liked the gesture/energy.

“Don’t Listen” | Corveil Portrait: February 19, 2025

Digital Art, Digital Painting, Finished Art, Personal Art, Work-In-Progress
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"Don't Listen" | Corveil Portrait Illustration
“Don’t Listen” | Corveil Portrait Illustration

Edit: March 2, 2025

Moved all the edits log to the end of this post to make the post read more easily. :)

Original post below:

Here’s an illustration where the original sketch was from a long time ago – November 2023, in fact! I’ll add a crop of that version at the end of this post.

This painting has a loose idea behind it, but it is primarily meant as one of the front portraits I seem to do of my characters every now and again. I believe with this one, the initial drive was to paint Corveil’s current design, which I had been tweaking here and there at the time. He originally had hair on the darker side, which I decided to change because too many of my characters were looking similar. I tried him with much lighter hair for a while, which I thought worked better for him, but didn’t completely fit.

For a bit now, I’ve been drawing him with something in-between – still fairly light, but a more warm grey or ashy, light brown. Though it’s probably not noticeable in this piece, specifically, since I did add more shadows for contrast. Haha.

I have a few alternate and earlier versions of this one I’m still considering, which I’ll add below:

Earlier in-progress version before adding more contrast.
Earlier in-progress version before adding more contrast.

This is also an even earlier version, before I added more contrast. I sort of like the softer look here.

The initial idea and some additional thoughts in the full post below:

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Sketchpage | February 12, 2025

Digital Art, Personal Art, Sketches & Studies
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A few recent sketches of Corveil and Kurt I just wanted to post for myself. :) With Corveil, I was trying out some hairstyle options for him. I started with a longer hairstyle (which you can see in the top-left initial sketch), because while shorter hair probably suits his character better, I tend to lengthen his hair when I draw him purely because longer hair tends to be more fun for me to draw, haha. I was also doodling one of his outfits here, that I’d been fiddling with in other sketches. I think I semi-recently added the orange ribbon around his waist, at the time of sketching this. With Kurt, I think I just wanted to draw the tails of his jacket (this sketchpage is from the end of December, a little while ago now).

One thing I want to try and do more this year is post a little more about my characters – I’m not sure if it’s a recent thing or if I’ve always been a little like this, but I’m always reticent about sharing info about them for some reason. I think I’m just a bit that way in general – I struggle a bit with preferring to mostly keep to myself. Which is probably why social media has never felt natural to me. But, I shouldn’t have to be concerned about things like that when it’s my own space here on this blog. :) I think this place is a good way for me to unlearn some probably-unhelpful practices I picked up from mainly using social media for sharing art over the past few years, instead of my own space. (In hindsight, I probably should have been doing both, instead of one or the other.) Mainly to try and be a little less guarded here when it comes to expressing myself, because I have never been entirely comfortable doing so on social media. I’m not sure the reason, maybe because it feels more public. I could probably do a Duskbirds page exploring this issue, haha. Well, I don’t think the reason is too important. Probably something that’s mostly in my mind, and likely not noticeable outside my overthinking.

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