illustration - dread nocturne

current listen - enya | shepherd moons (1991)

I had some art breakthroughs this week. I’ve realized two things:

• In art, I’ll sometimes try to force myself to use techniques I don’t like
• It’s difficult for me to course correct

These things combined mean that I will sometimes abandon pieces I otherwise like because I will refuse to drop doing some technique that I fundamentally do not like. And I’m not doing this for a living. I’m not in school. The entire reason I do artwork is because I like it.

The second thing has been true for me in non-art things as well, but here it’s a sort of “I can’t change now, it already looks good and I’ll never be able to make it look that good again”. Which is a silly thought. If I drew it once, I can draw it again.

These two thoughts combined (as well as recent portfolio shares making me realized I have nothing new to show…….) led me to finally push myself to finish a piece that I started maybe two years ago.

This is my Curse of Strahd part 2 OC, Nocturne de la Fontaine, warlock (and now paladin!) with Strahd as her patron. Her specialization is undead, so this is her form of dread, quasi-channeling Strahd’s power to become super saiyan.

Here’s a couple detail shots:

notes & thoughts

I had a lot of fun with this one! 2-year hiatus aside. The bits of clothing are removable because 1) it’s fun to have silly little horny artwork and 2) I spent way too many hours playing dollmaker games as a kid and that sort of thing scratches that itch.

I’m not posting that here though. That’s the sort of thing I’d charge a buck fifty for.

I tried doing the “black and white + multiple color layers” thing, and while it saves a lot of time, I’m still happier with how my work looks when I start with color. It feels so much easier for me to push my ranges and get punchier palettes. It could simply be a learning curve thing, I’m not ready to wash my hands of that just yet.

The thing that kept me from finishing this for so long was the hair. When I started, I envisioned hand drawing each individual strand. This piece is art nouveau inspired, and Mucha & friends loved detailed hair. But I find detailed linework so incredibly tedious when working digitally, so much so that I didn’t even get a quarter of the way through that linework before I decided I didn’t want to work on this anymore.

Here’s a screengrab from that version:

After picking that linework up again this week, I decided to change course because, you know, I’m supposed to find this fun and not so tedious I abandon a piece for 2 years.

So, I scrapped the linework and started blocking in colors for the hair instead, and cobbled together some kind of background. I’m pretty happy with it overall! And excited to have actually finished something.