Slithering through the tubes of your internets

I realized about a day ago that I uploaded the JPEG preview image instead of the full sized PNG, and I think I got it all replaced and sorted, but some sites (namely Weasyl) seems to be having technical difficulties as some of them still display the JPEG version. The main reason for this journal entry however is that I wanted to give a little context to some stuff.

Firstly, the A Snek In The Woods drawing has been something I’ve wanted to do for 20 years; not that it took that long to make (total time working on it probably topped out around 20 hours), but making a full-body illustration of my fursona has been something I’ve longed to do since I was a teenager. I’ve done busts and shitposty cartoons, but a full rendering always felt out of my skill set. I didn’t make it to start taking commissions or farm engagement, I made it purely for myself. The piece serves as a nice barometer for where my current skill level is with form, layering, colour, and foreshortening, and I’m under no delusions of those skills being anywhere near professional. I’m at best an amateur, but that’s okay.

There are things about it that I’m proud of, and some very obvious flaws.

Good stuff first:

-I’m really happy with the composition, I think I managed to do that thing where your eye wanders around the canvas with a clear yet uncentered focal point.

-The pose and position of the extremities is strong and grounded within the details of the environment

-I think I nailed the markings in a way that illustrates the orientation of each limb.

But of course there are some things I’d like to improve upon:

-The background was extremely rushed and I decided to forgo shading because I didn’t want to shade the whole scene or have the character’s shading contrast too heavily with the more simplistic background.

-I still don’t know what to do with the eyes and my desire to see the finished product made me take a “just finish it and move on,” approach.

-Line weight is dull and my line confidence is shaky for a number of reasons, and I should have just cranked up the stabilization and done a second pass with more dynamic lines.

Overall I’m happy with what I’ve made, but I still have ambitions to do better. At the end of the day, this work is something I made despite of all the shortfalls I’ve had over the past two decades: Years spent compromising on the things I wanted to match the expectations of others, focusing on what I was good at rather than what I wanted to achieve, and fighting through the tremors from years of untreated CPTSD directly related to some of the worst years of my life. Therapy has helped immensely in getting this project not just off the ground, but finished. I’m happy with what I accomplished with this piece, and at the end of the day that’s all I really wanted, to find the joy I knew was buried under layers of trauma. I still have bigger ambitions for my next piece of visual art, but at the end of the day it’s not the whole of what I am anymore than my prior writings define me; I’m a story teller at my core, and sometimes I just wana tell my stores through pretty pictures, comics, and maybe an animation.