Character design, mostly with fur on it
Reference sheets, portraits and the occasional full scene. Ten years of drawing, four of doing it for other people.
Commissions closed — next batch opens in January
Most of what I do reduces to three problems, solved in the same order every time. Does the silhouette read at thumbnail size. Does the value structure hold when you squint. Does the colour say anything, or is it just accurate.
Everything after that — rendering, texture, fur — is finishing work. If the first three are wrong, no amount of rendering saves the piece. I have spent enough weekends proving that to myself to stop arguing with it.
Working method
Krita for everything. Occasionally Blender, to block out a pose I cannot get from imagination before drawing over it — which is less often than it used to be, and I am not sure whether that is progress or just narrower ambition.
Turnaround runs two to four weeks depending on queue depth. Progress goes out at sketch, line and flat stages rather than silence until delivery. The sketch stage carries two rounds of changes, because that is the cheap point to change your mind and every stage after it gets progressively more expensive.
Personal use of the finished piece is yours outright. Commercial licensing is separate and negotiated per case. Training machine learning models on the work is not permitted under any licence — that clause is in the terms and it is not negotiable.
Notes
I keep working notes on the parts I keep getting wrong. They started as reminders to myself and stayed that way; if they are useful to anyone else, that is a side effect rather than the point.
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Silhouette before anything else
Why the first hour goes on a shape nobody will see, and the two-second test that decides whether the drawing continues.
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Fur is a value problem
Four years of drawing individual hairs, and the thing that finally made fur read was cutting the brush size in half.
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On charging properly
Undercharging is not humility. It is a slow way to stop drawing.