The same gifts that bring freedom and power and quiet serenity can also make one feel tiny, lost, and alone.


...

I'm a Breath of Fire fan.
Beat the first two games & all their alternate endings, and made it all the way to the endboss of the third before a lightning strike across the street killed the power and scrambled my memory card and generally made me rage!kiwi out to the point where all these years later I've never bothered playing BoFIII again.

Part of the fun of the Breath of Fire series are the Windian/Winlandian/bird-people. I love it when flying characters are in games and have meaningful flight abilities in said games (including the ability to not plummet down trap doors), and okay also I've this teensy-tiny-itty-bitty-wee-ickle OBSESSION with wings anyway and the games' artwork was nifty.


Believe it or not, this drawing was over ten years in the making. Started sketching it in 1997 on a scrap of computer paper; got terrified I was going to mess it up; stuck it in my art folder; forgot about it. Rediscovered the sketch in 2000 and cleaned it up a bit, adding the ledge and greenery of her perch and started inking before I again became convinced I was gonna screw it up and stuck it back in my art folder. Unearthed it again in 2003 and finished inked it with uni-balls; began coloring it but got intimidated by the color gradients in the greenery/cliffs and ran away. Then in 2008 I found it tucked into an old sketchbook, pencied in a background, and finished coloring it at Otakon 2009 (as something anime/fantasy to work on in between walk-up commissions). Played around with marker shading over the winter of 2009/10, then lobbed it at  indigoangelcat for additional colored-pencil shading b/c I'm a lazy coward. I'm officially declaring it done at this point, in part b/c the paper's too thin to add paint to - any further tweaking would require redrawing the image (most of my quibbles currently lie with Nina, not the cliffs, though I hope someday to master the art of background haze).

ANYWAYS. It's a neat snapshot of my artistic abilities back in the day, as well as my psychotic need to finish any piece of art I don't sell or set fire to, and it's neat to see just how far coloring technique and skills can elevate a limited sketch. :3


Nina and Breath of Fire are © Capcom

...y'know, they re-released those games for the GBA, and my DS can play GBA games...I should totally pick them up. (Though I hear they redid the artwork...)