August 2022
August 2024
Two years! Crazy huh (this isn't the latest thing I've drawn, but I just wanna share this somewhere and talk about my thoughts on the pieces.)
So, these two pieces share a composition and the characters and little else. Over the course of the two years, I have soured on Alyajm a lot. I think they have their cute moments, but the ways they respond to trauma are incompatible. Beyond this, their dynamic is very sweet but lukewarm and kinda boring. So! The piece I created in 2022 just isn't reflective of the story in 2024, but OneDrive showed me the painting in one of them memories notifications and I thought "wow, I bet My rendering style has improved massively from that point". And it has! I think the variety in hue is visually interesting, the contrast in the piece is so much better, I am 100% happy with my improvement.
Conceptually the piece is weird though, right? like I think the two of them are meant to be taken together. Alya looks a little manic and malnourished while Najm is totally detached and halfway dead, maybe the first piece is how Alya pictures the two of them, how they were before the trauma of the story, but miraculously they made it out of the Tazdahir. In reality, they made it out but the Tazdahir damaged them, and they need to heal.
