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Description
"...But soon, the flames will fade, and only Dark will remain"

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...Aaand it's done. A big piece of fanart for one of my favourite games of all time, if not my favourite one. The road to eventually finishing it was long and a bit of a bumpy one, so prepare for some very messy ramblings.

I had everything planned out for this drawing in January, then drew all the characters in February/March. Since there is no official art for any of these guys, I had to base everything on only in-game screenshots and concept art (which I guess some could consider to be "official art" but there's actually a world of a difference between the two). Then, after working on that for a month or so, my motivation ran out. I knew I didn't want to just abandon the piece forever because at the time I was very proud of how everything came out. I still am, even though some proportions aren't where I'd like them to be, and the anatomy of the human/"semi-human" characters is not exactly perfect because of the fact that I decided to start properly learning about that a couple months later.
Near the end of August I felt like I was ready to return to this project, and so I tweaked some of the most glaring mistakes in drawings themselves, prepared different colour pallettes for shading/lighting for all of the characters, applied that, added simple, little bits of backgrounds, applied shading and lighting to those, then added some finishing touches, and voila: after 600 layers and having created exactly 50 backup files after making each "significant" change, the picture is finished, and it's only October now.
So yeah, I'm very glad and slightly impressed that I was able to actually come back to this work and take it to the finish line, it's a great personal success for me! Simultaneously, I do feel terrible about the fact that some of the aspects of this pic don't exactly satisfy me - but that's a good thing too, isn't it? One needs to feel this way in order to have motivation to improve further.

That's pretty much all I wanted to say about the process of creating the picture itself. A teeny tiny bit inside of me feels bad about my probably most time-consuming work ever being a piece of fanart but I'm glad it happens to be fanart of Dark Souls in particular because it's just such a great franchise with wonderful lore and an inspiring story of how it came to be in the first place. Happy to be able to pay it some tributes, but I'm also happy to finally be able to start working on some actually new projects, because at this point I've forgotten what starting a new drawing feels like, lol.

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Dark Souls © From Software

Description
"...But soon, the flames will fade, and only Dark will remain"

---

...Aaand it's done. A big piece of fanart for one of my favourite games of all time, if not my favourite one. The road to eventually finishing it was long and a bit of a bumpy one, so prepare for some very messy ramblings.

I had everything planned out for this drawing in January, then drew all the characters in February/March. Since there is no official art for any of these guys, I had to base everything on only in-game screenshots and concept art (which I guess some could consider to be "official art" but there's actually a world of a difference between the two). Then, after working on that for a month or so, my motivation ran out. I knew I didn't want to just abandon the piece forever because at the time I was very proud of how everything came out. I still am, even though some proportions aren't where I'd like them to be, and the anatomy of the human/"semi-human" characters is not exactly perfect because of the fact that I decided to start properly learning about that a couple months later.
Near the end of August I felt like I was ready to return to this project, and so I tweaked some of the most glaring mistakes in drawings themselves, prepared different colour pallettes for shading/lighting for all of the characters, applied that, added simple, little bits of backgrounds, applied shading and lighting to those, then added some finishing touches, and voila: after 600 layers and having created exactly 50 backup files after making each "significant" change, the picture is finished, and it's only October now.
So yeah, I'm very glad and slightly impressed that I was able to actually come back to this work and take it to the finish line, it's a great personal success for me! Simultaneously, I do feel terrible about the fact that some of the aspects of this pic don't exactly satisfy me - but that's a good thing too, isn't it? One needs to feel this way in order to have motivation to improve further.

That's pretty much all I wanted to say about the process of creating the picture itself. A teeny tiny bit inside of me feels bad about my probably most time-consuming work ever being a piece of fanart but I'm glad it happens to be fanart of Dark Souls in particular because it's just such a great franchise with wonderful lore and an inspiring story of how it came to be in the first place. Happy to be able to pay it some tributes, but I'm also happy to finally be able to start working on some actually new projects, because at this point I've forgotten what starting a new drawing feels like, lol.

---

Dark Souls © From Software