The Phantom Inker

I drew a new portrait illustration! It's been a while, hasn't it?

This is Princess Claire of the Octavian Empire, a princess by birth, but she's a tomboy at heart, and she would far rather spend her time with the Knights fighting to defend the Empire than sit in the castle wearing fineries and courting nobles, much to her parents' chagrin. Who's she reaching out to? What's the rest of the story? It's up to you to decide ?

I'd like to thank Dido for the musical inspiration, and to thank Pandorasaurus for a bunch of related inspiring recent AI renders. No AIs were harmed (or used!) in this picture, but without seeing the hand in his picture, I don't think Muse would've poked at me so hard about drawing Claire here, so you can indirectly thank AI artwork for this picture existing ?

This is also my first picture drawn with CorelDRAW 2023, too, which I bought on sale in November. CD 2023 is faster and better for this kind of work than CD 2019 (my previous workhorse) or CD 2021 were, but boy, did CorelDRAW crash a lot while I was working on this picture. Admittedly, I pushed it pretty hard with this one, abusing the heck out of PowerClip and Gaussian blur, and I used some new scripts I wrote to make the suckers on her tentacles, but still, CD really didn't like this. (It's only like 20,000 vector curves or so!) It's too bad CD was such a pain on this, because I really like how she turned out, and with an easier way to do octopus tentacles, you may be seeing a few more of them ??

A properly high-resolution version of this can be found on my Patreon, along with various works-in-progress of it while I was drawing it over the last couple of weeks.