strayberry

Like always, it's inspired by the music I've been listening to. Porter Robinson mostly. The real core of this piece is the background, but it felt empty on its own.

Lighting practice mostly. Someday I want to be able to render objects realistically. Perspective, shading, and lighting don't really come naturally to me, so think of this like my version of drawing a shaded sphere to practice shading.

There's something to be said about liminal spaces like these, and specifically the backrooms being a physical macrocosm of our own inner worlds. Not only are our memories themselves fragmented, distorted, and often slightly wrong, but they can become monsters if we spend too much time staring into them. If you allow the past to consume you, you rob yourself of the future you deserve.

Been replaying Skyward Sword recently, I've always wanted to attempt to capture its aesthetic in my own style, but every time I've struggled to get the feel right.

Life has been tough as of late, struggling to keep the creativity alive.

edit 06.28.2026: after a while i grew dissatisfied with the original color scheme, so i changed them to something i find more appealing, but i don't want to simply erase the original as it was intended, so there's two versions now.

Potentially the last Ylsi for a while. It's a lot of fun using the skill-set I've built making abstract art to edit photos. Most of the time spent is on adjusting dither patterns and touching up details. Not sure how much comes through when you look at it from afar, but there's something rewarding about tweaking each color in the palette and the patterns in the noise. When you finally take a step back and the image pops out at you, there's nothing quite like that feeling.

A lot of time went into getting the background right and hand-drawing highlights for things like the pattern on the jacket. Might just look like a screenshot but it took me 5 hours lol.

An Invincible Summer (05.06.2026)

Ylsi the Blind (04.27.2026)

I struggled a lot with this one. I'm honestly not sure if I'm completely happy with it. I may come back to it later. It started as a simple noisy gradient for use as my wallpaper, but when I looked at it I couldn't help but see stars in the noise.

Edits like these are always so much fun, and they give me the opportunity to use techniques I've learned doing my usual art in different ways. In some ways this feels like going back to my roots, as making edits was the whole reason I learned to do digital art.

I fall in love with the moon sometimes.

(Edited to use the original widescreen render, every time I look at the cropped version it just doesn't feel right.)

Untangling threads until I find the one that holds my psyche together. If I tug on it hard enough, maybe I can unravel every destructive pattern I've ever sewn.

Meditating on some behavior patterns lately

ANGELDUST (03.01.2026)