Full body, full-colour illustration commission for sahlor_ (on Twitter) featuring Tiso & God Tam

Full body, full-colour illustration commission for sahlor_ (on Twitter) featuring Tiso & God Tamer facing off against a dangerous beast in the Colosseum of Fools! Worry not, they do manage to defeat the beast, & then take good care of each other! God Tamer does most of the aftercare, though, since Tiso sustained far more injuries than she did lol.I even have a (badly) written thing involving said aftercare, & who knows, maybe I’ll draw it sometime~ Thank you again so much for commissioning me, it was fun and challenging!Commission info: lrstudio.tumblr.com/post/183548269032 Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/leaphyI want to talk at length about this commission and what went into finishing it so if you’re curious about that, it’ll be under the cut!So, this commission was originally going to pretty simple, just Tiso and God Tamer, being pelted by a barrage of infection, against the usual white bg with a circle frame, like so: but the more I worked on it, the more I wanted to add to it, and this desire was only fueled by a snippet of context my client provided to me after I showed him the 1st rough draft. I was inspired to take it much further than I planned but I didn’t know if it was something he’d be down for, since it would make the commission that much more expensive and time-consumingLater, in a tweet, I lamented about wanting to to more with a commission than what I was initially paid to do, and he saw it and somehow caught on and approached me about it. after some discussion, the commission was upgraded to include a background, and audience members. I added the fools later on because the arena looked empty otherwise.It would have also included the beast but the composition didn’t allow it so it stayed out of frame. and for anyone curious about what looks like, my client wanted it to be this nightmarish hell-beast, also known asThe Primal Aspid Boss(Source)With a background now, a lot of redrawing/redrafting took place. I even ended up redrawing Tiso as well because by the time I had finished with all the inking, my style of drawing him had changed a bit and his outdated look was driving me nuts lolSo, what would have taken me a month to complete, ended up taking me about 7-9 months of work on/off. Mostly due to the p*ndemic making life much more hectic & stressful to really focus on art, plus experiencing frequent burnout, coupled with even more stress. On top of that, the commission involved a very large, very detailed background, with multiple characters, and I wasn’t (and am still not) very confident when it comes to drawing both of those things (much less at the same time) but I wanted to take on the challenge of drawing my two faves in an actual setting, and not just an empty voidBut lets be real, it was mostly the p*andemic That said, I made good progress on it but the burnout got really bad just before I started inking, so in an attempt to fight it off, I decided to start streaming the rest of the commission. Turns out, having an audience to keep me company ended up giving me the much needed push to get through the tedious parts of the inking stage i.e. inking every bit of cobblestone floor and anyone who tuned in to watch my streaming that part can tell you just how tedious it was lolI managed to get to the point of laying down flats before I took a break from streaming, and ended up finishing the rest of it offline because as helpful as it was to stream my work, it was also very distracting and I really needed to focus on the colouring part.There was also the added hassle of Paint Tool Sai’s memory limitations making it so that I had to separate the file into 2 (foreground and background) and constantly switch between them. So yea, that was essentially the process of this commission, on and off, over the course of almost a year!There was many a time when I felt that I bit off more than I could chew, and even contemplated giving up and refunding my client but I just couldn’t bring myself to do that, I had to keep trying. And despite the many hiccups, delays, and uncertainty I faced, I’m really damn proud of how this commission turned out!This was one hell of a project to work on, and I honestly can’t thank my client enough for being so patient and so understanding throughout it all, it’s really more than I ever expected him to put up with but he did. The man’s a saint, I tell you, and I’m so glad to have worked with him.I don’t know that I’ll ever take on such a big commission again in the future, but if I do, I feel a bit more prepared. -- source link
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