My take on the Avian race from Starbound. From the Starbound Wiki:



"Avian culture revolves around the worship of Kluex, the winged god of the Aether. Avians believe they were stripped of their wings as punishment for entering the mortal world and will only regain their wings in the afterlife should they achieve absolution through worship.

. . .

Avian soldiers are trained from birth to be fierce warriors and will protect their temples at any cost. Avian weaponry may look primitive at first glance, but the incorporation of advanced technology makes them particularly formidable."



Starbound is great imagination fuel! I really like the variety of races and their cultural influences. I'm not sure I could even pick a favorite race. So, expect more Starbound, perhaps... I have a couple ideas.



This one took a while. It was an uphill battle but I'm proud of the result. For this I really just wanted to concentrate on creating a strong pose/silhouette. I also took the opportunity to do a little more rendering, which is something I don't usually do. The real challenge of this piece was the perspective, believe it or not. I had the pose down, but I struggled to find the perspective of the body in general (with "ellipses", for example). It was frustrating, to say the least. But, I made it out in the end, and really had some fun with the overpainting.



As a small digression, I find myself experiencing something like "expectations creep". As I improve my technical abilities, I set higher expectations for myself. Now this is not a bad thing necessarily, but it's not a great thing either. My lust for perfection is gonna be the death of me. When I started getting more serious about my art, I had this idea in my mind that as I got better, I'd get faster. This may be true in a micro perspective-- it's faster to visualize things or get a good line down or pick a color or what have you. But in the macro perspective, I'm becoming increasingly ambitious and setting my expectations relatively high, and so the time I'm actually taking to create a piece is actually increasing overall. More time spent on a piece means more focus and more energy. I don't want to burn myself out so quickly, so I guess it's all about finding a balance between quality and quantity. My ability to produce higher quantities is taking a hit from my drive to produce quality, and thus it feels like I'm getting less mileage out of my practice, in a way. I don't know whether this is true or not. But what I do know is that I'm going to try to loosen up a bit and keep going regardless. Art is fun.



Thanks for reading my essay. Now if you don't mind me I'm gonna go play For Honor. That game is a serious threat to my productivity.