Fits and starts

Rieu and Kayem, aristocratic hobgoblins, leaving the northern city of Port Verge in early morning snowfall, after a weeks-long bloody civil war ravaged the port and destabilized the area. They're each casually carrying their own very heavy, decorated trunks packed with travel clothing and valuables.

This is a revised version of a previous drawing of the two noble hobgoblins I had done a couple of years ago. It was fine but could be better. Having watched fashion history on YT and IG, I realized the two nobles would have much better attire than I had given them originally. Also, I need more active poses with my character portraits, so I have them walking along a street, talking casually to each other as they shoulder their very heavy trunks, paying no attention to the blood spilled on the cobblestones which is being covered up the snow.

Rieu has a reddish-brown outfit with flaring garments, gold decorations, and a fur lined hat and overcoat, while Kayem favors a sleek lavender suit with flaring bell-bottom pants, a voluminous purple-gray cloak, silver chains and rings, and pale yellow accents.

The Soundeater, a demon toad

A farewell card for a coworker.

In a move of remarkable foresight, a coworker left work this week, moving on to greener pastures. They're a great person, I'll miss them considerably, so I made a pop-up farewell card for their last day.

The card turned out remarkably well - I made several draft versions and tested out folding techniques before committing to the final copy. (Notes to my later self: (1) fold the paper both ways to reduce crinkling on the heaviest folds and corners; (2) make sure there's extra paper to accommodate the bulk of a fold; (3) draw before folding. Once folded, the paper is too bumpy and affects the line quality).

Chuffed as I was with the card, it was rather small and plain on its own. Feeling that was just not good enough, I decided at the 11th hour to make a soft cover enclosure with an inside pocket to hold the card. All the lessons that a co-worker whose super skilled at paper craft and book making actually paid off. The papers were lovely textured remnants that I'd had been saving for some occasion, and it's all held together with lots of double-stick tape. Glue would have taken too long to dry and warped/distorted the paper. Despite being an unplanned effort, the enclosure came out halfway decent!

Redid the rust drake (top) to look actually rusty and more drake like. No one knows much about them, but it's thought they're actually iron drakes that suffered some ferric affliction or decaying curse that causes them to rust. They look like a jumble of rusting metal pieces until they move. One of their attacks is to spray opponents with rusty shrapnel that does damage and causes tetanus.

This is patterned off the Forgotten Realms version of drakes, which lack wings. This does have metal sheeting between its fore and back legs, because I thought that would be cool.

Brownie graveyard with yogurt-covered pretzel skeletons.