hello there kids!

back again with some more fireforge action, hehe. dang... that just reminded me of needing to draw ruindir again soon...

anyways! for english class, we all have to hold "small" presentations - nobody told me that they are supposed to be 3-5 minutes long, so i just talked for 30 minutes jsnvdfkv - about a specific topic. in this case it was country/city.
and since nobody ever specified any criteria concerning the topic, i just.. you know... held a presentation on the fireforges.

so whilst i was working on the presentation, i found two drawings that looked out of place. which is the reason of what you'll be seeing in this chapter.

now, when talking about east-fireforge and the political side of the nation, I wanted to utilize this image of bronadan, which was a half-body of him on his wedding day, that i drew earlier this year:

and whilst i do still like the piece a lot, it looked out of place next to my newer stuff. and since i've been drawing bronadan a bit more frequently lately, i also wanted to change his anatomy and face quite a bit.

soooooo.... here's the newer version:

I basically wanted to push the warm light and the over-the-top-ness of the fireforges, to make him look essentially elegant, warm, powerful and so on, with the only difference being his expression. if he had a smile, this image would have a different atmosphere. but he's supposed to be worried, nervous, sad, scared... yet trying to hide his emotions in an attempt to keep the atmosphere alive.

now after having finished the presentation, i looked back through everything again.

and i found that lithrdir looked a bit unhappily out of place. the shading and lighting was just too different, making him stick out more than i'd like to.

now... the thing was, that i still liked that drawing a lot and didn't quite have enough time to redraw him, i decided to just go back to the old krita file and replace the shading.

those plans were pretty quickly changed, when i realized that i had merged all the shading onto the flat colours. so i basically just enhanced the lightsource and added more details, whilst also adding an extra layer of shadows on top, so the cell-shaded style i have now would also be visible.

both of these drawings were made at the beginning of the year. and whilst my style in itself hasn't changed as much as it did in the past years, my sense of light and mood has developed quite a bit. this whole thing is especially interesting to see, when looking at my fireforges...

so here's a small trip down memory-lane of the fireforges... mostly consisting of ruindir :)

man.... it's still weird to see this thing. you know, sometimes i look at my early digital drawings. like... january/february/march of 2019, and i wish for that sort of "style" to come back. yeah, my general art-skill has improved, my understanding of anatomy, light, expression, has all developed, but.... something about that grungy roughness still appeals to me and i miss it. my drawing have become so clean, warm and colourful lately... i want to return to that messy thing i had going on. but whenever i want to try, i slip into my current ways.

i guess this is just a part of the art-journey. letting pieces of your past art go, for the sake of improvement. and i think that is okay.

nothing else really happened in 2019, but dang... 2020 really changed stuff up.

I love how ruindir hasn't really changed in his appearance, but my style made it seem so...

but then again, the actual changes, happened when i decided to turn my grasslands, hills and small mountains of the fireforges, into a country filled with deserts and volcanoes.

.... the leap in design it pretty darn interesting, especially when I just realised, how i sorta developed ruindir, and then went backwards in topic of design and appearance >w<

this is the first time i gave bronadan a face, and figured out how i wanted the tattoos to look. man he has come such a long way..

i think here we can see the best, how my shading developed to the cleaner look i've got now. it also is fascinating to see, how my style has changed (only looking at the flat colours) since then. on the one hand it seems as though barely anything changed, on the other hand everything is just slightly different enough to be completely different

here i redesigned bron for the... fourth time? i had quite some struggles to get him to look right, but this is where i landed and stayed until today. again, it is weird to see how my style change makes everything look more different than it actually is...

and then 2020 came to an end... the development my art made that year was insane.... especially when comparing the later pieces to the pieces in the beginning and looking back at 2019.

now 2021 has been fairly interesting so far...

simply because i started off with realizing, how i barely shaded my works anymore because it wasn't fun and took way to long. so i decided to make changed and take shortcuts pretty early on. and i think that's what helped me the most in lighting, because i slowly learned to only set the most essential shadows and lights to set the scene.

this piece of ruindir probably was the last soft-shaded one i created.... at least the last one i can remember. and it was this piece that made it clear how i had to take a step backwards and make changes.

which pretty much lead us to where i am now.

man... looking through my old art is always a blast. sadly i left my external hard drive at school, where my firefore-pieces of 2018 and 2019 are all... but i guess i'll just need to make a full development-recap at the end of this artbook :)

either way, i hoped you guys liked the two new drawings i made and didn't mind me talking a bit about my old creations. as i said in the chapter before: looking at development is important to show how you are always growing, even if you don't notice it.

>>cuddles, pats, wraps in blankets and gives cookies<<

so take care of yourselves, kiddos, and remember, that you're always loved and appreciated