Friday Art Post: Historical Scanning (Sketchbook 44 Con't) (Patreon)

Five scans this time from Sketchbook 44, in 1999, and a very random selection it is. Going through this one I'm surprised at how there will be a run of ten or eleven sketches from a single day, and all of them barely developed, until I hit one that I bothered to take any farther than a few hurried lines, just to get the idea out of my head. I still do this, but to a lesser extent; I'm more likely to linger than I used to be. This is great for both people who don't want to puzzle out a handful of lines, and for my budget, because it means I go through sketchbooks more slowly...!

Anyway:

• Centaur Girl - A sketch of a player from a campaign I was running. I like her face and hair and I paid a lot of attention to the horse body, more than usual. It made a good portrait, which is probably why I inked it.
• Hilfy - This, on the other hand, was my character for a historical Mage campaign I was briefly in. It's notable for me because I was trying to recreate the colored lines of animation by tracing over my ink with gold pens (for her hair) and white pens (in other places, less successfully). Her lashes were the main focus for me, and I still like them, along with the attention paid to the ribbon pattern on her gown.
• Uncertain - Back to the campaign I was running, an NPC with one of the PC's weapons, looking uncertain. My grasp of anatomy was all over the place at this point in my artistic development, but sometimes the sum was greater than its parts, and the composition and emotion in this one made me look at it twice while scanning.
• Devotion - Recalling that I was still working on Worth of a Shell... here's Thenet and Dlane, and the inking on this is more deft than the drafting (the pencil stage), and elevates it over its errors. I think Dlane's face in this one, tucked against Thenet's back, is one of the most perfect encapsulations of her personality I've ever rendered. But the linework on the tail and hair, and the shading around Thenet's spirals on its neck and thigh... wow. I should learn from Past Me.
• The Spiral - I thought this was an interesting thing to stumble onto, the week I started prepping a new live chat area: it's a sketch of the people who used to hang out with me at the Spiral on FurryMuck. FM had an artist's hang-out and a writer's hang-out, and for obvious reasons I was frustrated at being forced to pick. So I made the Spiral, which was for creative people of all types, and it remained my hang-out on FM for a long time. When I page through my sketchbooks, I find periodic "group photos" like this, from places I've made and the regulars who joined me there. It's a reminder that while technology is ephemeral, the party is eternal.