Well, well, well.... who do we have here?

This dude.... with some more drawings he made, cuz he finally has two small drawings finished that he can put in once chapter! Yayy!

Anyways, as the title already says, I made a small picture of Nave, even though it isn't really Nave, but one of the reincarnations of Nave... specifically the reincarnation after Nauthir, even though this dude doesn't have a proper name yet.

So.. since I worked around the timeline a lot, Nauthir and Ruindir went from "becoming the cutest gay couple I ever wrote" to "Nauthir is the husband of Ruindir's Great-great-great-great-great-great-uncle" ..... so yeah.... since Ruindir changed a lot since the beginning of writing on "Burn" I decided that the two characters have become so estranged to one another, that no character development would make it possible for the two to be the same person, which is why the "original" Ruindir (who I named Eldred, in homage of the original project) is now a completely different person, to the "new" Ruindir, whilst still being related through bloodline and all that.

Anyways, that also means, that Nauthir pretty much is dead by the time of the main-projects Ashes, Defiance, Paladin and Crystal Bones, so I decided to follow my worldbuilding rules and reincarnate Nave into a different character, who I then gave a face.

Essentially I kicked it off with the idea to finally give a face to all the new reincarnations, which is why I started with this lineart, in the corner of the canvas, leaving enough room for about three or four other heads.

Goal was, to give him a bit of a softer appearance, whilst his hair and expression really cut through that. He should look like an average person, who's just so full of everyones shit. He's supposed to be the embodyment of "You're fucking kidding me, right?" to create more or less an exact opposite to Nauthir.

Next up I got out the colours, trying to make him look rather cool and as though he cared about his appearance a little bit, whilst also trying to make everything look effortless (AKA: "What do you mean with 'styling your hair' I wake up like this, bitch."  whilst having spent at least half an hour figuring out his hairstyle beforehand)

The only thing that should really stick out, should be his eyes. I attempted to hold back A LOT with the piercings and scars this time, to really draw all the "bling bling" focus on the eyes.... I did fail a bit with that through the light-situation I decided, which made the hair nearly metallic-shiny, but you'll see that in a sec anyways.

So.... all that happened around the first half of march. after that I wanted to go ahead and draw the other reincarnations, but I was lazy.. and didn't want to draw girls..... so it kinda just chilled in my WIP folder, until I dug it out again in April and added shading, yeeting the idea of the other portraits on here out of the window.

And since just shading it felt a bit boring, I decided to test out some new things in regards of cell-shading. So, I went ahead and started off by not making my usuall airbrushed highlights, but giving him some proper cell-shaped highlights... and after I did that, I remembered that weird ass lighting situation that rarely happens in real life, but looks really fancy when drawing it.
You know when light hits someone through shutters, so you have these fancy parelell lines of extreme light, whilst everything else is just cloaked in shadow? Yeah, so I tested that out.

Honestly, the funnest part here was, to figure outwhere the light would hit the planes of the face, and then erasing the shadows to create this really extreme, clea look... also shading the hair and eyes was just awesome. Just look at that red flare, fire, texture thingy I made thate... that does just look at least sorta awesome, huh?

So next up.... well, I hope you lot remember this drawing I finished up in January? Where we sent a hoodie in the discord server, and we all drew one of our OCs in the same hoodie?

Anyways, that happened again with this jumper over here:

and since I never got around to drawing Ruindir in the first hoodie as well, I went ahead and made a 10-15 minute doodle of the modern AU version of him in the other hoodie >w<

it really isn't anything special, but I kinda found the idea cute, because Ruan totally is the type of person to find the hoodie stupid and ridiculous, but then later on love it, never take it off and zip the two halves of the hood together saying "Piss of, I'm a bear, I hate people."

And I also just had to add that aro/ace pride heart badge thing in there, because it sorta seemed fitting ^-^

So yeah! That was that for now, I hope you liked the two drawings, even if they were rather small. I personally had a lot of fun drawing both of them and am very satisfied with that drawing of Nave, whilst... I mean I definetely could've done better on my boy Ruan, but it only took me a bit less than 15 minutes and I batched one rough shading layer on top so... I shouldn't be complaining.

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

Hopefully we'll see each other in a future chapter and please don't shy away to share your opinion, ask questions or start a conversation in the comments. I always love reading what you guys have to say and an artbook essentially lives off of your input ^-^