EDIT: the more I stared at the size/shape of the snout, the more it bugged me, so I fixed it :p

Eight years... aside from the silly little animated icon I did recently, it's been eight years since I've done any digital art. I don't exactly count that icon; it was purposefully low-grade to learn some of the basics of Krita. In fact, this piece was also from my attempts at learning the new art program, and rubbing off the rust from my art skills.

There are a lot of little things that bug me about this, even considering it was just supposed to be a quick study. But I'm happy with it for only one reason: it doesn't look like complete garbage. I was genuinely afraid that I wouldn't be able to do anything worth a damn, art-wise, after abandoning those skills for so long.

While this is still a far cry from what I used to be able to do (there's a lot more practice that I'm going to have to do over the next few months to polish and re-hone my skills), it actually didn't take that long to go from "WTF is this?!" to "Oh, this isn't that bad..." Just the course of a day. Critically analyzing what's wrong, why, and digging deeply into "Why does this look wrong?" So I learned (and re-learned) a lot of things from this one piece, and that's encouraging to me. It means that returning to art isn't hopeless at all :D

And yes, this Zethara, from the Animal Condoms story. I'm not entirely certain I'm satisfied with the anatomy (shorter snout, maybe?), but it's just to help add a more solid visualization/visual-aid for the character.

Also, I found it fucking hilarious that the bright red I was using for highlights just happened to be "Lust." Seriously, I laughed my ass off! What an appropriate coincidence! ROFL! That's an actual color, you can go look it up! I found that out by looking up the hex value here: http://www.335u.net/ It works by punching in a hexadecimal color. Then, it will find the actual named color which most closely matches the value you entered. In my case, I entered the value E62021. As it so happens, "Lust" is a value of E62020, so it's practically identical XD

EDIT: there's a reason why I'm picky about the names of colors. It bugs me when I'm reading a story, and they describe how something looks in the most irritatingly vague way possible. "It's red." yeah, you don't say? What kind of red? Fresh-meat red, or what? "It's grey." REALLY?! Like, neutral grey? Concrete? Wet steel? Cold and sky-less? Even if you want to be lazy with the description, at least give a more specific color! That way, we know what to use when/if we draw fanart :3

Krita's awesome, by the way. Completely free, and native to Linux (it has ported versions for other OS's, but it runs best on its native environment). It works very similarly to photoshop, but actually has a bunch of extra features PS doesn't. Plus, it's free. There's also quite an active community around it, and it's in active development, so there's always new features, fixes, and improvements being made. Did I mention it's free?