Tiny Local Cryptid

If you're wondering how I've been, busy is the best answer I've got! Been focused on work and volunteering at the carousel.

Goal this year to get making art again!

This piece is for a big yearly fundraiser at the nonprofit I work for, The Clay Studio of Missoula. It's a wonderful arts space providing affordable access and education to ceramics! We've got a great residency program for ceramists out there! Anyone can bid on small works online if you're cool paying a shipping fee. Please consider checking everything out and placing some bids to help us do what we do!

I'm not going to link in case it gets this post swallowed, but look up Potsketch 2026 if you want to check it out! The website is through GiveSmart! Bidding starts March 20!

Not much context because I didn't get any before shots, but here's a photo of the horse I touched up that got me all tangled in a new hobby!

I'm still fighting depression, so maybe it's better not to have the responsibility of doing contest prizes on my plate right now.

If Pod E101 hadn't been a reader POV story we would've gotten Ciprean here, who is still a very snarky fun OC in my head who Astrophel keeps around a good long while. He has a habit of trying to make arguments with Astro, who is good at accidentally shutting them down on the basis of how cute and naive they are. But he repeatedly prods Cip for arguments anyway because he finds it charming that Cip isn't the slightest bit afraid to speak his mind even after knowing full well how powerful Astrophel is.

It features Astrophel because he repeatedly has been my muse lately when creativity gets hard. He's a living nebula, 1/7 of a black hole that gained sentience and split itself to research the ever-growing universe. Astro was the piece created from this being's heart chakra and is embodied by it: being social, sweet, and naturally in tune with others at his best. After some drama involving the creation of a child that angered his sibling, the defacto leader among them, Astrophel is no longer allowed to spend extended visits at inhabited planets but was never told to stay away from space explorers, so that's how he makes most of his friends and gets in trouble these days. Astrophel is made of celestial dust and can form a massive celestial body that can shift mass and size dramatically or create small avatar-like creations inside of relatively simple environments or on planets/crafts.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/53710357

For the DTIYS, the ask is to try one of the two images above, modified to suit your style, another scene from a short story with Astrophel, "Pod E101" linked above, or another piece featuring Astrophel in-character. I welcome questions if anyone has them.

Entries will be due by June 25th! They should be posted to Tumblr with the tag #clickspringdtiys

First prize will be a fully rendered image of up to a full-body single character or a GT interaction image cropped to composition if that floats your boat.

If there are 3 entrants or more, first runner-up will get a colored single character sketch up to fullbody.

My entry to @puddingforg DTIYS! I wanted to go for a slightly different angle and a few moments in the future of the given scene, which was a lot of fun ❤️

Another Potsketch in my run of tiny rooms! The theme this year is western, so I went with an old saloon! Didn't have quite the gumption to color it this year, but I had a ton of fun playing with copic and prisma markers to make it look like an old tintype.

This is up for auction at www.potsketch2025.givesmart.com