I have finished my cross stitch of @angry-cajun-lady's Witcher OC Vanik. Since we've been shipping Grayson and Vanik together, I wanted to do a portrait for him to go with Grayson's. Behold, the beautiful smiley Bear:
I am very, very proud of his collar and the way it came out. That and his hair make him the most colorful Witcher portrait I've done so far and I absolutely love him. There's no medallion, but if you look around the edge of his neck, there is a thin line of silver thread that's supposed to be the chain, so his medallion would be just out of view. I'm not good at taking pictures of my finished work due to poor lighting in my apartment and impatience, so the silver isn't as obvious in the picture, but trust me, it's there.
I also tried something different with his nose; so far, I've been using another tone to help highlight the nose on these portraits, but since the reference image I used for Vanik had the sunlight on his face, I wanted to keep that idea. (Yes, I'm the person who wants there to be a light source when it comes to cross stitch.) Overall, I'm very pleased with how he came out. The colors, the colors!
I also redid Grayson's eyes finally. I tried something different with them because I was lazy when I originally stitched them, but they didn't have quite the look I wanted, so I redid them and now he looks lovely. Well, even lovelier <3
And here they are together!
Thank you to angry-cajun-lady for sharing wonderful Vanik with me. I've grown really attached to him and Grayson, I love them together so much <3 Thank you to @witcherscrane who gifted me and angry-cajun-lady the art of our OCs to begin with. I still can't believe that, it's one of my favorite portraits of Grayson, I look at it all the time, and the art inspired me to work on both Vanik and Grayson's patterns
The art that I used as a reference was from defenestratin, go look at their art, it's wonderful. And also, I used the portrait of Vanik done by @cylin-aka-ankamo as another reference for Vanik. Cylin is a dear friend who also has fabulous art that I cannot recommend any higher.
And thank you to the @continentcakeshop for sharing your advice, stitching tips, or just listening to me ramble. My apologies for the long post, but so much went into making the patterns for these portraits, I really wanted to make sure everyone got a proper shout out.