#monochromemarch

I wanted to get a bit cute with this one, despite my tremendous fear of ghosts. It is not that I believe in them, it is that if they are real then the implications that come from it will break me.

I remember my first all-nighter as a kid watching Nicktoons on the little tv my parents put in my room circa 2006-2007. I remember watching a marathon of Corneil & Bernie, Kaput & Zosky, Aaahh!!! Real Monsters and the likes. Those shows still remind me of that night in vivid detail.

I actually wound up having a nose bleed around 2 or 3 in the morning or so and woke up my mom and dad to help me because it was the only thing I really knew to do. Imagine your kid waking you up in the middle of the night covered in blood! That must've scared the hell out of them. After I got cleaned up, I went back to my room and kept watching tv despite my parents' advice. When dawn came, they were less than thrilled to see me still awake.

Nowadays I am used to handling all-nighters, sometimes even managing to go into "all-dayers" depending on what I have planned (a little behind the scenes, I am writing this at 4am).

A town being attacked and a lone fella on his horse being the only ones traveling along the path - it'd be stupid to plunge in there without considering the risk... but sometimes you gotta do something stupid if it could even save one person.

A return of the mysterious stranger from Day 35, going from a journey through a flooding mountain pass to now a burning countryside. This guy just seems to bring misfortune along his way, but surely he means well.

"Shhh ... h ... h ... you have to keep it a secret..." The voice whispered, its tone gently laying each word as though it were a comforting blanket.

When I was younger I had a major fear of the dark, it felt like within it was this looming presence waiting for the first chance it could to latch onto me, hoping I would free it from the dark into the world at large.

Sometimes I'd feel this same sort of presence late at night looming at the edge of a lit room, just watching curiously from behind or from the corner of my eye. No face, no body, just a presence of something desperate for acknowledgement and - if possible - an opportunity.

A boogeyman, a haunt, some type of monstrous imaginary friend without form - who knows. Scary as hell to experience though, which is why I can't sleep with doors open at night.

I am going to go buckwild with these tags.

But anyway- I worked on my tablet some more with this and originally was going to do a more sci-fi look to things and try emulating a style akin to my prior work with day 39 (effervescent) but eventually realized it wasn't turning out quite like I'd hoped - especially under a restricted palette of pink colors.

Part of the fun for this month is thinking how I want a picture to look and whether it'd fit with the color I am working on as well. Some of these I have a very set direction for it, and others I try making it up as it goes.

Trauma lingers in the background, waiting to remind you of its presence when you least expect it. When things get particularly quiet, that is when it strikes the hardest and I find myself physically recoiling from the thought.

Through that trauma comes fear. Fear of commitment, fear of vulnerability, fear of perception - and it leads to very dark places. I have many fears and while some are 'matter of fact', like ghosts, I do share the common fears of growing old, never finding 'the one', or sharing some of my biggest mistakes and how badly they affect me and in what ways. Worst of all, the fear it will happen again.

Without warning she thrust the blade deep within his chest, wrenching it through the sternum in search of her bounty as he was overwhelmed with shock. He was dead within seconds and without a moment of hesitation she knelt down and cracked his ribs apart.

Finally seeing the pound of flesh she needed, she cut it from him and left his still twitching corpse behind. Standing bare before her patron, she offered the heart - the life - of her mentor in exchange for her darkest desire.

This one was really fun and I gotta say - working on MS Paint on Windows 11 is night and day compared to Windows 10. They've got an ability to turn down the opacity for the pencil and layers- LAYERS! Though I wish the layers could also have their opacity adjusted on their own.

If you take a closer look at the pic, too, I am actually really happy with all the little details I put into this one. That said, I didn't use a reference for the body, so I don't know for certain whether the lighting is accurate.

I even managed to practice some of the magic effects surrounding the pillar of magic with the help of @souperluminal's light tutorial here!

Slight tangent, but I tapirs for sure look like they've had a long day in any photo I've seen of them. They're perpetually coming back from work.

But anyway, the story behind this drawing is that I was taking a photo of my parents' cat, Fireball. Getting up close while he slept, I switched the phone camera on and took a quick pic. Well, two of them.

I say that because my camera faced the wrong way at the start and I got a huge honkin' picture of my schnoz which inspired the pic (not included).

But I wanted to approach this piece with a different style, because I like jumping around in my approach. Some of these get close to the reference material while others are pure digital or pixel art. A few are fanart while others are just things I make up on the spot or characters that progressively manifest of the course of the month/drawing with questionable degrees of returnability (here's looking at you, Goose).