I want to undo the division of day and night.

"Stay sharp even when everything looks blurred."

Recently, I started playing Disco Elysium again, and while I was at it, I decided to take another look through the game's art book. So, this piece is the result.

The in-game artwork by Aleksander Rostov is unbelievably good, and I don't think I need to explain how much life it breathes into the game. Without that artwork, my experience with the game wouldn't have been half as enjoyable I think.

At some point while I was working on something else, I suddenly got the urge to paint. Why Manhattan Cafe again? Well, for one, I simply like her. Also, in my previous work, I was pretty happy with how her "friend" turned out, but I wasn't satisfied with Cafe herself. This time I tried to fix that. The result is that I think Cafe came out much better, but now her friend ended up looking worse than before… -_-…

In my defense, I wanted to try depicting it in a different way instead of just making it look like a shadow with two eyeballs. But, well… I kind of messed that one up, even if by the end I tried doing that.

As you can probably tell, it's pretty obvious what inspired this piece. I should clarify, though, that this isn't a direct study, nor was I trying to imitate Aleksander's art style while. I don't possess even the talent needed to create something as good as what he does, for now… In other words, I'm fully aware that this painting is rough around the edges. What I did try to emulate was the intent behind it, the idea that a portrait should communicate something about the character. Did I succeed? I'll leave that for you to decide.

Mostly, though, I wanted to talk about how much fun I had painting a portrait. I love painting landscapes too, but they take so much time… I wouldn't exactly call myself a fast painter, but portraits are still much quicker for me. This one ended up taking longer than it should have, though, because the heat kept me away from it for about a week. It isn't even summer yet, but I couldn't stand sitting in front of my computer or staying in my room for long periods of time :'(.

Even so, I think I'd like to paint more portraits in between larger, more time-consuming projects.

I also uploaded the painting process to YouTube (https://youtu.be/enNgBBAqzqc). To be honest, I'm not particularly fond of showing my process. I work on a huge canvas, which doesn't always make for the most exciting viewing experience, and I don't really feel like I have anything worth teaching. Showing only the painting itself without all the time spent putting down the brush, taking breaks between sessions, checking references in a browser, fiddling with the color wheel, and so on, doesn't really convey even half of what the process is actually like. But I'm not meticulous enough to record, narrate, and explain every little thing I do, so it is what it is.

That said, it was a good opportunity to test a bunch of brushes I'd been collecting. I think I have one or two more recordings of older works lying around somewhere, so if I can be bothered digging them up, I might upload those eventually as well.

Other than that, I'm still working on both art and writing. The problem is that every time I finish writing one word, I feel compelled to go back and change two others, so it'll probably be quite a while before I have anything substantial to share about my novel.

As for the next big illustration I have planned, it'll be something about 黃金旅程. I'll leave it at that.