I love Stardew Valley and have played it on-and-off for several years now, yet curiously I still have not married anyone in my multiple save files, haha. I can’t choose! I love many of the NPC’s for different reasons. I still plan to, eventually. But anyway! Seeing Sebastian in his winter outfit portrait inspired me at the time to try painting him, based on that teaser image. The full image is about 3/4 body, but I was never happy with this painting, so here in the lead-up to 1.7’s launch, I was once again inspired to try painting Sebastian again – this time, with a paintover of that original painting from 2023.
I don’t know if I’ll finish this one (but I’d like to!), so here is just a small crop from the image for fun! I also don’t know if I’ll show the original 2023 version, because I was never very pleased with it, and the errors bother my eye. Because this was also drawn only from that portrait teaser (I hadn’t seen the sprite model), the outfit is also likely not accurate to how it is in-game.
Corveil from a painting I’ve been knocking around on the side! Another construction practice from imagination from a bit ago – last month, to be precise. This might be a potential WIP (the full composition is full body), but I’m undecided yet on whether I’d take this further or not.
The Harbinger’s Path | Chapter 3 work-in-progress crop (art not final)
Progress crop from the page I’m cleaning up today I felt like sharing. The colors are not the actual ones – it’s just a bright color I’m using to see the mask more easily.
Edit: October 13, 2025
Repurposing this post to add any additional process crops I feel like sharing for chapter 3!
Did some drawing for this panel tonight! Did the line sketch drawing and color masks The red there is again only for masking, and not the final color – though it looks a little nifty to me, as-is.
I have a confession to make – I have never been comfortable choosing local colors until drawing this comic. I’m not sure what happened, but I would never, not in a million years, have been able to choose the colors in this panel a year ago. My local colors often lacked harmony when I chose them, and I would need to do quite a bit of trial-and-error until figuring out a palette which was somewhat decent – and even then, I was often displeased by the colors.
Remember, Chapter 1 was initially conceived as a black-and-white comic. For that chapter – and that chapter alone – I added color after doing a greyscale value pass. This was my initial plan because I am very fond of black-and-white comics – but it was also because I was not confident whether I could pull off color successfully for a comic page.
In Chapter 2, this chapter was conceived in color from the start. However, it uses a mixture of different workflow experiments for different pages. Many of these pages didn’t begin with local color. Many began with a burnt sienna value drawing, with colors layered on top (though I might not have used this method for every page).
Chapter 3 is the first time, I think, where I’ve been starting with local colors first (though I’d need to check chapter 2 to be certain). I never would have had the confidence to do this in chapters 1 or 2 – or anytime before this year. I definitely focused on values first before now, and drawing the comic has really felt like remember all the things I used to love about lines. I haven’t really worked with lines (beyond very loose sketches) for years.
It’s been helping so much with making several things which have eluded me for years feel much more natural to me. Mainly improving my construction drawing from imagination skills, and I think it is also the reason my ability to choose local colors seems to be improving.
I’m so happy I started this comic, for so many reasons, and this is just one more reason to add.
Here’s how it looked when I opened the file tonight (with some text redacted to prevent spoilers).
Edit: October 19, 2025
Crop from one of the panels I’ve been drawing this weekend. While drawing chapter 2, discovering Krita’s “isolate layer function” felt like unlocking a superpower. I was vaguely aware this functionality existed in Photoshop, but I never used it, because I rarely worked with lineart until this year. I never appreciated how useful and time-saving it was until now.
During chapter 1 and partway in chapter 2, whenever I needed to adjust part of the lineart, I was manually going through my convoluted stack of layers, hiding and un-hiding through them until I could see the lines clear enough to pinpoint what I needed to adjust.
But now, no more! All i need to click is “isolate layer” and that’s it! I can see the entire layer! Right the, right there.
Magic, I tell you.
Edit: November 14, 2025
Currently enjoying cleaning up this panel!
Edit: December 5, 2025
Edit: December 13, 2025
Edit: January 17, 2025
A work-in-progress panel, and––a no context Trahearne!
Eric Barone’s (“ConcernedApe”) announcement today of a new, upcoming major Stardew Valley update (v 1.7) reminded me of a painting I started during the last major update, the 1.6 update when winter outfits were added. Before the patch went live, ConcernedApe teased two portraits for the winter outfits – one which showed Sebastian! 
