Fenra Leaps - Art Fight 2026

Monday, July 27, 2026

Art Fight attack of Fenra by Aroix_Lights! Chaos, I love unicorns.

Still veering my unicorn art very cervine (which may not be correct for Aroix Lights', whoops!), utilizing heavy photo refs of deer. Always an interesting thing to go looking for, sice it's so damn easy to accidentally stumble into hunter shit instead. Hunting's not bad, I don't have problems with it--it's important to manage populations and it's good to eat and use the meat, hides, and etc. But not visually what I'm looking for, and it can be an unhappy experience sometimes.

Doing Stelle the Sable, I used iNaturalist to find refs for the first time, and that was really great, since sables are also big for a product, so it was nice to have more photos of the live animals to puck from there. But the pickings for deer weren't quite what I was looking for. Not that there were few of them, there were lots, there were just lots of "There's a deer in my backyard!" photos, instead of more professional shots. Not a bad thing, just meant there was more to sift through, and I ended up looking elsewhere since I wanted to draw her running or leaping, and not just standing.

I've been trying to get different qualities in my art and linework, and tried that again, here. I did more of a clean-up sketch with shading in my linework layer instead of my more typical inking approach, which was something I'd tried with the Fauna bust, too. It feels pretty good, and I think I like how it's looking. I like trying to get a more vital, less stiff result than I sometimes get with my linework. Because I gear my linework for being able to use the flood fill tool, it gets a bit static sometimes. Pretty normal artist problem, and the "Just use your sketch layer," hack is pretty common advice. But that works best when your sketch layer isn't just a mass of scribbles. So still doing a layer for the sketchy inks, still scratching and building it up, and presto, there we go.