Had a potential idea today for the Corveil sketch from February 20, 2025.
And a rough thumb of a vague idea I had one of the mornings earlier this week, and forgot about until this morning. Only this time, I sketched it down quickly before I could forget it again!
It’s probably difficult to make out to anyone other than me – it’s Corveil and Arquel on a boat, floating down a river in a misty mire.
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.
Here’s how the full composition looks – haven’t added clothing yet. Or more hands, haha. There will be both! I promise.
And one more detail crop that’s more narrow.
Edit: February 28th, 2025
Added a few more thoughts.
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:
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:
Felt like drawing Corveil’s outfit after posting the previous sketchpage, tried some drawing/painting things I’ve been meaning to try, too. :)
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.