Or, "Sebastian the Salamander Goes on a Bad Trip".So this was going to be my last drawing for "Dude-uary", but I couldn't figure out what to do with the background. I tried doing something brightly coloured and swirly and psychedelic, but it just looked really wrong. It also kept detracting from the drawing itself which I'd worked so hard on. Anyway, fast-forward to last night, and I found myself wth an hour or so to spare after doing my daily drawing (for once). I'd kind of resigned myself to the fact that this would never be finished, but I decided to give it another look, and suddenly the idea for a background hit me. And, well, here we are. One background, a bit of cleanup, and some text later, it was actually finished. Makes a change. Normally when I leave a drawing unfinished for a couple of months, it's lost the one chance at life it had.I tried a few different things with this one. For example, you may notice the hard-edged pixels (be sure to zoom in for the full effect). It started out as me wanting to try 's advice, seen in his XCOM 2 Viper video, on how to do hatched shading. Like him, I used a hard-edged brush, but the hatching ended up being a bridge too far for me, so I just stuck to what I know. The hard brush is fantastic for not having to deal with problems caused by anti-aliased lines of the colours not reaching all the way, which requires this or that to work around it. However, there were still some pixels which got trapped in the corner and the colour didn't reach them, so I ultimately still had to fix it. Anyway, I grew to like the aesthetic of the hard edges in the end, so I downscaled the original file specifically to keep the hard pixels on the DeviantArt upload, and the Fur Affinity upload will have a different, lower resolution, version in accord with their size limits.The hard pixels aren't the only thing making this different to what I normally do. For one thing, the colours were quite unusual in the way they worked. I had my red, yellow and dark blue. Then I used the fill tool at 50% opacity to find the mid-points between each colour, and then the mid-points between the mid-points, plus white of course. And I mostly only used those 13 colours for the entire thing. If you look closely at the eye, you can see where the blue shadow overlay deviates by going over some oranges derived from the red and yellow. And the mouth and tongue have some slight pinkness added to them to make them look a bit less weird. Oh, and the general atmosphere is quite a bit different. The pose is more dynamic than usual. There's also a general... intensity that I never normally have either.I guess this is another new character. Meet Sebastian! He's a spring salamander . He's more of a design than a character since I don't know what his personality or backstory are, but I do know that he's half French Canadian, half English. Here are the drawings I did when I was figuring out his design, which actually did get uploaded in January:I've got some WIPs here (including one which I posted in a journal back in January), along with the original Don't Break the Chain drawing that inspired this (it's in the middle right of the page shown). Oh, and the rough sketch which I did first to help figure out the pose in my head, because I thought it looked funny.