The Last Dance (Patreon)

I know, I know, I'm suppose to be drawing lewd material and such. But now and then I get visited by a nice muse to whom I don't want to ignore.

There's a saying, and it's that a muse can come at any moment, and it's the artist's job to be ready/there when it does. And that rang particularly true for this.

In the sketch you can see the very quick, very rough idea. I knew that in order for the candle girl to be special, I needed regular candles - which would also act as a middle-ground element to keep scale and interest in the piece. I didn't know what I wanted for a background yet, or that I was even doing it in color.

In LastDance_02.jpg, it's just the lineart of the candle girl in her candle holder. I went with short, curved lines to emulate this sort of pen-nib mottled look. The original pose offered this very slow moment that's very peaceful. A long bow before the dance begins, or maybe this slow saunter. It has this special energy that's all wound up that's ready to be released. By changing the pose to this one, I trade a lot of that calm energy that befits a wax candle for a lively one that befits an animated figure. I believe that if I had kept the original pose, it would have seem like a carved statue replica rather than a living, moving thing. But I think that the mystery of it being alive or not, as well as keeping in tune with the "atmospheric pace", was the better choice. I should have trusted my gut instinct on that.

In LastDance_03.jpg, I figured out what I wanted for the background and went to work. At this point I had been working on this piece for about 6 hours straight. I knew I was close to being done, but I wasn't happy with how the candles came out. They looked too much like buttholes. And that's because I didn't properly use reference photos.

Lastly, the lineart. I think I would love to draw a (sfw) comic with this kind of loose rendering style.