Bit of a personal brain cleansing art. Ori's eyes are so happy shaped that it's hard to make them look anything else. Like dead or soulless. This isn't exactly what I had in mind when I started to draw but it is creepy, I think. I've tried to draw stuff around this idea before, with masks etc, that would convey how little it actually means when he smiles. Or meant. The whole point of my lore is to help this broken boy. Never been very successful with those so I think this is the first one I've finished, since it was so simple and fast to do. And I got properly inspired by some lyrics from Salvador Sobral:

“I drew a line to feel safe
It’s a place no one can break in
Where the beginning meets the end
A place the lonely understand
Where no one hurts you
‘Cause no one cares”

He's very good at acting, wearing a careless and loose personality to keep others from getting too close. He also doesn't like thinking about things too much, especially his own life, so what is behind that act is often... nothing. Or not nothing, but a personality so heavily stomped on to stay hidden that it very well could be. It really took an absolutely unexpected event, something that he was completely unprepared for, like falling in love with his "primary antagonist" (biggest pain in the ass) Eudoxia, to make that smile falter and get the true personality out. No one could have seen that coming (and that's why I had to do it)

But yeah, I still draw the sad past boy from time to time. He's therapy for me, the one character who has inherited probably the lion's share of my own issues, poor child -_-