#hmcs moondancer

[insomn-art]

For what feels like the first time, I have enough art from throughout the year to do one of those "one finished piece from each month" deals. Fun stuff!

Details below the cut.

January was some concept art for @astralfrontier ongoing Phase 3 Menagerie continuation stories. This is a very fun character named <deep breath> The Most Illustrious Supernova of the Universe, the Legendary Navigator of the Space-ways, the Right Honorable Quinnar Gentry who is a joy anytime they show up. Very much a foil for Concord, but also a (sometimes) ally.

February is more Phase Three art, this time of the Hand, a stage magician-themed villain who is a part of the Seven Wonders, a world threatening group. I really wanted to give her a look where, if I was to include them in any Sentinels of the Multiverse cards, she wouldn't be confused with any of the four-to-six other stage magician themed characters in the custom community's many decks. Not sure what the appeal is of the stage magician-themed super. I'm sure it's Zatanna's fault.

March is a bit of fun with @solkaras's Valerie and that skimpy meme dress that was floating around at the beginning of the year.

April is the first of several entries' here from my friend Bobbert's HMCS Moondancer environment deck, this one featuring cameo's from my other friend Mist's tokusatsu-inspired characters Alius and Ampere (whom I've also done art for). There's going to be several of these, so I'm going to spread my thoughts out, but for this one I will say that I always love doing cameos and I'm happy Bobbert let me go a bit wild with them in this deck's artwork.

May is when I started gearing up for ArtFight, including drawing new references. I feel like I've always struggled with drawing Niko in a way that I like (I'm not the best artist when it comes to animals) but this year I feel like I definitely made some strides forward in that department.

June is more Moondancer art, this time featuring Clara Cloverfield, whom I did the character design for (and might do some additional art for in the future, we'll see). This was one of the cameos that Bobbert insisted on, so I had some fun exploring the character and figuring out the best way to depict her undercover at the casino.

July a cameo from a pair of the Menagerie kids: Jason Quill and Alycia Chin, with Jason cheating at craps. I struggled a bit to figure out which of the Menagerie crew to cameo (it would have been fun to dress any of them up in fancy clothes) but the obvious conclusion was Jason and Alycia. Their leaning into spy tropes and their history with shady organizations made them a perfect fit for the Moondancer's themes.

August moves us on to the Moondancer's lounge singer, Frankie Bongiovi. They were a fun character to design with Bobbert giving me a bunch of inspirations for the character to draw off of. I also got to try out some new techniques (particularly with Tucker in the background there) that I think worked out well.

September gives us the final piece of Moondancer art, as the deck was released the following month in October. While I had a lot of struggles working on the art for Moondancer (it was the first project I've done at this scale for someone else) by the end I feel like I finally got to a good place working on other peoples' projects and I'm thankful to Bobbert for giving me the opportunity. It really helped me grow as an artist.

October saw me dive back into my comfort zone with this group shot of the Menagerie kids. I've got some big projects in mind for these kids coming up, which I hope to have started before the mid-year.

November was a bit of a cheat. I was running a Sentinel Comics RPG game during this time and spent a lot of time working on that game, so November we have artwork of Fractal from that game. This ended up being a token for her character when she showed up in the final fight the adventure (as a hostage, not a villain). As winter starts to rear its head, my drive to create tends to dwindle.

Finally December brings us a sketch of Ashley and @solkaras' Valerie again, playing off some silly BS we were talking about on Discord during the Christmas-to-New Years period. Given that this was done on 12/29 and I really didn't have anything else to show for December, I really squeaked this one in at the last minute. XD

Anyway, happy New Years. Let's all hope it's not utter dog shit.