unus mundus sum

Bellamy. I am an Illustrator based in England. This is one of the places where I host my art. If you like it, please feel free to follow and reblog! 

[starryspectre]

Hey!! Here’s my updated commission sheet. Everything is correct as of February 2023. You can also tip me on ko-fi here

It’s very important that you read the T&Cs under the read more before commissioning me. I’ve tried to keep it as short and sweet as possible, but there are things you need to know in order to have the most streamlined experience possible.

If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to send me an ask or email.

Thanks! ♥

Notes

Standard resolution is 300dpi. Size can be altered to meet requirements.

Please let me know if you want to remain anonymous, if you do not want the work to be shared, or want to use an alias when the work is presented in my portfolio.

All images will have a watermark during the WIP stage. The watermark will be removed upon delivery of the artwork.

Please remember that all copyright is retained by me, the artist, and starryspectre/Bel must be credited when/if you share the artwork anywhere. If you share my artwork online, a link to my site or blog would be really helpful, but it isn’t mandatory.

Usage

These price guidelines are for personal use only. Commercial artwork (e.g. book illustrations, editorials etc) will require further negotiation of prices, as well as a new contract and licensing agreement.

Please contact me directly if you’re uncertain or the artwork is intended for commercial use.

Development

Major revisions (e.g. changing a pose, clothing, angles etc) are best decided on during the sketch phase of the artwork. This is because I am a traditional artist and major revisions are not easily achieved once the work is completed. This means that once I get your approval on a sketch, no more major revisions can be be done. So please tell me if something is not to your liking or you would like something significantly altered during the sketch stage.

Please try to keep major revisions to a minimum of two.

Minor revisions (such as a small change of colour or fine details) are okay and incur no added cost.

Please send references to help me meet your requirements as closely as possible. This can include sketches and photos, but descriptions are also useful.

If you do not have a very solid idea of what you want, it’s okay! These are simply rough guidelines for the limits of what I can/will do. Much of the brief will likely be created during our initial discussion, so if you’re not sure, the best idea is to just shoot me a message and see if we can come up with something.

Payment

Paypal is preferred but if you live in the UK and would rather do a bank transfer, this can also be arranged.

50% of the payment is expected before the commencement of work on the commission, and 50% upon its completion.

Alternatively, you can pay me 100% of my fee before the commencement of work if you prefer.

Cancellation & Kill fees

If the commission is cancelled before the sketch stage, I will refund you fully.

If the commission is cancelled during the sketch phase, I will refund 50% of the initial fee paid. If you have paid in full already, I will repay 75% of the overall fee.

If the commission is cancelled after the sketch phase, there will be no refund.

If I cannot complete the commission for some unjustifiable reason of my own, I will refund you fully.

Content

I will not illustrate depictions of excessive gore, violence, or hateful subject matter (racism, homophobia, misogyny etc).

Nudity and NSFW commissions will be accepted as long as they do not fall into the above categories.

I will not plagiarise another artist’s work, designs or style.

Contact

You can contact me in a variety of ways:

E-mail: [email protected] (preferred)

Via an ask on Tumblr

Via PM on Artstation

My timezone is GMT or GMT+1 in Summer. If you need your work by a certain date/time, please let me know beforehand.

[starryspectre]

The Empress

Another one down...

Sometimes I think I bit off more than I can chew with this project, and I'm feeling it now since it took me like 3 weeks (!) to get this one done. I have really been struggling with my focus lately, but I think I'm starting to get over it. Hopefully this means I'll be more productive and will get more done over the next year. I'm wanting to redo at least 2 of the cards I've already done though, which makes it extra difficult... This is the problem with longer term projects; your skill improves during the process, so you can see lower quality work in your older stuff and have to redo things.

Anyway, I'm pleased with this one. I have a design for the Emperor in mind and may do some more court cards soon too. :)

[starryspectre]

Hi! I saw your drawing of Marindor and I really liked it. But I'm wondering, as a traditional artist myself, how you managed to upload it without the background having a beige hue and the coloring shifting. Would you mind to "share your secrets"?

I'm not a bot! I know my texting style is similar, but I am just figuring out this social media thing. :-)

Thanks!

I clean it up in Photoshop. Actually the background is a little off-colour in that one bc I didnt clean it up as much as I usually do 😅 However for vignettes like that usually I use the magic wand tool to select the blank area around it and delete it. I also put a white layer underneath. You can do this with more or less any photo editing software.

As for the colours themselves, it really does depend heavily on the scanner. Some scanners completely butcher the artwork. For me personally, I only really like Epson scanners because it maintains the depth of colour and layering and doesn't screw it up. Again I also do some editing in Photoshop, mostly with the vibrancy and selective colour tools, until it looks right.

[starryspectre]

My bosmer OC, Manindor :)

[starryspectre]

Deluge

I came up with this idea several months ago while I was thinking about loss, and how much I miss those I've lost. I can really cry a lot once I get going. I have literally cried almost non stop for a month before. At a certain point, it feels like I literally live entirely within those tears, like my tears even have tears. I feel so heavy and flooded with this dark water, getting all my soft fluffy insides saturated with it and feeling so fragile and useless.

