[ARCHIVE] caudle sketchpage (2019) + blubbery bookstore bat(2018)

    These two pieces from my archives were gifts for my best friend Caudle! He and i are incredibly, incredibly close. He's an absolute rock in my life and the person who really pulled me out of the deep, irony-poisoned pit i was in post dropout. I've become a far more sincere person since knowing him and i'm beyond thankful for that. I'm bummed we haven't gotten to hang out in real life this year since the pandemic hit, but i'm moving to roughly around the same area as him next year so that will thankfully change.

    The sketchpage you see is something i pulled together over a few months when i got my first Surface tablet back in 2018! I wanted to try out a few little scenery things and different species that i had yet to draw. Caudle's fursona transforms a lot due to the magic contained within the bookstore he owns: Belfry Books. He often is a different species each day of the week in-universe. The different critters you see above are all him. Many Caudle forms have different personalities and take on a bit of a life of their own. It was fun to play with different designs and stylization across the various species i drew him as, though my workflow certainly left a lot to be desired back then. I spent so much time fighting the tablet and my own drawing skills that i probably could draw the same stuff in 1/8 of the time today. I'm still very proud of that environment vignette in the upper-right though. For how little i knew back then, i made a really convincing bookstore space. I should do more stuff like that. I love visual development stuff and as much as i enjoy drawing characters, i really like to think about the spaces they exist in too. Just another skill to practice i suppose!

    As for the second illustration, you really didn't think i'd be close friends with a skinny guy like Caudle without having fattened him up at least once, did you? He's such an adorable bookish bat and with how many 'thicc' characters he has, it was only a matter of time that i'd soften him up a bit too. Though i definitely pushed him a few notches past 'thicc'. Whoops~ Nothing a potion couldn't fix. He made for a great cushion for resting against while reading books for the day -er- weeks he was at that size. One that offered fantastic book recommendations i might add! I promise I helped him with shelving the new releases while he was unable to move. He rocked that look really well for someone who is not a fatfur and I'm hardly the first one to try and nudge him in  that direction for this exact reason.

    Funnily enough, this was my first time drawing more immobile blob sizes? The body still holds up, but i've learned a lot since then in regards to how i handle faces. I wasn't really referencing anything and as a result he came out looking a bit more 'boxy' in the muzzle, as opposed to the proper pointed look of a fruit bat. I've since improved that in my art of him. I'm proud of the way i did the fat on this drawing! I really took a risk trying to make his suspenders pinch against his pudge and it opened me up to do wilder things with that in future art. I also hadn't cel-shaded before this drawing. These days i definitely know i can work the details with such a constraint a bit more, but I think the little scratches and marks i added into the shadows made for a fun bit of texture.

    Below, as always, are full-resolution files for both images. Enjoy!