I decided it was time to make a proper character profile for Chielle, a character in my upcoming novel.

 
You can read more about her in the blog post where I first shared Chielle's concept art.

If you're curious about the naming convention I used for her family, it was inspired by the Spanish method of passing on surnames.

Since I'm writing a sci-fi fantasy world that isn't based solely on white Canadian culture, I didn't want to default to the "kids get the dad's last name and the mother's name disappears" formula from my own culture, so I looked to some of Earth's other cultures for inspiration.

I liked the Spanish model better: married women keep their original surnames, and after their personal names, Spaniards have both of their parents' first surnames, usually with the father's first and the mother's second.

But there were still a few things about that system that I wanted to tweak for this fictional universe.

For one thing, the first surname is often the only one used in less formal settings, so once again, the man's name is at the forefront while the woman's is left out.

​And because the children usually inherit the first of each parent's two surnames, the fact that the father's surname usually comes first means that - again - the mother's surname is erased.

That being the case, for the purpose of this book, I gave the system a small tweak: if the child is a girl, her surname is her mother's first surname, then her father's. If the child is a boy, his surname is his father's first surname, then his mother's. And if the child is nonbinary, it's decided on a case by case basis.

That way, both parents' names have a chance to be passed on.

How close is this book to being finished?

I'm in the process of fleshing out the outline, which means filling in plot holes, making sure no characters inexplicably disappear for days or indefinitely, adding foreshadowing, and removing any parts that no longer fit with the overall story.

I'm also writing the first draft of some scenes where I already have a clear and detailed idea of what I want to happen.

I'm currently on page 84 of 138, and the document is 68,664 words long!

Right now, I'm in the process of rewriting and fleshing out a pivotal scene roughly halfway through the book.

The first draft was already pretty much written, but then I decided that, under the circumstances, it would be more realistic and more emotionally compelling if it took place in another dimension, while one of the characters was bleeding into their brain. >:)

It definitely shifted the dynamic between the characters involved, and it gave me a chance to show off a side of their relationship that hadn't been shown in quite a while, while giving a shoutout to a part of their early backstory. All in all, I'm really happy with this change.

Want to see more?

If you want to be among the first to get updates about this story, to get early access to all my completed art and stories, and to get exclusive access to works in progress like the concept art for the man Chielle rescued, please consider supporting me on Patreon.

This is the concept art for one of the major characters in my upcoming sci-fi fantasy novel. Everyone, meet Chielle!
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Out of all the concept art I've drawn for my various characters, this is one of the ones I'm the most proud of. She looks pretty much exactly like I pictured her in my head, I love her fashion sense, and she's got such a distinctive look.

Her right hand is posed the way it is because I plan for her to be holding one of her inventions, when I figure out what said invention looks like.

So who is Chielle?

Chielle is a human scientist in a universe where Spinosauruses, spaceships, and immortal semideities can all be found on the same planet.

Her natural hair color is brownish black, but she's always been a big fan of stark, bold color contrasts, especially between light and dark. So when she started to develop vitiligo, she decided that if her favorite aesthetic was going to take over her face, she might as well run with it.

She lost her right arm in a shuttle crash when she was a child. When the rescue workers finally found her and pried her free from the wreckage, that moment when fear and despair suddenly turned into hope made a deep and lasting impression on her, as did the impact that getting her first prosthetic made on her quality of life.

For the rest of her childhood, she was torn between two dreams.

She became fascinated with prosthetics, and started studying them in hopes of someday inventing one that had the same range of motion and sensation as the original limb. She wanted to make life better for herself and her fellow amputees, just as the inventors who came before her had done for her.

But at the same time, part of her wanted to be a hero in a more direct and life-saving way, as those rescue workers had been to her. She wanted to be the reason someone's terror and despair turned to hope.

Even after she accepted a job in research and development, that part of her still hoped that if another shuttle crash happened, she'd be close enough to save the people inside.

Then, one day, she got her chance.

Chielle accepted an ambitious assignment in a classified lab on a remote planet, to seek a technological solution to a magical problem that had cost thousands of people their lives.

Her mission was to use her expertise in technology and neuroscience to invent machines that would block magic Wisps' control over their host, allowing people to wield the Wisps' magic without fear of getting possessed.

When the impact of a downed shuttle shook her lab, she didn't hesitate to race into the flames and drag the only surviving passenger to safety.

She had no way of knowing how this ragged, mysterious survivor would turn her world upside down.

Update:

Chielle now has an official character profile! You can see it here.

