Over September and in between work I participated in Swordtember, sharing my drawings only in private spaces with friends. I wanted to try an art challenge, but I didn't want to make it a trial, so I chose to only do 12 illustrations. To make it even more fun, I used my Earthshine OCs as subjects. I love drawing these guys so much and what better delight than giving my lesbians some swords to play with? I did all of these with prompts taken from Faith Scaffer's 2022 prompt list.

Since being offline I feel like my relationship with community challenges has also gotten healthier. I thank my tiger drawing foray for this as well. Keeping this to a private space with close friends made doing Swordtember so much more fun. The delight comes not from completing the entire challenge but instead from just showing the people I love what I have done so far. Also, I know to only choose parts of a prompt that I actually like, rather than feeling obligated to do it all (which would have included concepts I don't find all that interesting).

What more I gave myself the space to experiment and I got to try out new CSP brushes, and I found a few that I really like and will likely be using for future projects.

I've only included 6 of my 12 illustrations in this blog post, but you can see all of the pieces on my Patreon for a $2 (USD) subscription. I also have plans to print a collected zine that I'll have available at local zine fests. I don't have any plans for wider online distribution.

Thanks for stopping by!

Earthshine is mainly a story about a duo, but there are a few important secondary characters who make their mark on the whole narrative. One who has a particularly big impact is Nova. She arguably turns the duo of Sol and Nyx into a trio, but only in the back half of the story.

I would love to share more about her here but I run the risk of spoiling the whole first arc, and I’m learning that I should probably stop doing that. I do still want to name her ahead of time. I have been drawing a lot of art as I develop her character in preparation for her future debut, and I really want to post a bunch of it with some context to point back to haha. I think I just have a habit of introducing powerful and charismatic high femmes late in whatever narrative I’m writing. It’s like a sick joke I keep playing on myself.

Nova has gone through a few design changes before I settled on her current look. Honestly what has helped me flesh out Nova’s personality was sticking her in a sci-fi AU where she, Sol, and Nyx are travelling on a spaceship together doing deliveries and/or smuggling shit. 

The nuts and bolts of canon-Nova is that she loves swords, is a mage just like Nyx, and is a big fan of patricide. The rest will come as I start churning out this story.
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Hello everyone!

It’s been a bit of a stretch between blog posts, haha. I’ve been a bit busy with freelance and day job work, and when I do have time to myself I have been more interested in going outside for walks and bike rides, knitting and weaving, or drawing privately in my physical sketchbook. But I did want to come back to this, in particular to talk about my journey to draw a tiger every day.

It’s not going great! That’s not necessarily a bad thing, since I have so much else going on in my life. I still take the time to draw tigers when I can, but as it turns out I just couldn’t find an interesting way to keep up with this self imposed challenge. I think there’s something I could say about self imposed challenges, and how there is value in letting them go. I found out my limit when it comes to drawing a specific subject every day, and there is value in that. I came away from this challenge knowing myself a bit better than before.

I still plan on drawing tigers, just not every day, and when I have enough to share I’ll make another blog post about it. In the meantime I have come across a very talented artist who has been keeping up with the Draw a Tiger Every Day Challenge (inspired by onecoweveryday on Tumblr). He has taken to the challenge by playing with different art styles and even accepting requests from his followers. His art is really lovely and he deserves kudos for how far he has come. Go give him a look and maybe a follow!

I hope to have other art to share between all these tigers. Thanks for stopping by!