This is an unfinished illustration; a would-be masterpiece I will never be able to complete, an echo of a life I no longer have.
The full context behind this image will take some explaining. TL;DR is: I managed to meet some very wonderful people, and some of those wonderful people introduced me to the game of Dungeons and Dragons, and this was to be an illustration that could have ben printed out that would feature the characters of our party, as well as the archfey-ified K'Sara, my character's Warlock patron. The full explanation follows;
In 2015 I had been playing far too much Warframe, and I started to upload some youtube videos in which I reviewed some of the gear in the game. By all accounts I barely knew what I was doing, but apparently I knew enough of what I was doing that not too long afterwards, I managed to get the attention of another Warframe content creator called QuietteShy (now Quite Shallow). After some time we got to know each-other and, after she started doing art streams with DKDiamantes (Another Warframe content creator) she invited me to co-commentate with them. This was the start of a pretty long-running partnership in which I had the privilege of meeting a lot of other people involved in the Warframe community, developers, voice actors, and even a few highly notable people from outside the Warframe bubble. One of which was MoistCr1tikal, though in that case I actually managed to make a complete fool of myself pre-stream and that blunder of mine still haunts me as I lie awake at night. He probably doesn't remember who I am at all, which is for the best. But the figure that is actually important to this story (and the image) is Lucas Schuneman, professional voice actor, the voice of Tyl Regor and Nef Anyo (and Ghoul Rictus) within Warframe as well as various other voices for other games, and D&D fan. He pitched the idea of making a D&D one-shot in which he would be the DM, and Rozalynd, DKDiamantes, SarahTsang and myself would be players, with Rozalynd being the only one of us who had played D&D before, and all being hosted on Shy's art stream as she did her illustration work, and the first of those sessions even had her illustrating our characters. They were, respectively, a half-orc Barbarian, half-elf Druid, half-elf Vengeance Paladin and human Warlock. Lucas was even kind enough to help workshop what my patron would be, as I was kind of set on having a dragon as a patron. No, I had no idea how warlock patrons were meant to work, but Lucas managed to make it work anyway; when I described K'Sara as being whimsical, he settled on Archfey and Crystal Dragon.
The one-shot would end up extended in to a four-shot, with the first session revolving around our adventuring party finding a town that was to host a tournament, which ended up being a search-and-rescue story, which further ended up culminating in halting a summoning ritual to prevent an evil god named Arbeyach from entering our world and rescuing The Smith, who ended up with the likeness and personality of Shy herself. The next sessions, each some months apart, involved each of our characters taking part within the tournament, which was then interrupted by a new BBEG that had stolen a forbidden sword that The Smith had been working on in secret. The sword, able to cut rifts in space to other planes, was intended to save The Smith's master, but for that session was used to set a demon on the party as the BBEG escaped, and The Smith was taken in to custody. The next two sessions took place in a new town after some travel time (after a brief fight on the road with some thugs and a Bearded Devil), which involved a murder-mystery with peoples' bodies being turned in to kyanite with their hearts having been removed as well as trying to track down leads on The Smith and the stolen sword. The murders would end up being the result of a devil cult, with a homebrewed creature (it was a golem made of gold coins, and had an attack that would have inflicted various debilitating ailments on us if we were wearing anything made of previous metals) which used those kyanite hearts to restore its own health, and the other lead would involve going to the old workshop of The Smiths' master, which was currently bring ransacked by a devil and a gang of people the devil had enthralled. In the latter fight, Sarah's paladin character managed to reach in to an retrieve an item from the heart of the coin demon (an item we never did learn the nature of), and in the latter both Rozalynd's character and then my character would be charmed by the devil, very nearly resulting in disaster, but we came out victorious with some documents that would reveal where to go next, as well as an explosive satchel charge that the would-be looters would have used to make their escape.
This image wasn't actually an event that happened during that short campaign, but it was more of a "what if" idea I had, where we might all end up going to the Feywild and meet K'Sara (Or at least, this version of her) in person. Aside from that, this was meant to be something that I could point to as an example of what I could do artistically; something that could maybe be sold as prints some day, to show off something I was lucky enough to have been involved in, and maybe something I could proudly show my parents and other family members, as a lot of my art was of the NSFW variety. Throughout 2020 I had been suffering from some burnout and was getting gradually phased out of Shy's art streams (Rozalynd and I would alternate co-hosting with DK, as I recall) but, even so, I felt like I was still a part of something. Over those last few years I struggled to differentiate myself, as I really only had any notoriety thanks to Shy, and I was a bit of a mess even back then. But I was still proud to be able to call her a friend and be involved in her work. I had been working on this image on and off for a couple of years, having spend a good 250 hours in total at least with its absurd 12,000x4800 resolution and a greater attention to detail than anything I had drawn before. It was slow going but progress was happening.
Then my mother suddenly died on the 17th of December 2020. I never really did recover from that. I appeared on a few more of Shy's art streams after that but my mental health had taken a sharp nose-dive and that was kind of it. Eventually Shy burned out on Warframe and she moved on to other things. We are still on good terms, lest you worry. She currently hosts the Adeptus Ridiculous, Detective Ridiculous and Unidentified Signal 99.9 podcasts, and is working on some Visual Novel projects; the first of which is Star-crosst, which you can buy on steam and I did a lot of play- and QA-testing for. Stay tuned for more on that front.
But, I digress. That's the gist of the story behind this unfinished image. A would-be masterpiece I will never be able to complete, an echo of a life I no longer have.
