One of my goals for this year was to spend more time drawing. A sketch a week, and a drawing every month. There were no rules for what the drawing had to be, just a finished piece of art. It could be line art or a painting, flat colors or fully rendered, as long as I completed something.
I’ve posted some of the pieces I completed on Instagram, but haven’t really had a dedicated place that I shared any of the year’s fruits.
One of the first pieces I did was needed for publication of Paragon of Light, and it’s the chapter header graphic found inside the book. It was fun to go back to painting with gouache, and I hope I can find more chances to do illustrations with gouache paints. I’ve considered doing some little designs for stickers or something, just for fun, and I think gouache would be a good outlet for it.
I’ve enjoyed the chapter header graphics a lot, and my illustration for September was another one, meant for Paragon of Shadow. The purple crystal they found in the very first book makes a return as an object of importance, so the Shadowsliver is the chapter header for book 5. I suppose that leaves me with the Spectrum Blade itself to paint for book 6, although I’m unsure how to make it look good for print! I have lots of pearlescent and metallic gouache colors that look amazing in person and would work so well for it, but they don’t translate to black and white well at all. So far, all the paintings I’ve done have been matte colors.
Not all my illustrations this year have been winners, though, so a lot of them haven’t been posted. I spent a lot of time playing with different art styles, as well as different coloring styles, while I work to find where I fit in the world of art now. When I sketch, I find I often favor a manga style, which is something I drew a lot when I was younger. It’s been fun to go back to it, but I’ve tried more western styles, too, like the below illustration of Adelinde and Aldram I did for The Witch and the Wyrm.
Originally, there was going to be no shading on that piece at all, but I found the flats were a little too flat, so I added some blush and a hint of shading to the skin. Otherwise, the bottle was all that got shading. It was fun, and relatively easy, but I don’t think it’s the direction I ultimately wish to take my art.
After that, I tried a few other lineart styles, but I eventually went back to digital painting. I’d done a portrait of Firal from The Snakesblood Saga earlier in the year and figured it would be nice to do a matching one for Rune.
The problem was, I didn’t use the same methods twice, since I was still learning to use my iPad for art when I did the drawing for Firal, and I adopted a looser sort of style for the portrait of Rune. It was still fun, but ultimately they don’t match as much as I thought they would when I started!
It’s been a fun project overall, and I think it’s one I’ll continue into 2025, even though not all the pieces are worth sharing. I might do some kind of compilation when the whole year is done, but for now, I have to figure out what my last two drawings of the year might be.