Cuddles and Ky

For Cuddles (cuddlypfudor) and Ky (kyogre1523) @ Instagram.

During the group chat with them, Ky mentions about an anniversary for our group and couldn't believe it's nearly a year since it was created. We also have fun racing to the top by scrolling the entire chat just to confirm the date and time (especially I live in a different timezone than Cuddles and Ky).

As a special occasion, we decided to create a drawing piece each that includes our personas and make our interpretation. For mine, both Ky and Cuddles knew each other in person so I got an idea to draw them together with one of them holding their phone as a form of communication with me from the other side of the world.

Unfortunately, by the time we agreed on the deadline, I couldn't post in time until an extra day or two late. It's been so long I got back to drawing on my laptop and I wanted to surprise them how much I improved in my old digital painting style instead of cell shading.

Knowing my situation of my delay, both of them are really nice to wait despite I still feel pressured from myself that it's not good enough. When I finally submit this artwork here and on Instagram, I didn't have the time to write anything before I passed out asleep until I update this post (22nd December, 2020).

Due to poor health, my ability to work is a lot slower than ever. Since I took nearly the whole year as an advantage to take care of myself, my body worsen because I felt stuck being unwell and struggling for far too long. In result, this illustration took about 5-6 days with a total of over 19 hours and 45 minutes recording my progress into a speedpaint.

Although my energy is extremely low, I still come up with many ideas until my motivation weakens the further I struggle to continue drawing. However, I was confident enough that I stick to the very first vision and begin taking photos of my sister with permission as position references for this artwork.

Before colouring, I chatted with Cuddles and Ky to confirm their heights in which I changed Cuddles to at least appear slightly shorter than Ky as I prefered to keep their positions the same.

There's a lot I like after completing this illustration. I'm happy it turns out colourful and vibrant with an improvement in trying to create a better anatomy into semi-realism style. However, there's a lot of minor mistakes I made since I rushed.

At first, I thought drawing furries would be a struggle because of the furs but it turns out I struggle a lot more with human's faces on whether I should lean closer to realistic or more of an anime or cartoon like how I drew my persona in the phone screen. The background wasn't planned out and intended to make it simpler because the main focus are the characters. The downfall is making the grass is another struggle to complete the most.

After exporting the speedpaint, I realised I missed certain details like a white dot on my persona and unfinished shading of Cuddles' highlights. I could edit this again but I need to move one ans accept this as completed so I could improve those flaws next time, even if it bugs me as a perfectionist.

P.S. "Personal Usage" is for Cuddles and Ky only to use freely.