The last few months I’ve been working on the 2018 Wintersday Zine for the GW2 Collective. It’s been a big learning experience working with some amazing creatives who love Guild Wars 2 as much as I do. The feedback loops provided have pushed me to do some artwork that has been a little outside of my comfort zone. It’s made me realise I need to get back into doing dynamic poses/ sketching more.

I’ve struggled with art for the last couple of years. Health has played a big part, stealing energy and enthusiasm for anything beyond survival mode. I probably burnt out a little bit, I tried forcing myself to do more traditional work and became pretty unhappy with things I was producing.

But, I feel like I’m slowly making my way back to a happy place with art. I moved around my workspace a little so that my Wacom Cintiq is the primary monitor, and got an iPad pro so I could do work away from the computer. My day job is at a computer (I’m currently doing JavaScript fullstack development so I live in front of a PC). I’ve been able to knock the last 2 portraits out fairly quickly, and since the beginning of September have created 3 complete illustrations for the Zine.

Onto the art…

Wintersday Zine preview

This is a small preview from one of the 3 pieces that I’m collaborating on for a short story by writer J.Daggs for the 2018 Wintersday zine, Journeys. I can’t tell you much about the story because that would spoil things but if you play GW2 you may be able to guess something about her from her armour. 

Pre-orders are available until the 15th of November (there are some great perks and bundles available) and you can order yours here: https://gw2collective.bigcartel.com  . 

Pre-order information can be found here . Proceeds go to charity. This is officially sponsored by @guildwars2​ .  More previews by the group can be seen at @wintersdayzine, with the collective account at @gw2collective. They’re also on twitter, and there is an active discord group.

Commissions

I released this a little while ago. It’s a companion piece for Mira, with the character Tish from Paul Grover’s novel Ark of Souls . I got to read the second edition of the novel which is going through some editing but I thoroughly enjoyed it (it’s always interesting to read a book you’ve painted characters for after you’ve done the paintings). It’s character driven scifi, with a space opera feel. There is the ever present threat of space as the great danger, where people are still people with politics, the cost of war, and relationships between friends, family and loved ones, and survival of the fittest in harsh unfriendly environments. I’ll do a shout out when the new edition is released as I don’t know the differences between the first and second edition.