NEW ART: Fall of Torna (Mythra Poll Drawing) (Patreon)

Hey everyone, it took a while, but I've finally finished the Mythra poll drawing that we voted on so, so long ago. x_x

Most of you have likely already seen this on twitter, but for anyone who's not on the cursed site anymore, I hope you'll enjoy seeing it here!

The reason I delayed posting it is because I had hoped to slip in some extra alts for Patrons, since it was, in fact, a Patreon poll drawing, but I've been so damned hella busy trying to manage all my responsibilities and I just don't know if it's going to happen at this point. So here she is!

I've got some stuff to say about this drawing! And, in general, "Artist Notes" are going to be a new feature of my posts for anyone who's curious about the creative process behind my artwork!

ARTIST NOTES

As you can plainly see, this drawing is quite a deviation from my usual work. It was experimental in multiple ways -- both in technique and atmosphere.

Atmospherically, this piece is distinctly more moody and emotional, and less sexualized. I know a lot of you guys are into the latter (this is Patreon, after all), but I hope you'll appreciate the more somber turn of this piece!

Truthfully, I really like doing this kind of art and I've seldom gotten to do it in the last several years, given that I established myself as an ecchi artist. But I love, love, LOVE more serious drawings that tell a story. It's the kind of art that inspired me to be an artist in the first place, and I would really love to do this kind of work more often.

For the uninitiated, this is called the "Fall of Torna" because it's depicting a very tragic event in Mythra's backstory (depicted in the Xenoblade 2 DLC). I won't spoil too much, but in a nutshell, it was an event so traumatizing for Mythra here that she essentially created a new personality as a way to cope with it, and that's why we have Pyra.

Anyway, with a character who is SO often depicted in a sexualized manner (including in her own damn game) it was surprisingly fun not focusing on that at all, and instead trying to capture the emotion of one of her most important moments. What do you guys think about it?

A Note on Technique

It's worth noting this piece was also experimental in my technique. Since many of my drawings take anywhere from 20-40 hours, I consider drawings that take <10 hours to be a "sketch."

My Patreon poll drawings are "sketches" since I have too many commissions to spend a lot of time on them, so this one had to follow suit.

I decided to cut the crap that takes up a lot of time in my usual process. Once I had the lines drawn and a general color scheme figured out, I actually did most of the shading on a single layer, which is incredibly atypical of me. But it was also... so liberating? Just painting without layers really accelerated a lot of aspects of my process. And ironically, this drawing that took roughly 10 hours looks better (in my opinion) than a lot of drawings that took four times as long.

On the downside, doing everything on mostly one layer destroyed the flexibility I usually have in creating alts. She's stuck in this lighting forever and it can't be adjusted short of a full recolor. You have to take a lot of measures to make a drawing "ready" for alts, and it turns out, if you're just aiming to create one final end piece with zero variations, you can get it done a whole lot faster by skipping all those measures.