Yay my art drought has been broken... with a kind of vent piece using a character I draw not too often..

Pic comments
I'm so rusty and kinda lazy. I tried to simulate shading by overlaying the lineart/colors with the sketch, which has an interesting and kinda cool effect. I do like the way I drew the face and am kind of working out a new style for it, particularly with canids.

Story behind the pic
I put this in a section at the bottom incase people want to skip over the sad/personal bits. Which most people probably will.

I'm not even sure how to word this...

September has become a bittersweet month for me, because it reminds me of... someone. When I was ten-years-old I joined a Sonic the Hedgehog forum, and met lots of people. One of them was someone who I'm calling SB. When I met SB she was 13 and identified as male (SB is MtF transgender), when I randomly added her on AIM one day around this time of year, because I was new to it and wanted contacts. xD But we talked a lot and became friends.

SB was the first person who encouraged me to explore my gender when I started realizing I was transgender when I was 14, and the first to really accept me as male (even before I had accepted myself as such).

We were in a relationship on-and-off but even when not we were still like siblings to each other. Even after we stopped going on the Sonic forums we still kept in touch through MSN and later Skype, and I just sort of... always assumed she would be around. She disappeared once or twice, but she always came back... and so did I.

But then in May 2013 I got a message from a mutual friend saying that SB said she was leaving the internet. SB had bad anxiety issues and lived in a toxic environment and sort of fell victim to that, I guess. I haven't seen her since... I don't know if she will be back or not.

It's so... strange... because I feel like I don't have a right to miss her. I didn't really talk to her a lot for a while. I didn't know she was declining. Maybe if I had been there for her she would be okay... but likely not because her issues were due to her IRL home issues. I didn't know her IRL but still our relationship effected me. I think she is one of the reasons I am who I am today.

There is a reason I chose Aiden for this picture. Because originally I had created Aiden to befriend a cub character she made back in 2009, but she stopped Rping much and eventually gave said cub character to me. I still use him as part of Aiden's backstory... maybe I will go more into that later, but for now this is really long so I'm going to stop here.