Hey Reader! :)

I hope you’re doing fantastic today! I’ve been better; last week was extremely exhausting at work, but thankfully the holidays are coming!

Despite being very busy I’m super excited to share some more art with you this week. Not only my current big illustration, but also a nice bonus that I’ve had in mind for months!

Let me show you! :D

It's cold outside ❄️

So, last week I shared with you the finished ink of my latest illustration. This is the very first time I’m drawing a winter scene!

And to sell the idea of winter, I needed to get convincing colors for the snow. But before telling you more about it, here’s how it looks for now!

I’m happy to have one more step finished :)

The goal here was to convey the cold atmosphere without relying (yet) on the lighting.

The first step was to do the color blocking: give every element a color and a layer so that I can adjust them later. I often do it by group; for example, all the tree trunks are on one layer and the foliage on another.

Before adjusting the colors and lines the mood is completely different!

Once done, what I like to do is adjust the color of the lines: making the contour lighter for elements that are further back is something that I do a lot in my usual illustrations, but here it was especially needed to give the impression that the scene is slightly foggy. And it helps the character stand out!

After that, I started adding proper colors to all the elements. For that I love to have my previous illustration around so I can pick colors. As a bonus, it makes my body of work more harmonious!

The blue roofs of my fictional city have, for example, a specific shade that I must reuse to keep things coherent. But since all my illustrations are usually set on a sunny day, I obviously needed to tweak it a bit!

It took a long time to split and adjust all those elements, but I’m now really excited to start the last step and to show you the final result next week :D

As a bonus: here is the first sketch I did for this illustration :)

Finally: here is a map of my fictional city!

If you remember, during Inktober this year I shared 31 snapshots and locations from my fictional city.

Posting one every day sure was intense, but a very good world building exercise!

Since then I’ve put everything on my website, and I’ve also been working on a zine. I decided to add a special bonus: a concrete map of the city!

Here it is :) ✨

This took me way more time than I thought!

Actually, this is something I wanted to do for months—well, more than a year actually.

You can see in my illustration “She is free” (which I finished in June 2024) that I already had the basic layout in mind back then :)

Gosh, crazy to think that it has already been a year and a half! Time has been flying so fast now that I think about it.

But the reason I never actually made a map was simply that I had never done it before; this would have forced me to make a lot of decisions very early on.

Now that I have more established locations, it was easier to lay everything out on the map. But I made sure not to write (or draw) myself into a corner, be too precise, or draw every single street. This would not have looked very good, and this gave me more freedom to expand and adjust in the future!

So if you’ve been following this worldbuilding project this October, I hope you enjoy this simple map :)

Feel free to use it for your next D&D campaign haha, you have my blessing.