medli20 draws sometimes

Your local bird-watching, dungeon-delving e-cryptid

[medli20]

HEY GUESS WHAT

Chapter 2 of my webcomic, Tales from Alderwood just finished!! This chapter is almost 180 pages of adventuring, jokes, fist fights, and a little intrigue sprinkled in, so if you’re into that sort of thing, please consider giving it a read!

It updates Mondays and Fridays, it has a cute owl in it, and it’s freeeeeee 🦉

[medli20]

Common backyard birds of the California Bay Area

[medli20]

Turning into a walking map hazard was a lot of fun. Doing it with a wizard's health pool made it... challenging, but still fun nonetheless lol.

My main webcomic

[medli20]

Tried painting my boyfriend's grandparents' wedding portrait in a vintage style. This is very different from my usual style so it was an interesting project to tackle lol

[medli20]

Anachronism

(process/thoughts under the cut)

This piece kind of took me on a journey, so I figured I'd talk about it here to share with you guys.

One day while I was taking a walk, I saw a pigeon sitting on a rooftop silhouetted against the sky, juxtaposed under an airplane's contrail. I thought it was a cool visual that contrasted two different modes of flight against each other, so I stored it away in my mental vault to come back to later.

A month or so later, I realized I was going to get a much larger booth at an upcoming anime convention than I'd initially thought, and I figured I needed some more prints to round out my display. I thought back to the pigeon and threw this together, hoping to sort of tell this story about a dopey-looking bird staring forlornly up at this sleek plane. I decided to change it since my goal was to sell prints at an anime convention, so I subbed the pigeons in for my OC Raven, a fantasy birdman character from my webcomic. I still like the pigeon idea though, so I think I'm going to reuse the composition for a separate project later.

I was kind of spitballing ideas for this illustration in my Discord server and half-joked that Raven might not be super appropriate for the illustration, since the webcomic he's in doesn't have airplanes so it would probably feel a bit anachronistic.

Then I hemmed and hawed about it before deciding to lean into it anyway-- contrasting birds with aircraft, past with present felt like too much potential for implicit storytelling to pass up. I swapped his usual post-industrial outfit for a more fantasy-adventure-y… gambeson? doublet? jerkin? and dressed up the scene with antiquated, overgrown stonework to further sell the vibe.

It was here that I realized that there's CONSIDERABLY more reference material for raven wings from the front than there are from the back, which made this tricky. I don't think it ended up mattering much anyway, since I had to scale the wings/feathers in a way that would look like it'd fit a grown-ass man, so they like… don't actually look like raven wings anyway lol.

Not a whole lot of commentary here, but if you can, please take a closer look at the quilting on his gambesondoubletjerkin. It's not an important detail or anything, but I'm just pleased as punch with the way it turned out :)

Devin Elle Kurtz makes really wonderful plant brushes btw, 10/10 highly recommend

She also makes really great cloud brushes too. Anyway that's it for my process on this piece, thanks for checking it out :)

[medli20]

Throughout our current campaign, our drow rogue Llthrys has really loved dropping fun little anecdotes about his hometown. "In Menzoberranzan, we would feed sickly children to the spiders" sort of stuff. The rest of our characters found it shocking at first, but after spending so much time together, we started adopting these Llthrys-isms into our own speech. They're a lot of fun, but I think the other party members are better at coming up with them on the fly than I am lol.

[medli20]

I don't have a lot of confidence in being able to tell human-made art apart from AI-generated stuff, so I'll occasionally look at discussions in communities where this is a regular thing. Sometimes their reasoning makes a lot of sense, but other times they'll cite things that remind me of things I did myself with my own two flesh-and-blood hands.

(art is mine btw, thankfully I haven't been accused of using AI... yet)

[medli20]

Our rogue becomes an absolute death machine whenever I cast Haste on him. 10/10 would recommend

[medli20]

たまには他の人がforeign languageで話して、ほんの少しのEnglish words以外にその語りの意味は全く分からない。

[medli20]

I drew my boyfriend's mom because she's got crazy drip 🍋⭐

[medli20]

[medli20]

So I haven't really advertised this a whole lot, but I've been working on a long-term project wherein I'm trying to make custom tokens for every character/creature that shows up in the D&D 5e adventure Curse of Strahd. So far, I've finished up Death House / the opening, the Village of Barovia, random encounters, and Vallaki + its surrounding areas. It's still a work-in-progress, but I've been releasing a new pack every month as I chip away at this thing.

Most of them are available for purchase (or included as a member perk for all paying members) on my Patreon, but this month I did the fated companions as a free pack for anyone to download.

Anyway if you're running a virtual game of CoS or you're in a game and your DM is looking for art assets for every single character, please consider checking it out-- you can either make a single purchase for everything I've made so far, or you can drop $2 on a monthly membership to pick up everything (including other series of custom tokens I've made) and help support my efforts as I continue to make these going forward.

Happy hunting, and beware the mists, brave adventurers! 🧛‍♂️🦇

[medli20]

IS CORNY BALD (FROM THAT ONE DRAWING) (im sorry)

BTW I LOVE YOUR ART!!

ty Anon <3

[medli20]

[medli20]

"Is that a corvid in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?"

[medli20]

[medli20]

I hope you feel better soon! Injuries are no fun, but your lefty art is really good and cool and I am a big fan of all the art you make! Please take care, we love you! ❤

Thanks so much! It's admittedly frustrating not being able to catch up on work and slowly watching our buffer of webcomic pages dwindling, but it's also nice being able to at least draw for myself in the meantime.

I'll do my best! 💪