Could we with ink the ocean fill,
And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade,
To write the love of God above,
Would drain the ocean dry.
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky.
So I just came on here, glanced over at my sidebar, and was like, “Wait a second...that’s my...Ah!!”
I have no idea who did this, but thank you SO much for promoting my Fire Emblem piece! It was a huge surprise and so sweet of you – I really appreciate it! Feel free to let me know who you are so I can thank you personally, but if you’re going anonymous then I really hope you see this. This means a lot to me! Thanks again!! ^_^
Now that my Fire Emblem challenge is over, I wanted to feature my wonderful entrants and their artwork!
Taking first place was Wakusei Aoshi with this gorgeous picture of Artur and Pelleas:
Taking second was superstarpanou’s super-cute painting of Kent, Lyn, and herself as the Tactician:
Third went to moonlit dream for her excellent portrayal of Franz:
And I wish I could’ve done ties or placed this one somehow too, because it’s simply beautiful – SnowP’s portrait of Aira:
Thanks again to my entrants! You have no idea how hard you made it for me to pick winners XD Seriously though I was very glad for your interest in my first challange. It was a lot of fun to host! And now I get to have all kinds of fun drawing your prizes 
I'll try not to take too long!
Hello again!
My buddy LucCalar mentioned that he would like to see some of the process that I go through for my digital artwork, so I thought I’d put an entry together showing some of my sketches vs. the finished product.
1 – “Respite”
This is probably my best example as I happened to scan a version of it early on before I had detailed anything but the faces. This is also very typical of the process I go through.
I almost always start with a pencil drawing, starting with a rough sketch with some skeletal elements (kind of light here, sorry), then building on top of that and erasing to get a more complete pencil drawing. Then I use my tablet and Photoshop CS5 to draw the digital lineart over top of my pencil drawing (on a different layer, of course). Lastly here I added base colors. Then lots of shading later we have…
The finished picture! Note this is an older one so the lines are a bit thicker than I usually make them now. Also most of the background was just added as I went along.
2 – “Dance with Me”
This one is similar to the first one, but I wanted to show it because it’s a case where I started with a much rougher pencil sketch and filled in most of the details digitally.
Here’s my original sketch and then a modification of Rennac’s arm I added in Photoshop because I didn’t like the original placement.
And then the final!
3 – “Because I Love Owls”
I don’t believe this one ever made it to TheO...it was just a quick picture I made for an ID on DeviantArt a while back. But it’s a rare case where I did everything digitally, no pencil involved, so I thought I’d show it. I usually avoid this method because I’ve found that I have a harder time getting anatomy right for some reason when I draw straight through my tablet, but this one turned out alright.
As you can see, my tablet sketching is VERY messy!
4 – “Dark Link”
Lastly I wanted to show a piece where I just colored directly underneath one of my pencil drawings in Photoshop. This is the same sort of thing I did for the drawings of Felix, Arcanus, Midna, Rath, and Seth in my portfolio.
Here’s my original pencil drawing and then the finished picture. I set the pencil layer to “multiply” and then painted underneath it. In this case, I also duplicated the pencil layer to make it darker.
And that’s it! Thanks for reading, and I hope this was enjoyable. Feel free to ask questions if you have any ^-^
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