WOAH. HOLD YA HORSES THERE!!!

Before you read the chapter I just wanted to kindly remind you, that if you do indeed participate in this little collab/arttrade thingy, to just.... go to another chapter... and not read this one, because you are not supposed to see this yet ^-^

So off ya go! Farewell! Come back in a few days!

(am i saying this, because im an idiot and nearly spoilered myself who luzibu was supposed to draw for? yes....... and i wanna thank them very much for that little parapgraph at the top of that chapter there, that could've gone very wrong, very quickly...)

Either way, I hope the rest of you are able to enjoy this chapter nonetheless and I won't stop you from reading onwards any longer >w<

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Okie dokie, let's get right to it then!

For those of you who are new to the concept, secret art santa is a nice group arttrade, except you don't know who you're trading with. You essentially submit an OC (I sent my boy Bronadan out there, since... I give Ruindir too much attention...), and then the person organising the thing (in this case buechl-sophie) gives you someone elses OC to draw in your style. In the end you have no clue who drew your character, and it's overal just a super fun challenge!

Now the issue is, that it is incredibly important to finish the drawing in time... and anyone who ever hosted an art contest probably knows that I'm terrible with deadlines........ and quite often I am indeed the dude who just.... doesn't make it in time.... and then panics... and gives up on the drawing........ and then makes people sad bc they never receive a drawing of their OC from me.............

But this time I actually was finished pretty good in time, so everything went well^-^"

I just now noticed how much I ranted... either way, I was allowed to draw Celea for the user erdsee!
And... I would indeed be lying if I said that I was excited about it. To be completely honest I was very dissapointed.... very very dissapointed.... like... to the degree that I already had the message typed out to ask, if I could get a different OC....

Like, not that I didn't like the character or their design! They look absolutely awesome, the story, the clothing, the jewellery, the colour scheme, etc. was all down my alley! I love love love Celea so much for so many reasons and I can only give props to erdsee for creating someone this awesome.
The dealbreaker for me were mainly two things: not a boy and very floofy.

If it were just a normal female person, I wouldn't mind at all. I can draw females, I just don't like it as much (wait... really? never would've thought when you looked through my artbook, right?), it was just the fur.

Because I am terrible at drawing animals and fur in general and I was absolutely terrified of completely ruining her look and making her look ugly as fuck. Yeah that was the only reason I was about to give up on here, BUTT I decided to give it a try and challenge myself.

Since I was so super insecure I went ahead and did something I usually only do for larger digital paintings: thumbnailing.
I did about five of them, until I settles on a fancy little pose, which I then "refined" into this scribbly mess:

I plopped the drawing into Krita and then spent the following 2 hours figuring out how on earth this is supposed to look now.... especially the face was something that took me forever, and I did indeed switch it up drastically in the lineart phase later on.

Also... did I enhance the tail floof, so I can have a nice floofy spiral going on there, since I couldn't make it look right any other way? Yes. Yes, I did.

The probably most intriguing part about Celea, for me at least, probably has to be the clothing. Simply because it's totally something I would stick my OCs into, especially with all the chains and the belt and the nice and lofty material... argh totally my thing.
And all that paired with floofy ears, horns, a bag and a fantastic hairstyle? Good lord I envy erdsee for these design choices and I might go ahead and "steal" some elements for my own OCs >w<

(stealing obviously meant in the sense of being inspired by it and it showing a slight resemblance, whilst also being a complete standalone design.... i would never go and just steal someone elses ideas. just wanted to set that clear before someone comes along and accuses me of something)

Then it came to the lineart... and oh good lord was that a fight. An enjoyable fight, since this is something I literally never drew before and I had a blast figuring things out, but a fight nonetheless.

Special thanks are yeeted out to DastiveArt and SabinaCh4n for helping me figure out that facial anatomy... she did look a lot like a lion in that sketch, and whilst I did loose a lot of dynamics in the lines (which is the main reason I don't do sketches as refined as that anymore), the ability to recognize her was indeed more important. I was indeed very worried about the face, since it looked extremely outlandish and goat-ish, but the colouring and shading pulled it together pretty darn nicely ^-^

Also ignore the entire necklace-holding thing... I only realised after I drew that hand that my initial thought of: "Hey, that's a brilliant idea for a lost hand that has no proper use! Why didn't I think of this before?" has indeed been thought of before.... but the hand was cool and I didn't want to erase it, so we all need to live with the fact now, that merm Cev and Celea both carry necklaces around because they can.

And then it came to the colouring... It was quite interesting to pick out the colours, since erdsee made the drawing traditionally with watercolours. The palette thus was a lot more pastell and because of the lighting it also was a lot more grey.
I tried my best to match them up though and I think I did a pretty good job ^-^

The by far more interesting point here, would probably be the background. Regular visitors know, that I have a love for circles and dots and gradients and textures, but I fancied drawing something a bit more literall for Celea here.
So here goes my attempt at drawing some bushes and treas, that look like something organic, whilst also implementing some circles in there ^-^

If I wanted to, I probably could've done better, but I thought that I'd probably need to blurr it quite a bit later on anyways, since it did indeed distract from the character a bit, which is why I decided to not go too detailed.

I then went on with the shading... and it was tough, ngl.

Trying to avoid the fur for as long as possible, I started with the clothing, trying out a new shading technique for silkier materials on the side. Then came the eyes, metal, hair, horns and the bag. Nothing all too flashy, all things I've done before and know what I'm doing.
I wanted to go all-out on this one, since i set this as a personal challenge and it was indeed a picture for a different person. So I tried my best with a lot of details and hopefully accurate lighting ^-^"

The fur however... oh boy... I figured that if I shade like I usually would, an then add highlights to give the texture on top, it would look like fur. Well at least I hoped for that to work, since that's my technique to draw side- and undercuts on my usual characters xD

And it did go amazingly well! I also added several layers of different colours, to match the fur variety erdsee has given her.... well......... it went well until Krita decided to crash on me, right after I finished shading the thing....

Very sad moment.... very sad moment indeed...

And I was indeed tempted to give up on the drawing and finish it up the next day, but I decided to just continue on and finish it up.

*yeets final drawing at ya*

So there we have it!

I am incredibly proud of this piece. Not only because it's a fully rendered fullbody, but also because this is something completely new to me, which I have never attepted before in my entire art-journey QwQ

Ngl, I had my ups and downs along the way, but I do have to admit that I had an irrational amount of fun figuring out this more or less foreign anatomy and shading it later on. This probably was one of the most fun pieces I drew this year!

So I just wanted to say a big big thank you to erdsee for submitting this OC, and obviously give sophie an extra fat hug and cookies for organising this entire thing in her artbook!

*cuddles you and gives you a blanket, tea and cookies*

That's all I got for now.... there are a lot more half-written chapters waiting to be finished, and I am confident that I'll be able to finish them up in the near future. Until then I hope that you stick around for another while and remember to take care of yourself!