sphynx7

Hello everyone! Thank you so much for the interest over my discounted commission window. I am now officially closing them! If you have contacted me before regarding a slot, worry not, you will still be charged the discounted price. However, anyone contacting me from now on will have to pay my regular commission prices.

I will still be taking commissions if asked, and the funds will still be going to charity, I have no plans to end donating as of now.

The Keep's most valiant heart, its little garden maid.

I'm honored, thank you anon!

I haven't actively looked at TES artists in a while so a lot of my recommendations are dated and/or people who simply don't post anymore. That being said, here's some recommendations.

ON TUMBLR

@pastwiska has been for years one of my favorite artists in the fandom with her faithful designs and elegant but action packed art style, and is currently working on hand animated shorts

@igorlevchenko-blog does complex portraits mostly of Morrowind scenes, inspired by various traditional painting styles

@icicleteeth did a whole series of TES illustration for her fanfiction that take inspiration from Morrowind's temple artwork but in her unique and lovely art style, and has her own stories and character designs

@foulserpent has moved blogs, but this one has a great archive of their OC art featuring lovely designs

my biggest OC design reference but unfortunately inactive for years is @duddyruck (and her older blog @owligator where most TES art is found)

@arcturite is an old friend with some sick new takes on designing gods among many others

@al-rudikov hasn't posted in a long time but made a lot of stunning fanart years ago

OFF TUMBLR

I'm sad to say she seems to have privated her gallery since the last time I checked but nadmoremtumana is an old favorite who did superb watercolors. You can still find a lot of stuff by looking up her username online through reposts.

@radishez-archive archives the art of a long deleted user I was a huge fan of (and mutuals with back in the day too, so you might see my posts there) who did really complex, colorful and trippy renditions of lore figures and their own takes on cultural practices.

Pulcharmsolis makes incredible armor mods with custom designs that are some of the coolest takes on TES cultures I've ever seen

Any concept art from the Tamriel Rebuilt and Project Tamriel mods. Their Art of Hammerfell book was particularly influential to me. She doesn't have a page I can link but there is a lovely modeler who goes by LilianaUnfolded who's responsible for some of my favorite assets for PT, shoutout to her!

popobawa does some really good armor and gear design with my shared passion for bronze age and neolithic weirdness

ashuldur is mostly in the Souls zone right now but are a Beyond Skyrim CA like me and we share so many design sensibilities

There's a loss of control that comes with sharing anything on the internet. Once you've posted an image (this is also true for other file types, but especially so with images) you can't control what people do with it or where it ends up. People can and will download and repost your pics, and scrapers will add your pics to offsite databases to appear in search results (& nowadays in databases for generative AI, although I care less about those).

In 2020, I published a little book I wrote for the Beyond Skyrim project, which was an illustrated guide to the art direction choices my team holds to depict the Khajiit. It's called "Designing for Khajiit" and contains a bunch of stuff that clearly marks it as the product of a modding team. It was published as a PDF, hosted on itch.io and on a private GDrive link, as well as some image uploads here, but as a whole, I never published the individual drawings included in it. Regardless, the individual images were somehow saved and reposted on Pinterest stripped of context, where one of my amused BS:E concept artists found the reposts and sent them to me. The comments are full of people saying my advice is bullshit and that I am no one to judge how people should or should not design fantasy stuff. My book doesn't tell people what they should draw or not just like that, it's a style guide for a production, context that vanished. That's like saying on a Disney movie character sheet that they're rude for telling people how to draw Ariel. I don't care about people "stealing" my art style or my characters but I do care about people decontextualizing my ideas. The stories I write for myself heavily feature complex made up worlds I daydream in, some that have existed since before I could read and write. There's no way I could adequately explain their intricaties with art, especially not with art posts reposted out of context on the internet, and that would upset me. There's already something upsetting in posting something so personal online and potential reactions it can gather in the first place.

I am also cautious of online communities. I've been lucky to not be at the tail end of too many witch hunts but people have and probably still will find reasons to be upset at what I post and make up a false idea of who I am behind the posts and try to get them down. It's impossible to not have people misunderstand your stuff when you have over a certain follower count, and getting flamed for people making bad faith assumptions over stories that mean a lot to me and are fully my own would upset me more than on fanart. There's also a great number of fans, bless them, who are categorically unable to understand the shit they read, and unlike some online authors I do not have the patience and zen to politely take on the flanderisation and/or out of left field interpretations of my characters and worlds. I know I'd be a rude bitch in return and I also know that a creator being a rude bitch to their fans sucks for the fans. So, I just dont share things.

