Welp, this took forever. 'Twas 18 days ago when I started working on this. While I can't say for certain if this took longer than any other drawing I've done, I have a feeling it did. Since I drew it last year, 4 Socks 4 Yira (below) was kind of my magnum opus, if you will, and that took 12 hours, also most likely a record breaker.

But... I dunno, I just have a strange feeling that the one that took 18 days to complete maybe took longer than 12 hours total. Especially when one considers things like... hmm... how about the fact that it took me 2 hours or more just to get the stocking texture to work? You can't even see it that well at this resolution, but you can tell it's there, and I wanted to go all-out on the detail this time.







The inspiration was quite simple really; I saw someone else's pic of Cynder on here (though I have absolutely no idea what pic it was) and they jokingly called her "goth gf", which just made me imagine her being all moody with heavy makeup and black versions of her normal accessories. And yep, at that simple whim I threw myself into a torturous maelstrom of spending a week plus on the sketch because I'm not used to drawing quadrupeds (or Cynder for that matter), then spending just as long on the colouring because of all the crazy things I wanted to do. (Well, it was about time I did a proper Cynder drawing, so this gave me a good excuse.) And of course my mum had to see me drawing it and say "Is that my future daughter-in-law?"







The keyword for this drawing was: textures. I imagined a pretty heavily textured drawing from the start, but I didn't realise how far I would end up taking it. I used at least 7 brushes, maybe as many as 10. For the skin alone, I did my normal smooth shading with the painterly brush on the Mixer Brush, then went over it with a gritty brush to rough it up a bit, then copied the layer and used it as an overlay to darken the shadows, then copied it AGAIN and used it to brighten the highlights, then I decided to go full hog and made ANOTHER layer where I drew a scaly texture, then made ANOTHER layer on top to add extra shine. In all I ended up using 42 layers, and that's just the ones I ended up using.







So yeah, I kind of felt out of my depth at certain points, but in the end, I'm glad I put the effort in, because I'm really happy with how she turned out. I've never been brave enough to try a scaly texture before, but I thought of a very simple way to do it and I like the way it looks. I've still got a long way to go, but I think it's fair to say this is the best fully-shaded drawing I've ever made, simply on a technical level.





Well anyway, I hope you like this too. It's been a minute since I did some Spyro fanart. (And here I am hoping that the Reignited Trilogy's Switch port doesn't get dropped when they've clearly been thinking about it.)





Oh, and here's a WIP I made but didn't post, from just 2 days ago:

Wow, just compare the vibrance and lustre of the skin. (Yes, I sped up a bit on the last few days.) Also, that's a mockup background you see there.





Sketch with bonus doodles:





More Spyro fanart: