I seem to be on a portrait kick lately. I've really been wanting to make my characters' expressions more readable and generally more interesting. I'm also trying to prove to myself that I can indeed draw my characters' faces with consistency. This is also the first time I've properly drawn her with fur; yes she's actually kind of fuzzy, but it's so fine I've never had to draw it before because she's never this close to the viewer.

Despite Absinthe being one of my most common subjects, I've found that I didn't have any terribly recent portraits of her. I really wanted to draw her again, since she seems to hold endless fascination for me as her personality becomes more and more three-dimensional, especially as her personal "timeline" becomes more detailed. This sort of expression you wouldn't see early on before she has a family and acknowledges the importance of close friends, but eventually her rather callous lack of empathy lessens more and more as the decades go on. A very rare expression of remorse and guilt crosses her face, realizing that she'll have to start to make amends for the centuries of crime and bad karma she has accrued...

Done with various graphite pencils in my Moleskine sketchbook. Character belongs to myself, as does the art.