Kate by Moonlight (The Lunar Sketchbook)

Some of us hiss. Some of us go non-verbal. Some of us climb the nearest tree and let the entire forest know we are done.

This is for the overstimulated, the dysregulated, the ones who have been told they’re “too much” by people who couldn’t handle a single Tuesday in our nervous system.

Scream on, little guy. We see you.

All rights reserved. Merch available soon.

That’s how this started. A friend asked for something cool. What I delivered was approximately 47 hours of my life, a minor crisis about feather rendering, and one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever made.

Let me walk you through how a “quick commission” becomes a full personality event.

The linework phase is a love language.

Those early sketches, just a jaw and an eye floating in white space, that’s where the piece lives or dies. Get the expression wrong and no amount of color saves you. I knew from the jump this guy needed to look simultaneously capable of eating a car and completely unbothered about it. Heavy lidded. Peaceful chaos energy. A dinosaur who has absolutely nowhere to be and is at complete peace with that.

I spent an embarrassing amount of time on that eye.

Scale texture is meditative until it isn’t.

There is a point in every detailed illustration where you question every choice you’ve ever made. For me it was somewhere around the third pass on the neck scales. I have notes on this. Literally pink handwritten annotations directly on the canvas. “Where I start tomorrow.” Reader, tomorrow was not easier.

The botanical framing nearly ended me.

Feathers and leaves sound simple until you’re building a circular composition that has to feel organic, decorative, and structurally sound all at once. Every element had to earn its place. Every curl, every frond, every spiral. No filler. No lazy shapes.

Color is where it finally becomes itself.

The linework is the skeleton. Color is when it wakes up. Teal into burnt orange into those surprise pops of hot pink in the feathers. The background texture I built from scratch, the splatter, the grid, the darkness that makes the whole thing glow. All of it earned.

I built the background. I always build the background. Wrapped it up and delivered with a bonus profile image for him to use:

camo. chains. flames. home run.

new baseball design on redbubble. hand-drawn with grunge textures, checkered lightning, and mixed-pattern varsity lettering that has no business going this hard for a sport where people eat sunflower seeds competitively.

hand-drawn folk botanical meets tattoo flash. available as stickers, prints, tees, and basically everything else.

i fall in love with fictional characters

i disappear for hours at a time

my emotional stability depends on plot outcomes

and my bank account suffers at bookstores

anyway here’s a cozy little piece for the fellow book gremlins 

found a mirror that shows a castle with the lights still on. someone is home. i’m going.

made a lantern that holds the whole night inside it. the bat knows where he’s going even when i don’t.

Softness has always been misread.

Taken as welcome.

Taken as weakness.

Taken.

Each trailing filament carries memory of hands that reached without asking and of boundaries tested like they were suggestions.

It still glows because it refuses to dim. There is no anger in it, only a single warning:

Come close and learn.

You can admire the light. You can drift alongside it for a while. But the moment you forget yourself, the sting remembers for you.

This piece lives in that tension between invitation and warning. I wanted it to feel beautiful enough to draw you in and self-possessed enough to make you hesitate.

Because some things aren’t meant to be held and they don’t owe you comfort about that.

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