y's art blog

As as an aside, I wanted to share some bts stuff...

In the third illustration, I adapted the painting Lady with an Ermine by Leonardo Da Vinci into a niche reference to Meggie and the horned marten, Gwin, from Inkheart by Cornelia Funke. I can probably attribute my love for fantasy back to this book. I'd daydream about being transported into books all the time. Goodness, I still do...

Also, iirc, I posted a wip of the third illustration some time ago but it now has a different color palette. Tbh, one of the reasons I've been sitting on these for quite a while is because I've never felt quite satisfied with the colors. I've been leaning towards more 'naturalistic' color palettes lately but also...

I was not sure who I was doing this for beyond just me pouring back the good energy I felt reading the source material into drawing. Thinking of making and sharing art as my little messages in a bottle I throw into the digital sea helps? Kind of? Hopefully there's another defensive baking reader out there that was thinking about a redeemed Oberon and Spring Green Man lol... May this find you!

After seeing a headline about digitized price tag thingies, a sense of dread tickled me. Huh. Maybe I should pick up some sci-fi books to prepare for tomorrow's world...

Speaking of changes, apprehension, and trying to barter... I'm slowly talking myself into posting on insta again... I don't know why I feel so much angst about posting there. Ok. I know why.

Anyway! Below is a current wip (with extra doodles on top of it) that I'm working on to "commemorate" a middle-grade fantasy book I read a year or so ago. Maybe you can guess what it is??!

I've started my spring break by going through my drives and cleaning up sketches to release into the Internet Wilds. The drawing of Kvothe and Ambrose is from last fall, when I encountered a situation that made me think about professionalism in academia. Maybe professionalism would dampen exciting plot points in school stories, eh?

Anyway, anyway... I've been putting on The Dragonbone Chair audiobook while drawing etc. I was initially reading it in written book form, but I've been experiencing a weird reading slump. Once I reached the 80% mark, my eyes refused to budge. That's when I put on the audiobook, which I don't often do because I find it very difficult to concentrate on them. (To the people who can, including my brother, you amaze me!)

Strangely, I can listen to podcasts and short-form storytelling just fine? Maybe it's just novels and the way descriptions mix in with dialogue that makes my head swim. In this particular case, it helped that I was familiar enough with the book (80% of it!!)... but then I was confronted with the different character name pronunciations and character voices...

Goodbye Pie-rates, you are now (apparently) Pry-rait-tees.

I finally talked myself into finishing and sharing the painting that began the recent slew of LOTR posts. Whatever story I'd first envisioned for this has shifted with each drawing I've done afterwards. Maybe that's what's made me feel self-conscious about sharing it. Besides, I don't know if there's anything I can bring to the table of Éowyn confronting the Witch-King except flowers, a blue sky with puffy white clouds, and designing the Nazgûl to have a toucan-shaped head.