#ashlings

"Stickers!"

WIP...

will be part of this print series (unreleased atm):

Waut ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh—

//got too much Ashlings and become a pancake

These are probably my favourite illustrations for the first version of my big fantasy project I mentioned in another post, the one I have started again multiple times. These were drawn a long time ago, so they have a lot of technical details I would do differently, but compared to a lot of other stuff I drew back then, these are still pretty nice. They are actually from a really irrelevant scene that was there just for filler that I illustrated just because it would look good, and I ended up deleting the whole scene later, BUT that scene is also what inspired the music eating creatures of my debut novel, so all in all it turned out very useful for me. Basically, it's a scene where a character is possessed by a demon that needs music to survive, and it needs human bodies to hear it, so it's making this character dance in a bar. Another character figures this out, and joins in to encourage the demon to dance for so long that the other character, who isn't in a very good shape, faints, knocking the demon out as well, giving the others time to figure out how to get rid of it.

This is a page depicting a character's return home, from a comic that was first a series of short stories, then two novels, then half a rewritten novel, then the comic which I drew for a little over one chapter before deciding I still wasn't satisfied with it, and currently I'm making my writing group beta read the old novels, and they love them so much... that I think it's going to be a series of novels again. It is one of my dearest projects, I love the characters on a level that is different from almost all of my other work. I'm not saying it's more, it's just different. They are something a little more unique to me in some way. It's just that back when I started it at 19 my writing skills were not at the level this project required, and because I had written thousands of pages of it and the contrast between my skill level at the beginning and end was so drastic it was particularly difficult to edit. But now, after a decade, I think I am actually finally able to handle a huge series cohesively. So, Ashlings will see the light of day yet.

I suppose it's best described as a fantasy adventure that focuses a lot on the ordinary lives of its not so ordinary protagonists. The epic plot is there too, but it's more of a side effect of the characters being who they are, and the core of the story is magic as an everyday feature, and a "fingerprint", what it has to say about individuals and the world alike. The focus characters are a healer, an alchemist and a mercenary at the brink of adulthood, who have prowess over perspective, and the middle-aged chief of their people, who has perspective over prowess.

It's my meditation on traditional fantasy tropes, and my dialogue with them.