Art Vs Artist Illustration

I’ve been drawing digital more often this year. I’m not happy I didn’t finish enough artwork, but I’m want to recognize the pieces I did finish.

I made this Raccoon Jill sketch on a lark along with the other S.T.A.R.S. crew. These pieces hit pretty good even surpassing my Krystal Illustration! I’ll move on to the RE2 characters at a later time, maybe after I actually play the games.

Stacie is a Skunk Maid who was one of my older ink sketches I did before I colored her fully this year. I still thinking it’s a fun idea to to broom board and I gotta think of something cool to do for her and Claudia.

The Raw Milk Cow spokes lady was a silly sketch and got plenty of attention. Am I a pervert for giving this cow huge titties? Yes, but it’s still funny to draw!

I had this Goat Knight and Civilian ink in my files for a long time before coloring them this year. This goat is part of my many world-building drawings of hero characters living a normal life. I’ll see if I can think of a name for this character and his family later. It’d be nice to get him in my game.

One of my few drawing commissions I took and created purely in Procreate. This also isn’t the first time I made a spotted rabbit character too, though I could’ve did better about using thinner lines or coloring the black lines, but I’ll let this go for now.

A bunch of martial arts monkey designs to wax my silly anime love. I’d do more with these monkeys when I figure out something to do with them beyond being vaguely Wuxia styled characters.

This self-indulgent illustration is notable in that it’s one of the first digital drawings I was trying to create with the “traditional mindset:” Using a textured marker brush to places down many transparent colors without changing layers for fretting about tight lines too much.

This one is my personal favs for how I’m getting bolder with my armor designing. Years earlier, I wasn’t happy about how boring and simple my armor looked compared to “Warcraft” armor other fantasy artists made, but it has it’s own appeal to fans who don’t like the excess so I found a niche.

Honorable mentions

Many of my early forays into digital art competency was learning how to get my brush settings to work for me and not get too frustrated when things weren’t working. So I used modified Copic Marker Brushes from Halftone Hospital and Rusty Nib Brushes from True Grit Texture Supply to do my best to complete this drawing. So far it looks hald decent, I was much more lax in my line art and not being anal about precision.

For most of November, I had this ideaof some postapocolypse kangaroo stuff.

This was a silly meme sketch I made when I was acclimated myself to digital drawing. It makes zero sense outside the context of the meme or Blackmask, but it’s still funny to me.

Art Vs Artist Pixel Art

I didn’t do as much pixel art as I should’ve this year. I’ll make arguments that my sketch art is to prep for future pixels, but I’ll have to make it happen next year.

One of the few pixel art pieces I used my iPad and Pixquare to create. I started with the elf girl and expanded to a series of other character designs like the leprechaun and vampire lad, with a vague idea of a urban fantasy beat-em up game.

I made small attempts to get some sprites to work in GB Studio, but they were too large to work with. I don’t know when I’ll return to this, but if I do, I hope it’s still exciting to think about.

Here’s an Icon commission that was gift art for their friend. I’m happy with how the colors turned out and the cookie is quite an animation milestone for me.

Half body Game Boy commission. I wanted to take lower intensity commissions after a marathon of larger pixel art commissions from 2024. These turned out well and it’s been fascinating seeing how the art looks in GB Studio.

Another half body Game Boy commission in my series of lower stakes commissions. This was first made in the monochrome palette until, I was paid extra by my client to have color. The liberties I took to the character reference to get the piece to look straight out of a Game Boy Color cart is something I take pride in.

One of the few full body pixel animations I did during the entire year is an commission from FurAffinity. Despite getting more efficient with animating full body idles, I’m reducing the scope of these animations for future commissions.

Much of the early year of Blackmask was worrying about the quality of my story drafts and planning out the scopes of my cutscenes. I didn’t make larger announcements about development status, due to most of the real work needing to be done by my programmer.

Balatro face card commissions I created in time for my client’s friend’s birthday! I’m told he and his hife cried tears when my client show them these, so I’m happy!

On a lark, I even figured out how to add these textures in my own game of Balatro, so I play with these cards in my regular runs on PC.

Another batch of NPC sprite designs I made for Blackmask cutscenes to explore how I was going to tackle cinematic. As cool as these designs are, unless I figure out a bigger role for these characters, they might just be scrapped for more important NPCs.

Honorable Mentions

Here are some honorable mentions I’d like to acknowledge but left out of my top 8 as I forgot to add them.

My first pixel illustration of my Woolly Mouse OC, who I’ve deemed, Murnia. I had a short stint of elaborating on her until I fell off earlier in the year.

This Callie Briggs fan art I did for my first collab on Lospec’s Discord. I should’ve done more of them, but this specific topic was in my wheelhouse so I did it.

Earlier in the year, I wanted to make a top down walk cycle template to save myself future work down the line. I only made a walk look for a female model and a block in for a male version before needing to work on something else.