Over the last year or so I haven't been sharing my art as much, here or most of my other social media accounts, bar the occasional art-related post to Tik-Tok and Twitter. I think I needed a bit of a break from online spaces, but now I've been away, I'm keen to show off what I've been working on over the last year!
End of 2020
Last Commission
After finishing up my last batch of commissions, I accepted one more from the same person who commissioned the picture of Kwei'zar (from the last post) of the character he played in a Pathfinder game with My partner and I. This time he was playing a Kobold medic named Daffodil, who ended up becoming famous in our home-base town when he finished a drink known locally as "The Beer Tower" or "The Kobold Killer", and his player asked me to do a drawing of the moment in celebration.
I was super proud of this one, as it was the first time in a VERY long time I had done not only a full scene but had a character actually interacting with items in the scene!
In hindsight, how did no one suspect anything earlier...
At the end of 2020 I decided to join Tik Tok. It seemed like a good platform to share my art on but I quickly realised it wasn't as good for that as I'd first thought. I did end up having some success on the platform though talking about my experience as both a queer and disabled person though, and it's admittedly grown on me since then.
But within a few weeks of joining there was a trend going around the art community on Tik Tok to draw your original OC (original character) in your current style. I went with Kiesse, since I made her up at some point during primary school and she has been my "mascot" for as long as I can remember, but she's gone through some serious design changes since then. And well...the title says it all, someone probably should have figured out I wasn't exactly cis and straight much earlier haha.
Not long after, I came out publicly as nonbinary and made myself some little pride stickers using Kiesse's current design
From left to right is the Transgender flag, the Nonbinary flag and the Agender flag (I don't identify as agender anymore, but used that label while I figured out my exact feelings about my gender)
Christmas Dragon
A few days before Christmas last year, I decided to draw one of the traditions my partner and I have at our house, and that is that out tree topper is not a star or an angel, but a stuffed dragon toy named Spiro (yes, Spiro). I've had Spiro since I was a very young kid, and when my partner moved in with me and we put up our first tree together, we realised we forgot to buy a topper, so I grabbed Spiro and placed him there, and it's been a tradition to have our little Christmas dragon on top of the tree ever since.
2021
Pathfinder characters
I got really really into pathfinder 2e in 2021 and I think that shows in my art haha. I didn't end up playing as many of these characters, but I created a lot of them!
New "Mascot" character
As much as I love Kiesse, I have begun to feel like she didn't really fit as my mascot anymore, especially once I came out. So I got to work designing a new mascot character for myself.
Meet Nix, my new mascot. I've been using them for most of the year, and they are my avatar on most of my social media accounts now, as well as a potential avatar for a youtube series I want to make eventually.
Worldbuilding projects
Another thing I got really invested in this year was worldbuilding projects. I ended up jumping between 4 in total, and the vast majority of my artwork this year was related to them. Unsurprisingly, 2 out of the 4 of these worldbuilding projects were Pathfinder related: settings for homebrew Pathfinder 2e campaigns, one that my partner is currently running, and one I had planned to run, although I never finished it.
The other 2 are the ones I'm more proud of, and I really wanted to show off the artwork I did for them, but I honestly wasn't sure how to share any of it on social media since I was changing things about the lore constantly, which is part of the reason why my art social media accounts were so quiet this year. I decided recently that once I'd solidified a bit more of the lore I can share them here on my website. I've included a new section on the "Comics and Stories" page for worldbuilding. I haven't connected the pages yet as I'm still putting everything together, so until then, I'll just share some of the artwork!
The Dragons of Namai
Namai is the world that Kiesse (the dragon mentioned above) is from. technically, I've been worldbuilding for this setting for years, but I've only recently started formally organising everything and actually writing the lore down.
So here is some of my favorite pieces of concept art I did this year for Namai
The Dragons themselves:
The gods of Namai
Not going to lie, I'm SUPER proud of this series of pieces!
Character Designs (mostly just Kiesse)
There's a few more pieces of concept art, but they're either incomplete or would require some context to explain, so for now I'll leave Namai here.
The Pelexat Galaxy
I started work on Pelexat back in 2019, but I very quickly lost interest in it, but recently got back into developing it! The Pelexat galaxy is the home of a species of alien I call the Kepek, who I've grown pretty fond of in the last month or so in particular!
The Galaxy
I did realise after posting this one that there's an error on the edge of the painting, I apparently need to adjust the brightness on my cintiq, because I can't see it at all on that computer, but as soon as I looked at this post on my laptop it was pretty glaring... error aside this was super refreshing to paint and gave me a break from my usual stuff.
The Kepek
The other Creatures of Pelexat
Xari Redesign
I also redesigned Xari, my protogen character. She's now a Kepek and a character in a potential story I have planned, which will be set in Pelexat. This is their new look!
Again, this isn't all of the artwork, just what I can show without much context. Pelexat will probably be the first out of these two worlds to get its own section of the website, so I will have more to show soon!
Miscellaneous art
I've also got quite a bit of artwork from this year that wasn't directly linked to some larger project!
And yeah! that's a pretty good summary of the artwork I've done this year! I had decided fairly early on in the year that I was done with trying to be an "internet artist" - in reality, I think I just needed a break from it. Even though I did post quite a few of these pieces, it was refreshing to be able to take a step back and do art for things that I wanted to do, and not have to feel so stressed about if it will do well or how to market myself better, which in turn allowed me to take a breather and try some new and different things (while there is still A LOT of dragons, there's a few new things in there haha)
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