It's curious you ask me this because the majority of what I post is fanart (unless you are counting original characters created for existing franchises as original, while I do not)? I do work on original settings, but I do not share them online with the sole exception of my character Richter.

That being said I do have some...? Experience with this through my original characters as well as through worldbuilding headcanon stuff, so I'll answer nonetheless. Warning: there's some not fun parts about this I'll be detailing at the end. I prefer being honest even when stuff sucks.

My number one tip is to post the same thing over and over. As an artist posting on social media, you represent one post among the hundreds someone will be scrolling past. If you can cumulate that split second of visibility on posts of similar content, that will cement an identity in the mind of those scrolling. It can be art style, subject matter, compositions....but by making yourself "The [insert thing] Artist" you will win attention and followers. If I just post an image of an OC people don't know, they won't be curious, but if I post her 15 times they will know her, and with familiarity comes attachement. Once people are familiar with your original work, they'll engage with it, but you need to establish yourself first.

Second tip is to explain stuff. This is especially relevant on Tumblr as it allows you to actually type posts without character limits. When you're presenting a fully original creation, explaining what it is allows people not familiar to understand where you're going. Explaining doesn't need to rely on text in a caption: making clear artwork can "present" an idea by itself, like visual development and concept art. For my characters, I do comics where they explain their background, reference sheets for the design where I point out details. I don't dabble in background art much, but for a whole setting, you can draw scenes highlighting what makes your world unique, depictions of details you thought through, etc. Over the years i've followed them i've seen this wonderfully executed by @jayrockin to present a whole cast of characters, unique species, invented worlds...scroll down their blog and see!

Third tip (and this goes for anyone posting, not just original artists): make your art accessible. Nothing makes me want to follow an artist less than a media tab of reaction gifs & only seeing them post not what I followed them from. Each platform has their own way of doing things: IG has pinned posts and story collections, Tumblr has the wonderful tagging system and links, Twitter has the media tab... Make sure that anyone can immediatly see what you wanna show and have access to your whole output in that regard.

Now you might honestly ask: but what if I have a varied portfolio, not a lot of work to show and no dedicated page? Well, yeah, then its tough. There are other fun factors of posting online that mean getting attention is difficult. Generally speaking, people will only care if

your characters are fuckable and/or shippable

you are a one trick pony

you post very often and on their time slot.

If you do not fulfill these three factors, it's hard. Replace the fuckable bit with "mainstream appeal and/or riffing off something existing" for whole settings. My characters with any recognition tend to be all three or rarely two, and i've been posting most of them for over a decade, and most of them are derivative. Yay! The people love slop.

If you do not have online fame as a goal and just want to connect with others, the best way I can recommend is exchanging directly with like-minded users. Most people will be chuffed to be contacted by someone who understands their vibe (provided you talk to them like a normal person). You cannot go "hey, here's my writing, become a fan", but you can ask around for communities where to post. I've had the most rewarding interactions on small Discord servers and in exchanging in replies over my work. Also, please don't befriend strangers for their attention, they'll know. This 1:1 exchange stuff can only mean something if you genuinely love their stuff too. ArtFight can also be a good one, Reddit if you're a worldbuilding yapper, any social media with comments and DMs works otherwise.

For more general sites to post on, I will say I'm really not knowledgeable. Tumblr's great for the asks feature and letting you type full posts with hyperlinks. I find that FYP based sites like Instagram and Twitter suck the most (unless your OCs are the sexy/derivative/10000drawings combo). There's niche community art sites like the furries having FurAffinity but I have no experience on that end. Itch can be great for comic books and art books but there's no proper social aspect on the site itself so most people supplement it with social media presences.

If you really want to present something detailed, like a whole book you're writing or a fully made up world, it's a good idea to have a webpage people can read through. A blog, a wiki, a personal website. Even free stuff like carrd allows to write a significant amount. This will not be looked into by the majority of users but you'll get the attention of the crowd who really cares and is likely to support your work on the long run.

Pellitine's finest ☀️

My Wilds hunter.

Secret Santa drawing of @avpol 's sphynx character! Inspired by vintage illustrations and bronze age artwork.

Yes, and no. I don't have proper links, but I have a method. I don't rely on a specific source, I base my stuff on what I discover as I go and TES lore tidbits :)

When I look for references for fantasy clothing, I like to look at clothing from places in real life that have similar climates. This is because these clothes, especially everyday traditional workwear, are concieved with the living conditions in mind and reflect in that way the environment. Elsweyr is a jungle in the south, and a drier desert region in the north. Regions I like to use as inspirations are: central america, south and south-east asia, central asia, the atacama. This isn't exclusive, of course, one can find lots of inspiration anywhere. To this I like adding a fantasy flair by mixing in a something unrelated to clothes - a pattern I saw somewhere else, a color palette, a single visual element I like. Inspiration can come from anywhere!

