Cedar from Finding your Roots by SPB and Milo from Milos from Home by Nein. I read both comics back to back... two weeks ago? And doodled this since they have such... similar personalities. I'm sure they'd get along great if they ever met though putting two characters of such, uh, strong conviction together might have them... butting heads.

Made the decision to try to "keep it simple" by not blending or soft brushing at all. So this is 100% hard brush. I figured so many people make such nice looking stuff without even shading at all and I felt like I've been crutching on gradiants recently, though I ended up with at a dozen multiply layers trying to get back gradiating shading anyway. I think this scene ended up not having enough contrast to make it work right, a dojo with this much penetrating light doesn't have enough deep shadows in it. Got super stuck on how I wanted to shade amphibian skin which put me off working on this for like a week, especially with how stylized the character is. Ended up with bubbles?

My first concept for a joint fanart was this, since they both don't like the water (Cedar for plot not yet revealed reasons, Milo cuz he can't swim) I stuck them on a piece of debris in a flood trying to avoid getting swallowed by the wash with muddy water + sand attack respectively. Since you know, ground types, earthen, thats kinda Cedars whole thing, Milo is brown and slept in the woods once? Anyway I realized quickly that I neither knew how nor wanted to spend the 100+ hours trying to figoure out how to do that background so I settled on what became this as a simpler concept

Uploading on Christmas even, so hohoho fanart from Santa.