good evening kiddos!

um.... long time no see, haha..... depression and anxiety has been keeping me rather occupied and busy lately, so i do apologize for the sudden disappearance from all my social medias... but alas, since i'm high on antidepressants and just meditated for 2 hours, i'm feeling good enough to at least bring my artbook up to date ^-^

anyways, as the title suggests, i've drawn my child bronadan again! basically i just stumbled across some sketches of mine and have been working a bit on "ashes" again, so i felt inspired to draw him again.

not too long ago, i also drew this picture right here, with him being in the nightmare army:

i decided to try and make the new picture match to the one i already made, so i could one day make a series of development pics of him in the novel, and then bung the transparent pngs into one large "character development sheet" after they're all done.

quite similar to those portrait thingies i made with fer and dessie, but with fully rendered halfbodies >w<

anyways! main references for the design were these sketches i made last year:

not gonna lie, i find it fascinating how far my understanding of anatomy in my style and the bodybuild of my characters has come along since then... and even though i do still see my boy bronadan in those sketches, he also looks a lot more different in the present appearance of my style.

and after thinking that when seeing the picture, i decided to make somewhat of a redraw of the sketch on the right. simply because i hated it the most back then, and i wanted to make past-me happy with the development i've made since then.

maybe it's just my freshly meditated brain speaking here, but i think it's always important to look back at what you have done and compare it with the present. not always do you need to feel proud of the improvement or need to feel inspired by it. i personally think it's just factual evidence of growth. both in your creations and ideas as well as your personal self.
it just demonstrates in it's simplest ways, how everything in the universe is directed towards adaptation and development, and how we grow and mature through time, even if we do not notice in the present.

you know... i like to see people in metaphors quite often. sometimes we're struggling, in that case we're like caterpillars in their cocoon, dissolved into goo, no shape, form or structure to be seen, but in the end, we come back from the situation, realising how the experience has shaped us into a new version of ourselves.
in this case though, i like to see people like trees. trees are tiny at the beginning. some seeds aren't even as big as my toenail. but with time and resource, it develops, adapts and grows. if you see this little sapling every single moment of your life, you will never realize a change. but if you look back at the little seed it came from, the tree has had quite the development.

and that's pretty much how we humans are. with time and resource, we grow and develop, want it or not. even through the toughest of hardships, we develop. like when some trees get split in the middle through lightning, they still continue to grow. now neither the tree, nor we will be the same as before, but that's all a part of us now.
for me, my art and ideas are branches of my core self. they grow and sprout leaves, flowers, fruits. and they develop over time. so when i look at old art of mine, it means, that i compare the development of the branch, to notice, how the trunk must have also changed since then.

but enough spiritual talk, let's get back to the actual drawing.

what bothered me a lot with the old drawing back then where the facial features. now, they aren't terrible, but they didn't look like bronadan. nowadays that isn't an issue for me anymore. the main thing that bothers me in the present, was that he looked too clean.

bronadan at this point was a homeless, traveling, addict, who earned his money for drugs and food by busking on the streets. so the first thing i wanted to do, was to rough him up a bit. give him some patches and tears. make him look sloppier and dirtier than in the sketch beforehand.

i also decided to replace the backpack with a broken dagger, just to put the whole "west-fireforgean streets are fukkin dangerous" thingy a bit more in focus.

now, since i babbled on so much about trees and how my art-development is a direct reflection of my personal-development, i'm not all too sure, what i wanted to say about the drawing anymore..........

um...

here it is then!

i probably could have pushed the concept further. especially in regards of the silhouette. but overall i am very happy with the result, since it does portray the overall mood i had in mind.

i hope you guys like it as well, and if not, then i hope you at least enjoyed my little tree-talk up there >w<

other than that, remember that you in yourself are just one big project. a living and breathing creature, walking on the never-ending paths of growth. so take care of yourselves and remember, that everything is just a part of your own character-development.

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