So I started drawing eyes a certain way for the Ice King Finn stuff

and then decided to use a far more rounded, variable version in my normal drawings

and now I just drew AT fanart in my regular style and used those eyes on Simon.

Truly, we have come full circle.

Simon and Marcy!

Simon and Marcy!

A message from Anonymous
Simon/Betty pre-split up

The gleam of Betty’s face reflected off the crown he had bought, washed with gold, reminded him of her smile on their first date, aglow with sunset and the warmth of winter’s ending.

A message from Anonymous
Claus and Kumatora meeting?

Lucas had told her about him - about how much Kumatora reminded him of his brother - but as she stared down and him and he up at her for the first time unhindered by helmets or opposing goals, shoulders tensed in the memory of past pains and well-aimed lightning strikes, his gaze was filled with all the things she remembered not seeing as they fought; Kumatora decided that he was more like Lucas than like her.

A message from dragoplateau
Betty during the fallout

There was a terrifying moment when the sky, black with night only moments before, burned white-hot and noon-bright with the force of a distant explosion; the gale from the blast lifted a flurry of snow from around her feet to fling before her eyes, and stole away her precious single instant to react.

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Maria+Giegue

She sang and sang, though her throat only grew more and more hoarse by the day; he tried his best to form the shape of her words with his mouth, but he couldn’t get the sounds quite right.

So, I was thinking of something like this?  Other than the eyes it’s almost literally exactly the same as before, actually.

Anyway, here’s all the sketches from last night and today of me trying to figure out how this even works.  Other than the giant colored Hinawa, the sketch pages are in the order that I drew them.

They really are just not-insane IKF eyes, wow.  But I do really like these kinds of eyes.

…And if nothing else, at least that one doodle of Ceese Linley looks good in this style.

It has…become increasingly apparent that I really don’t like my own art style.

So I’m trying to maybe integrate some actual, expressive eyes or something - after all, SaB’s style first came out of me forcing myself to do something different from what I usually drew, so this is basically the same thing, though not to quite the same extreme.  And, when I integrated my old, more traditional anime-esque style in to SaB’s style, the body builds became more robust, but the style of heads and necks didn’t change, and I feel like they clashed a bit?  So this is kind of like the the natural progression of things from there, I guess…or at least from drawing IKF all the damn time and really liking how expressive he is.  I dunno, I’m having trouble getting all of this in to words.

Either way, I’m messing around with expressive eyes with…mixed results?  Sometimes it looks way better than others.  But I guess it’s all a matter of practice.  (The particular type of eyes I’m drawing actually integrate with the style pretty well, though I’m having trouble drawing them consistently.  Though, in retrospect and completely accidentally, they also look very similar to the eye style I’ve seen a lot lately, and I don’t want to come off as derivative but I do really like these kinds of eyes…ugh, again, I feel like I’m having a lot of issues expressing this all of a sudden.)

Either way, any thoughts?

I also feel the strange urge to work on my original stuff all of a sudden.  Call it a sympathetic longing.

Why is it 2 am