Some random examples from my Beyond Skyrim work, mostly

This outfit uses classical period Maya tunic as a base in the simple square shape and apron. It's a good outfit to do heavy work in the sun in. I added a large belt inspired by the stuff weightlifters use to protect their back.

This outfit's coat shape was based on...a coat I saw on a chinese farmer in a random documentary I believe? Fitting for cold desert nights. The hat with corners is inspired by woven hats from the ancient Atacama, and the sarouel pants are of Persian origins but used in a wild array of places nowadays.

Back when Skyrim came out what drew me in was their names. I was at the time mentally workshopping my own original setting and a naming system associated with it's main culture who also functioned using a system of prefixes and suffixes, so it was magical to see that in a big fantasy game.

Nowadays I would say what I like the most is that they have a philosophy of life that feels distinct from the other tamrielic cultures, to this day. The human cultures kinda lack this in their writing. Khajiit have a uniqueness to them in how they relativise things, how they regard magic and religion as an inherent part of life strangers are not privy to, something arcane and complex they live with and intimately understand. I believe Ahzirr Traajijazeri to be an extremist's take on this way of life - not an accurate reflection of how the median khajiit lives, but highlighting a few points to the way of life, points which are taken to extreme heights or lows.

As for my favorite furstock...I have a preference for those that let me blend human and catlike traits the most. My favorite one to draw are the ohmes-raht, which I like to give high, large ears, big round eyes and a hairy but not furred appearance. I say this but I don't have good art of them I'm happy with or that's not super old. This is a lineup I did for Beyond Skyrim. They're all bald here, so it takes away lots of the character.

My other favorite would be tojay and tojay-raht, which I have my own designs for too, most notable in the form of my "main" TES character, Ma'Jahrann! Here's a fullbody painting of her I haven't finished yet :o3

tbh my entire thought behind the symposium is just for an oc. i liked the thought of her getting her certifications and being overjoyed in getting her own certified seal of approval. local cat person jumping up and down in joy for passing her tests

For an Empire to have a complex bureaucracy of certifications feels fitting! This is what I adore in TES, there's a certain messiness to the official lore that invites imagination, it's still the best setting I've ever found to create OCs in because character building for the world just uncovers more little cracks you can explore for stories... Skyrim potion bottles ARE capped, so a seal of approval could be a fantastic addition! Now who's gonna write the lorebook ingame text of scholars of various governments beefing about how each other's ceritification systems suck?

Regarding my Beyond Skyrim ideas...One of the earliest concepts I proposed that was fully mine and not working on something pre-decided by leads were prayer charms. The idea was inspired by two spiritual encounters I had in my life, one of christian ex-votos and the other of buddhist monks selling bracelets. I'm agnostic myself, so I can't claim to understand how much it can mean, but I love to learn about how people make things related to their beliefs and I came up with the following idea.

Basically, the plan was to have our shrines work unlike vanilla's, who you "just" activate. The idea was that to activate a shrine, you needed to place on it a special charm, who would be sold by craftsmen (especially in temples and other religious contexts) or made by hand. In terms of game mechanics, it meant carrying a charm would grant you a boon, and activating a shrine would remove the charm from your inventory and show a different boon. I wanted the inactive/active change in the models to reflect this, by having shrines covered in many different dangling charms left by believers. While the idea hasn't still been implemented nearly a decade later, it did make a few ripples in our art direction as the shrines we designed still incorporate various rings, loops and other anchor points for charms to hang from, or as here even having their unique associated charm design.

This concept art was made by SunaSoldier, who has been the artist who designed most of our shrines! You can find her ArtStation here.

This was my original image for the prayer charms, from 2017/18. They were meant to reflect the handmade nature by incorporating various precious materials and personalized looks into the people who crafted them. Some are more complex, some cheaper, and we have have a reused Septim.

They were eventually modelled and exist ingame as insert clutter. Unfortunately I can't seem to find a name or website for the modeler.

You can also see more designs and models for them by SunaSoldier and Janne (modeler) here.

They've also been integrated as part of various outfit designs, mostly by myself, but not exclusively. An armor set we recently showcased shows two hanging from the belt!

This practical maximalism is at the core of the design principles we have on the team, but the prayer charms, while for now fully decorative (and perhaps forever, who knows...game dev is complex!) is my little idea-baby I'm glad I put out there all these years ago!