I’ve been feeling very not confident in my art lately. It’s preventing me from finishing part of a remaining commission (the other is I haven’t gotten the last ref/infos from the commissioner…)

After I touched up Snowhawk’s ref sheet for her novel version, I decided it just… doodle. And I had the foresight to open up OBS and record/stream. So, little under 6 hours later, we have this.

I’m surprised it was that short of time. However… I took some shortcuts for coloring. The biggest one was greatly simplifying my shading/highlighting technique. No blending/blurring/smudging, except with my watercolor brush on the layer I was working on.

The downside… This looks like trash at fullsize. However, when scaled down, it’s fine. Which was a thing I needed to work on, because I tend to obsess over the teeny, tiny uncolored pixels that literally no one knows are there but me. So I settled for “good enough”

… I had the feeling, while sketching, that I was again channeling like… 2003 me. Which I’m glad. She was a lot more confident with art than I am.

This was intended to be a doodle. No actual background, just basic shading… Then Banrai reminded me that, during that time, I used to do some nice stonework so… she got a background.

I extended the canvas down as I was working, since I needed a bit more room for her hooves… then I liked the offset and just left it.

If you’ve followed my art for a long time, you might recall a piece from 2001 of a younger Snowhawk in a similar-ish pose. Most of you, however, I would guess don’t know what I’m talking about. For those that do not, take a look at this link: https://i.imgur.com/549BBlj.png

Timelapse here (this file was short enough to actually be able to do this): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7DiLOqaqNQ