Historical Scanning, Sketchbook 44 (Patreon)

Back to weekly scanning, making a dent in the backlog. Sketchbook 45, this time, and that puts us in 1999 (almost 24 years ago!). At this time I was writing the first draft of Sword of the Alliance and doing development for The Worth of a Shell. The Peltedverse existed almost entirely as the Stardancer stories, those being the only ones developed (mostly in short fiction). The Eldritch stories were still a glimmer in my notebooks, and though Vasiht'h and Jahir date back this far, I barely knew anything about them and amusingly their only connection to anything was me wondering if they were Alysha's therapists.

But anyway, some selections from the week's scans:

• Pro-Accord: This one's shown up a few times, maybe? But it's of Maire and Carey from Sword of the Alliance. I was doing a tremendous amount of B&W work at this time, mostly for magazine/fanzine publication, so most of my art's planned endpoint was pen and ink. At this time in particular I was experimenting with brushes, so Maire and Carey's outlines there were brush-inked, and the rest was handled with technical pen.
• Contrails of Light: This illustration for a Stardancer short story about Laelkii's past and some events in her future went hard into something I loved doing: montages. I still love this one as one of my best B&W montages, leaning hard into the alternation of negative and positive space. The story this illustrates is so old it's no longer canonical, but I'm planning to rescue large chunks of it for a future Stardancer novel... maybe this illustration will become canonical again!
• Web Graphic (Eldritch): Around this point my website allowed for the customization of themes, so I would draw a character and then base a color/font theme around them and switch them out to keep visitors entertained. (What can I say, the old days of the web were a lot clunkier back then). I am deeply amused at this anonymous Eldritch male I drew, whose eagle eyes are intimidating and whose cheekbones could cut glass.
• Purple and Gold: It was rare for me to bother with color artwork in sketchbooks, and I had all but forgotten this character sketch of Dlane, back when I was first coming up with the characters for Shell--it is in fact old enough that I wasn't sure what the Jokka looked like...! Witness her furry chin! But even though as a marker piece this is lacking in sophistication, I think the color plan is fantastic, with the muted grays and purples and golds, and I executed the transparency of the fan she's holding  well despite my lack of experience.

I'm about halfway through scanning this one, so we'll see if any more interesting things pop up as I go.