Ah.... would one look at that..... I'm still alive.... and theoretically I have quite the ammount of chapters prepared, but none are finished yet and school's stealing my time QwQ

But I'm working on stuff!!!! See:

Either way, I'm slowly chiseling away, focusing on chapters that have deadlines! Like this one :)

Now... as the title already says: this drawing was made for a "collaboration" back in march, which I later on also decided to use for a contest!

The collab consisted of us artists (on the art club discord server) describing a character together, deliberately leaving out some details, and then each of us interpreting the description to create an OC!
In my case it meant, that my boy Charles Parsons, who only was a rough concept at the time, finally got a name and design ^-^

Since I can presume that you're curious about the specifcations, here's what we had to work with:

UNSPECIFIED
- gender - species - bodybuild - nose - shoes - materials - (everything else) -

ROUGHLY SPECIFIED
- short hair - darker skintone - confused expression - has to contain blue and green - wide jacket -

PRECISELY SPECIFIED
- eyecolour: light turqoise (left) + blind (right) - cold silver haircolour - wavy hair with dreadlocks - piercings - bandages/plasters - wings on hip - hat with pins

I think I implemented all of them, but chances are high that I forgot at least something ^-^"

But enough to that, I started off by doodling some small headshots in my sketchbook, before drawing a portrait digitally. After said portrait was completely finished, I went back to the file and added a halfbody drawing of him, to show his present design.
To make things a bit easier to talk about though, I decided to show equal levels of progress in the exportet WIPs, but just keep in mind that the portrait was completely finished before I even started the halfbody >w<

Kicking it off, I instantly knew, that I wanted to push the boundaries and turn this design into the final face of one of my OCs. Most of you here should be familiar with my fantasy/steampunk world "Mesoria" with the Family-Tree series, following "The Ancient" (Feredir, Cevrond, etc.) and "The Lost" (Eldred, Bronadan, Ruindir, etc.). Now.... the Family Trees are not only confined to mesoria, and I rarely ever talk about this project, but "The Warforged" is also a huge part of my novel WIP pile >w<

Essentially the series follows a family through the two world wars, allowing me to be the history nerd I truely am, as well as the war at the end of the world, causing the destruction of our known universe and thus the creation of mesoria, and hopefully adding a bit more lore and information to my ideas :)

Either way, the actual drawings started off with my usual ugly and rough sketches. The portrait on the right was supposed to show him just after joining the airforce, whilst the halfbody on the left was supposed to portray his  older self and what we get to see him grow into, in the book.

When it came to the lines, I decided to make him look official and preppy on the right, implementing the colours blue and green through merging different uniforms into one (also excuse the historical inaccuracies.... the story is mainly historical, but still set in an alternate universe, so I allowed myself to have quite some creative freedoms). So we now have him in a canadian-coloured, british airforce uniform, with some unusual british inspiration for the collar-area.
Face-wise I desperately wanted to give him a clunky nose.... i have no clue why, but I just wanted my boy to have a handsome potato-nose, so here we are.

When it came to the halfbody, I decided to derivate a lot from what you'd usually see at the front. The jacket was heavily inspired by british pilots, the airforce-symbol being influenced by the canadian one, and the trousers and shirt mainly being creative liberties, taken to emphasize how little he cared about etiquette.
Since one of his eyes should be blind, I couldn't help but give him some gnarly scars, which I also used to sorta add in them bandages.

When it came to the colours on the right, I had quite some issues when it came to making all the provided colours look really coheisive, but desaturating everything and pushing it all in the rather cold colour spectrum really helped on that front.

Generally I tried to make his skin the darkest value in the composition, whilst hair and uniform should rather play in the lighter midtone area. I trusted on my shading later on, pulling especially the hair in the more extreme silver direction, and also adding more texture and contrast on the image.

This is also more or less where I left the image for the longest time ever, before going back in june and actually finishing it.

When it came to the colours on the left, I wanted to keep the colours mostly the same, especially with the jacket adding some more values and tones to the mix, I found it important to keep the green and blue fairly similar, yet more grey and more towards the colder spectrum, since the jacket added some warmer colours to the mix.

Then it came to the rendering. The portrait was done fairly quickly, whilst I spent quite some time on the halfbody. Nothing all that special here to be honest, except perhaps how one can see my shading style change over the months. Especially since I drew the portrait back in April, you can really see how much more confident I grew with the cell shading style, and how i use smaller highlights around the light source and general lineart to define the shape and add more contrast.

But generally: this is it! Here we have the final image of Charles ^-^

Okay okay.... that's the actual picture, but the chapter isn't over yet. Remember that "contest" in the title?

So, after MicaAppatossis updated her contest with the topic "character sheet" this WIP instantly came back to mind.

So I finished up the drawing as soon as I arrived back home from boarding school, and then added extra informations about his pronouns, birthday and personality ^-^

So yeah! I definetely plan on drawing more or the Parsons family in the future, especially since I want to explore their story a bit more >w<

I don't really have all that much more to say over here, so I'll just leave it as is. Hope y'all have a good rest of your day/night/life, drink enough in this hot weather and feel valid and loved ^-^

>> cuddles you, gives you something cold to drink and ice cream <<