Umbra - [ FFXIV Commission ] (Patreon)

"She walks in darkness, but never alone...."

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Making this piece was a huge challenge for all the right and wrong reasons.

From a technical perspective, it's been a long time since I worked on a background so involved with the piece, and it was also the first time drawing/painting animals of any sort. Both of those things really highlighted some gaps in my knowledge that I had to figure out on the job.

I also started with a completely different color scheme (as you can see here) but somewhere in the process I took a heel turn to bring out some sharper contrast involving the reds, which I think definitely worked in its favour.

From another perspective... well, at some point in the creation of this I found out I had a bird mite infestation in the house (pro-tip, if you have bird nests in your roof, get rid of them stat). This meant that we had to dismantle and evacuate the house on very short notice for heat and chemical treatment to get rid of the problem, which did me no favours in terms of time or stress when working through this.

Overall I'm quite pleased with how this piece turned out given the circumstances and I'd be really eager to try something else with this color scheme/vibe in the future - possibly without a pest control situation on my hands next time.

As always, your thoughts are more than loved!