What? Fanart?????? That's something I do now????

Apparently folks.. apparently...

Anyways, I drew Xiao!!! And if you don't know who xiao is.... well first of all: my condolences. Second of all, this badass pretty-boy:

So, since I love playing Genshin Impact and just kinda fell in love with all the characters, simply because their designs are... argh.. *chefs kiss*, i couldn't help myself and had to draw my favourite next to Razor and Bennett, since i couldn't get him during his event and im still salty bc of that...

LIKE.. BRO I WASTED OVER 500 WISHES ON YOU AND INSTEAD GOT XINYAN 5 TIMES. AND THEN I GO WISH FOR ZHONGLI (WHO I DON'T EVEN WANT BC I DON'T LIKE GEO CHARACTERS) AND I GET HIM AFTER 11 WISHES. THE FUCK?!

... yeah.... just ignore my rants, let's start with the art instead!

I started off with a rough sketch in my sketchbook. But I hated the sketch, which is why I decided to make a digital piece out of this in the first place. So I imported the thing, started to line the face, absolutely hated it and then continued to abandon the piece since February.

But I returned, deleted what I had so far and started more or less completely new! You know, that's something I found that I do quite a lot recently... dig out old WIPs and completely restart and finish them.... it's actually really satisfying if you ask me so it's def worth a try if you have the feeling that you're stuck ^-^

*yeets linework in chapter*

Since it was just a small sketch in my sketchbook, the pose obviously isn't all that special, and since I kinda recycled the pose for my Esgaron sketch I made there (since I never thought I'd finish this baby) there are indeed quite the amount of similarities haha...

so don't expect anything too flashy, okay? okay.

I then yeeted the flats in there, as well as a fancy background. It was actually quite fun to do, since his colour scheme is all over the place, but still kinda works? I mean... blue, purple, orange, brown, turquoise, green and pink don't sound as though they'd look good on one character.

So I tried to group them into three rough colour families, which I tried to keep rather similar with the hue, obviously changing the..... uh....... shit i forgot the name....... darkness..... of the tones... yeah. Meaning we have a turqoise/green, a pink, yellow/gold/brown/peach/creme, and a purple/blue.... and together with the absolutely insane character design it does just somehow look cohesive.

Welp here's the flats:

I then continued with the shading, experimenting a bit with textures in the skin, since I am indeed sick of my style being bound to have freckles, in order for the skin to look more natural and not too "digital" if ya know what i mean.

And i think I figured stuff out pretty darn well!

I also had a lot of fun with his tattoo, since I fancied making it a bit glowier and more magical than in his original design ^-^

Don't really have all that much to say tbh.... after finishing up his trousers and everything from the waist downwards, I decided to make the highlights in his hair a bit brighter, since the shading made them a bit less noticeable.

I also got to experiment with shading pearls in cell shading, which is something I've never tried before and am totally blown away by xD
You'll probably be seeing a lot more pearly in my character designs from now on >w<

Overall I did indeed loose my motivation a bit, the longer I worked on this piece. It may be because it was so old, and if I would've started from scratch I would've chosen a way better pose, or the fact that the shading didn't go like I wanted it to.... yeah i definetely added too many highlights at times...... but we will just ignore that...

Also tried out something new with the metal and I think that went really well!

So yeah.. that's all I got for now! Apologies for the lack of uploads, I've been feeling a bit down lately and not in the mood to talk so much about my drawings, so.... been chiseling away at some chapters for a bit, never really finishing anything >w<

Hope you like Xiao tho, since I definetely plan on drawing more characters from the game, and even am working on my own little OC for the fandom atm ^-^" (gonne be pyro polearm dude from shneznaya, who was raised in liyue... already having a lot of fun figuring out design and backstory rgvpejalshf)

>>cuddles you and gives you tea, biscuits and a blanket<<

Until next time, i hope you have a lovely day/night/existence and take care of yourselves!