Commenting here since art fight is over. I love this picture so gosh darn much! I love it when I get art that has more emotion to it, where the character doesn't always have a huge smile and staring at the viewer. Not that that art is bad, but pieces like this are more rare I find. I really feel that tiredness displayed in this piece, you captured it perfecting. And the background is gorgeous! Ugh I wish I could hire you to paint my room the way you do backgrounds in art. It's all so charming and full of life. It's so endearing. Thank you so much for this amazing and charming piece. My only regret is not being able to attack back! Maybe I can without art fight needed haha.

Oh forgot to say I also love how you made the piece look older! I never really see that technique and style used!

Hmm, do you mean traditional background + digital character?
Or reduced quality?

As for the traditional backgrounds I do, it's a long and somewhat unique story. The thing is, I wasn't really a digital artist until recently, and traditional art was my only decent option for decades. So I was doing either completely traditional art including background and characters on one piece, or sometimes I drew characters separately but still with ink pen on paper, and then scanned, processed and colored them digitally in Photoshop. My desire for my traditional art to be on the same level as those gorgeous digital drawings of my friends and favorite artists made me study different tricks in Photoshop a lot, actually. That pesky scanner always ruined the colors of my works, but over time I found more and more new ways on how to restore the quality, make my scanned art as neat and close to the original as possible.
So even when I retrained as a digital artist when I finally got the necessary professional tablet, I still knew and remembered all these traditional techniques and tricks well, and now I work in this hybrid technique by my own choice, taking the best of both worlds 😊

Reduced quality is a super easy trick, I'm sure you of all folks already know it xD
But in case anyone else might read this and be curious, I'll note that I'm simply converting the image to jpeg instead of the usual png in Photoshop, and then lowering the quality level to the lowest.
Crazy how in the 2000s all images looked like that by default and we tried our best to raise their quality actually, but 20 years later we are now deliberately reducing it 😂 Nostalgia is a funny thing indeed.

Oh, I'm so glad to know that you were so pleased! Thank you very much for the kind words, that means I did everything right 😊
And I think I understand what you mean about the smiley art. It is always a popular, safe choice, so it's not surprising that people often come to this - including me or you - because it just works. However, we can still sometimes crave variety, and not everyone is ready to do the work that may not be guaranteed to be approved by the receiver if it's too sad, or suggestive, or whatever. During this Art Fight tho, I decided to make some of my attacks more diverse for this very reason (after doing some research on the characters I was drawing to make sure my ideas would still work for them). And now I don’t regret it, because it seems like everyone was happy 💖

But yeah, I feel a bit sad that I didn't manage to finish this piece earlier too. I was really planning to get it done sooner - I had that traditional background prepped separately over a week ago. But then life happened... and then I found myself finishing a whole bunch of drawings for Art Fight, including this one, at the last moment while trying to still maintain quality as best as I could. So at this point, I'm just happy I got it done before the event ended altogether at all 😂
So don't be too upset about this turn of events either, Sunday! After all, I knew from the start that there was no guarantee of getting a revenge due to various possible reasons, and so I just worked on this art for nothing but the very idea (which I wouldn't do if I didn't sincerely want to). Of course, if you still wish to make something in return just as a gift, I can't really stop you 😅 But if it will be more comfortable for you to tie it to Art Fight still - I think I may join the event next year from day one. This year I just had some tasks which kinda prevented me from joining in the first half of the month, but next one should be easier in this regard.