The process of doing this was honestly like trying to get blood out of a stone for me. In the space of a few weeks, my grandmother had a heart attack and I felt that same sting of loss hit me when I heard that she was so ill they were not going to resuscitate her. Luckily she's since improved, but I had to rush up country to say goodbye to her. Then as soon as I got back, my elderly cat became ill and I thought I would lose her too... It's been a really rough cycle trying to get this one out. I was no longer just thinking about my grief over past losses, but living inside it as I was doing this. Although it might seem right to be doing this when I'm living in the emotions, the opposite is true. Art can be a great anchor for me emotionally, but when I'm too flooded with emotion I can't do anything. I need to be able to clear my head enough to plan out what I need to do.

So, I did this one in dribs and drabs over the course of the past month. When this happens, I never really feel very satisfied by the end. I just feel relieved, and I don't like feeling that way about my work. I like being in the thick of my creativity.

[starryspectre]

Chimera

Lately I've been really focused on my feelings of not quite being human... in a spiritual way and in my personality, I've long felt like I'm just an animal wearing a human costume. Maybe it's the Hallowe'en spirit or something, but I've been very into stories about humans who become animals or other natural forces and vice versa recently. I don't think it's about horror though; it's more like a sense that modernity doesn't suit me because modernity has become so removed from our natures. Like monkeys having tea parties or something. I'm not saying we shouldn't be civilised, but so much of modern life just doesn't mesh with the way we evolved. I don't know, I'm going off on a tangent here, but I think that feeling is the basis of this illustration.

[starryspectre]

Decided to draw my inky to get used to my new desk set up and ease back into drawing :^)

[starryspectre]

I just have a thing for his eyelashes

(I feel like I made his hair a little too fiery but oh well. I am a ginger Solas truther after all!!)

[starryspectre]

Misc Bosmer characters

I felt like drawing elves and I really love the Bosmer from TES. I definitely took some artistic liberties with the lore here lmao. I wanted to a good mix of deep Bosmer and more cosmopolitan Bosmer, mages and Jaqspurs, various antler types. I'm also curious--do Bosmer shed their antlers like deer do? I did a couple of Bosmer who are in the shedding phase, because the idea of them yanking them off when they get loose like a wobbly tooth is amusing to me. I know some are supposedly glued on anyway, but some of them are grown naturally which is very cool

Looking at this tho it's very obvious which one is my favourite character to play as lmao. Find the main character!!

[starryspectre]

Somewhere in the Fade

An illustrated concept for a chapter in my post-Veilguard fic Rush of Sighs. I haven't written this chapter yet but I could see it so vividly in my mind, so.. here we are ig

[starryspectre]

Water Beasts

I'm very into amphibians lately :^)

[starryspectre]

Catharsis

Kind of a corny thing but just this need to purge all this old shit and not being able to do it alone. Like you're just drowning in all your trauma and misery and for some reason you can only expel it all properly if you have someone to hold your hand through it idk

[starryspectre]

Redid my Queen of Wands bc I went off the old design. She's feeling herself!!

[starryspectre]

Stone Mirror

One of my favourite mythological figures is Medusa. However, one of my main gripes with the way she's depicted in modern illustration and movies is when she's made out to be extremely beautiful. Although there are some retellings of the story of Medusa where she's described as being extremely beautiful, most of the stories and archaeological evidence depict her as a monster.

I guess I just find it frustrating because it proves that, even in stories where a woman is meant to be ugly or monstrous, people won't allow it. It reinforces this message that in order to have value or power, the woman must be attractive. In order to give her any kind of dignity, we have to make her beautiful. I personally think that more women should be allowed to be monstrous and ugly, so I depicted her as the freakish, venom-spitting gorgon capable of turning people to stone with her gaze.

[starryspectre]

Hope

'You have a rare and marvellous spirit...'

A few weeks ago, I did an illustration of Solas's spirit form and got to wondering what my Lavellan might look like as a spirit, and what their nature might be. There are a number of allusions in Dragon Age: Inquisition that the Inquisitor's spirit is unusual, and since all the lore drops in DATV I've been wanting to explore what that might mean. We don't know if it's unusual or if it's just down to the Anchor--Cole says it makes them 'more', but there are other things mentioned here and there that there's something weird about them anyway. Hope seems like a good bet for their nature given all the events in the story, so this is what I based the design on.

I chose 8 'wings' as a reference to one of my favourite films, Angel's Egg, where the coelacanth is used as an allegory for faith. Coelacanths are one of the oldest fish species on Earth and were thought to be extinct until the 1920s, when a live one was caught off the coast of South Africa. Before this, there were only fossil records. Coelacanths have 8 fins, with their tailfin having 3 lobes. It felt like a fitting reference to make given that both Angel's Egg and DAI are stories about faith and hope.

The spindly bits are based on siphonophores, which are deep sea creatures that, instead of growing larger, create duplicates of themselves with single functions. E.g., some parts only have mouths, for eating. Long strings of them live in the open ocean, and to me they look like musical notation--this also fits with the line 'everything sang the same' and how Solas and Lavellan's speech is in the same cadence. It's also how I imagine the relationships between spirits to function; they're all parts of a larger body, with differing functions to sustain the whole.

The 'head' is designed to look a bit like a starburst with parhelia or sundogs. (They're called sundogs because it was thought that they were the dogs Zeus walked across the sky by the ancient Greeks.) They're considered a good luck omen i.e. a hopeful sign. The colour palette is based on a sunrise bc 'The dawn will come' is the hymn sung by Andrastians in DAI.

The above quote is said by Solas in the infamous Crestwood scene.

[starryspectre]

Sick Martyr

[starryspectre]

Wisdom

A more detailed version of Solas's spirit form :)