I haven't had much time for drawing, due to work life, and the fact that I was away this weekend, but I managed to get something worth uploading as a deviation in, which was a cartoonish, nice departure from establishing references of this character (those poses, while necessary, are so freaking boring). Here is an updated version of

https://www.furaffinity.net/view/36853055/

I just want to pat him on his head.

For this drawing, I actually experimented a little, and used a different brush, Krita's hard pencil. I kind of like the effect, and think that it makes the linework feel more organic. Unfortunately, it also makes it more difficult to fill large areas with the paintbucket (though, to remedy this, I might just have to change the paintbucket's settings).

I am still experimenting with this character...

One thing I do want to say is that when you have hues that are entirely white, or entirely black, such as on this character, it frustrates your ability to add highlights, or shading, respectively, since those areas represent that brightest and darkest colors the monitor is able to produce. What I do, in that case, is to make such areas off-white, or off-black, but, in turn, that can throw everything else off. In this case, when I make Aether's fur off-white, it makes it too close to the robe's silvery color in hue, so that means I have to update the robe's color, and make it darker.

There is another issue with shading this character, which has frustrated me, which is that, since he glows, most of the time, that creates a sort of constant back-lighting effect on him. And while backlighting is my favorite type of shading, it can get kind of boring to have it on him all the time. Of course, he is not the only light source, and so, in addition to that backlighting, depending on other lighting sources, he would have other kinds of shading applied to him. But that means that this character always has complex shading on him (except when he is not glowing). This is just another reason I have such difficulty with this character.


For this piece, I wanted to provide both the backlighting, and directional shading, but it proved to be too involved for this particular iteration of this drawing. In the future, I was thinking of adding some contextual background information, just to make things more interesting, and amusing, and so that might be the place for that.