​If you want to be the first to get updates about Chielle and her world, to see higher-res versions of my art, and to get early access to all my completed writing and art, please join me on Patreon!

Somehow, improbably enough, its already 2023! This past year was certainly interesting; I switched my focus to a sci-fi fantasy novel whose outline/first draft hybrid is over 52,000 words long, am working on the character designs for said novel, got a few more chapters of Just Cause published, and started a series of pride flag-themed art pieces.

You can see the synopsis/back cover description for the novel in the image below: 

It's an early WIP; I might pare the text down later, and I'll almost certainly add something more to make the back cover pop, but for now I think it gives a good bird's-eye view of what this story is about.

It's been a while since an original story took over my brain the way this one has, and I'm really glad it did.

Outlining this story has certainly been an exercise in "shelving my darlings" - not killing them, but setting them aside for future books.

I had several characters, relationships, plot threads, and major conflicts planned in the original outline of this book, and then Raina and Quillen came swanning in, took over, and created a new storyline in which some of the original pieces no longer fit, haha.

A lot of these story components are too good to lose, and too complex and compelling to relegate to side plots, so I'll just have to find a new home for them where they can fully shine.

Hopefully by the end of 2023, I'll be able to share the completed book! In the meantime, I wish you an amazing year full of fun, inspiration, and amazing stories.

P.S. If you want to be the first to know when the book is available, and to get early access to excerpts, concept art, and other such goodies, please consider supporting me on Patreon.

I recently watched the first three seasons of Wakfu, an anime-like French cartoon, and now Qilby is living rent free in my head.

​Pretty much anything about him beyond his name is a HUGE spoiler for season 2, so you've been warned...


SPOILERS BEGIN


Like his fellow members of the Eliatrope Council, Qilby reincarnates after death. But while he (as well as, from what I understand, his twin sister, Shinonome) remembers all his past lives, his siblings' memories are almost completely wiped when they die, with only hints of emotional or subconscious memory lingering in their new incarnations.

This means Qilby and Shinonome are effectively the oldest of their siblings... and it also means they're condemned to die repeatedly and remember every gruesome second, and to watch their family die and forget they ever existed, over and over and over, for the foreseeable eternity.

It also means eventually, every part of life that once seemed interesting or exciting has become hopelessly stale and repetitive.

By the time Qilby first appears onscreen, he and his twin have been enduring this for at least several millennia, and it's taken a catastrophic toll on Qilby's mind.​

But what was life like before that?

Before his damaged mental state is revealed to the audience, it's shown that Qilby is very good with babies.

This, combined with his "oldest child" status and the absence of their parents, has made me fall in love with the headcanon that in his younger and more mentally stable days, he and Shinonome were the ones who raised their more forgetful siblings whenever they died and were reborn.

I like to think they had a series of actions they repeated whenever their siblings came back to life - songs, childhood stories, favorite games - in an attempt to awaken the embers of emotional memory and reestablish their bonds.

The lyrics in the image are for one of those songs. I kept picturing Qilby and Shino singing the Turret Opera from Portal 2​ to their baby siblings, and I decided to adapt the lyrics into something more fitting for the lonely existence of those doomed to be forgotten. 

​You can listen to the Turret Opera here, if you don't care about end-of-game spoilers for Portal 2.

In this speedpaint, I'm designing Kivara the Charishi kitten, a chaotic little member of a feline species in my fantasy short story and upcoming novel, Upholding the Covenant.

While I design her, I'll be sharing cute and funny Kivara moments, new facts about Charishi culture and biology, and insights into how the jock baby's friendship with nerd ambassador Orennian developed.
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​Remember that concept art for Kivara I recently shared? If you want to see what my drawing process looks like in fast forward, while listening to music that's far prettier than the early stages of the drawing were, here's the speedpaint!

If you haven't read Kivara's story yet, you can read Upholding the Covenant here. 

If you want to support the development of a novel starring Kivara, and to get early access to completed stories, art and videos, please consider joining my inner circle on Patreon.

And if you just want to thank me for my work, you can leave a one-time tip on Ko-fi.

She's here! That horrible, adorable little fur monster I've been posting about finally has a face to go with the shenanigans.

Guys, gals, and nonbinary pals, I'd like you to meet Kivara, the Charishi kitten from my short story and upcoming novel, Upholding the Covenant.

This picture put up a heck of a fight, which is appropriate for a kitten who will try to fight ANYTHING from loudly dropped boxes to thunderstorms.

You'd think an artist who's lived with cats almost my whole life would know how to draw them, but nope, I did not. At all. So this picture was a total learning curve for me, and it looked like ass until I added the stripes. After that, it all started coming together.

I had a rough idea of what Kivara looks like, but a lot of the details needed to be ironed out and experimented with on the fly, so I was actually designing Kivara while I drew her.

​I decided to record the process for a speedpaint, which I'll release soon, and even though I did a rough practice round before starting to record in earnest, the parts I recorded still added up to almost six hours.

​And that's not even including the bits of tinkering I did while the second-last video was rendering and I thought I was done (before I realized the ears needed fixing), and widening her raised forelimb to match the planted one!

Still, I'm glad I stuck with it, and didn't let that struggle be the final word on whether or not I could introduce Kivara's cute, bratty face to the world. I think this picture captures not only her appearance, but her alert, energetic, inquisitive and mischievous personality.

Designing not just a character, but a species.

Kivara is the first Charishi I've ever drawn, so to some extent I was figuring out their traits as a species while I was drawing her.

I wanted to give the Charishi more distinctive physical features to differentiate them from real-life felines and make them more unique, but so far, most of the ideas I've had just haven't felt right. The one thing that did stick was those big, triangular tufts of fur on the ends of their rounded ears.

Speaking of which, Charishi ears aren't normally that huge; Kivara's just special that way. She's the runt of the litter, but she has the voice, ears and attitude of a much larger creature, haha.

As she grows, her forelimbs' digits will elongate into fingers, and she'll start to shift to a bipedal stance as her default way of walking. But she'll still be able to drop to all fours for a startling burst of speed!

She'll also start to wear clothes; I need to figure out what kind of outfits the Charishi wear. Probably some sort of loose, roughly knee-high robe that can comfortably accommodate both bipedal and quadrupedal locomotion.

If you like this bratty baby enough to bring her into your house, you can get Kivara on T-shirts, stickers, coffee mugs and more in my RedBubble and Society6 stores!

And if you want to learn more about Kivara, her species, and the world she lives in, you can follow me on social media to get notified when I share more updates.

For my latest pride flag cutout art series, I wanted to try something more ambitious. Instead of having a single theme for the pattern, I drew seven different layers of the world: 

1. Outer space, with planets, comets, moons, and UFOS.
2. High sky, with birds, wind, and clouds.
3. Low sky, with treetops, dragonflies, and butterflies.
4. Ground level, with flowers, grass, and other graceful plants.
5. Underground, with tree roots, bunnies, and mice.
6. Shallow water, with sea stars, sea horses, and vividly pattered fish.
7. Deeper ocean, with jellyfish, octopi, eels, naked sea butterflies, larval lionfish, and ctenophores. 

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I'd initially planned to keep all the cutouts fairly simple, but as I so often do, I wound up getting more and more detailed. I went overboard with the butterflies and dragonflies, and I went absolutely apeshit with the fish, haha.

For those who are curious, I created this by placing a layer of black on top of the color layer, then erasing holes in the darkness, allowing the colors of the flags and the pastel rainbow background to shine through.

​I also added spots and shimmers of white to give it brightness and texture.

I hope you enjoy the result!

If you like this art enough to wear it or decorate your home with it, click "Read More" to see some of your options!

It's been a while since I turned a panel of Just Cause into a wallpaper, and this one seemed especially conducive to it. In this panel, Frisk is wondering if Flowey can wrest control of the timeline from them, and make them relive their most painful moments over and over again.

I'm not entirely happy with it; I feel like the scenes from Frisk's past don't quite mesh with the rest of the picture. They feel slapped-on to me. If you have any suggestions for making them feel more integrated, I'd love to hear them!
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Time for another snowflake series, this time in my favorite color. :)
 

It took me several tries to get a background that both complemented this pattern, and would look good when tiled.

​Below, you can see one of my earlier attempts; the contrast was so high that it distracted from the snowflakes, but it looked so good on its own that I decided to use it as a standalone art piece.

 

​​​If you'd like to get this artwork on physical items like clothes, accessories and home decor, here are a few of your options:
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​​Here are the links to the items in the collage:
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​Face Masks
Stickers
Floor Pillows
Throw Blankets
​Dresses
Shirts
Phone Cases & Covers
Towels
Tapestries
Shower Curtains
Coffee Mugs
Duffel Bags
Apple Watch Bands

You can see all the RedBubble items with this artwork here:

Stormy Swirls
Shower of Sapphire Snowflakes

To see more products with these pictures on Society6, check out these art prints, then scroll down to where it says "More featuring this artwork".

Stormy Swirls
Shower of Sapphire Snowflakes