Heyho again!

yeah, i'm still alive, don't ya worry, i just was rather busy and not really in the mood to write a lot of wattpad chapters lately >w<

either way, i have returned with an extremely important piece to me, so i really really really hope you guys like the end result about as much as i do ^-^

okay.... depending on when you started to pop into my artbooks and what ones you've already seen, you may or may not be familiar with the piece i called "drowned"

i drew it in january 2019, finished it on the 26th, and was sitting in the living room, surrounded by cushions, blankets and tea, since i had caught a nasty fever. During that time I also drew two other pieces I still really like to day: empty and lost.

they kind of became a set of three over time, as i tried to keep them all fairly monochromatic, used some smoke-esc texture and tried out a new style of shading.
of all the empty still is a piece I love a lot, lost was an attempt at storytelling through illustration, as was drowned.... with drowned i also attempted some new things for the first time, which ultimately ended in me not liking the piece at all, marking it as the ugly-one of the triplet.

Looking at it now, it really wasn't even as bad as I thought it was and I find it quite interesting, how drastic my style has changed since then...

either way, i planned to redraw this picture a whole while ago, as i still liked the idea and concept behind it, but not so much my first attempt at visualising it...
so last year, i decided to start by giving my boy Voronwë a redesign. Back then I had him as a charming lad in mind, with dark blue, round eyes and medium length, wavy, brown hair.

but since I changed a lot of things in terms of appearance since then and made the wavecall-clan (which is dedicated to him, as the god of water) heavily inspired by east-asian cultures and looks, i had to give the "fantasy-pirate from victorian england, who got lost in a fantasy setting"-appearance to some other character >w<"

i then went ahead and drew my boy a portrait..... which was already quite some time ago, and whilst it doesn't represent at all what he would look like in my present style, i do indeed still use this as reference for his features ^-^

and now we can finally start with the actual redraw!

so... this whole thing essentially happened in the first place, since i was motivated to draw, but not really inspired. because of that, i simply went ahead, downloaded some palettes from pinterest, gave those numbers, and let the folks on discord give me a random number ^-^

i then continued in similar fashion when it came to the type of palette, the type of background, what reference i used and what piece should be the main inspiration for this drawing... and in the end (when i had gathered everything together) i had that light-bulb-moment in which i remembered "drowned" and how desperately i wanted to redraw that piece... and since most of the things i got seemed to somewhat fit into the frame of a redraw, i went ahead and has some fun!

overall, i wanted to take what i had at the time and refine it. i wanted to have him more relaxed, his hair more chaotic and more of a magical feeling to it. i mean... in the end, this is how voronwe became the god of water after all.

so i went ahead and worked from there, getting the lighting in there to be more extreme than i usually do, to really convey that underwater-tone to everything. i also decided to make his eyes completely black. closing them seemed too tense in the sketch, just white it lost the "drown" aspect of it all, sams story with just normal eyes... so yeah... in the end this was an amazing choice, as it added more contrast to his face and separates his character (which is slowly merging with the background) similar to the hair, adding more structure to the whole thing.

and... well, since the inspiration piece had some really nice patterns and textures, i decided to add some similar things in there, and... argh they turned out so insanely pretty, i probably will do those in future pieces as well >w<

and... well... theoretically the picture above was the final product, but as soon as i uploaded it to discord i just... saw things i wanted to improve.... so i looked at what i had in front of me, and then checked back with the original...

so i made some adjustments to get the whole theme more into the blue direction, made some focal points more obvious, coloured the lineart to make it less obvious, and just small changed like that...

so now... uh... here's the final redraw of drowned!

man...

i am insanely happy with this piece.... like... insanely happy. man, trying out new things and revisiting old ideas is always so fun and exciting to do, and especially with this one i managed to create something i am actually proud of.

i desperately should add more abstract-ish backgrounds in future hehe...

other than that... i hope you guys like the first one of the three pieces and are looking forward to the next two!

>>cuddles, pats, wraps in blanket and gives hot chocolate<<

remember, that you're loved, valid and very very special to me. see you hopefully in the next chapter kiddo!!