q11 - siggy's cake and scraps

Partially a repost of things non-Big Supporters haven't seen yet, but I'm putting these two together now because they belong to each other. I've also included the ancient project I was referring to in my commentary as part of the MEGA download:

MEGA LINK 

Gonna copy and paste my old commentary for those posts too.

Starting with the scraps:

So my best friend really loves Dwarves, and a few months back, he decided to commission me for a Dwarf related project.

Unfortunately, the overhead for this project quickly spiraled out of control. It was very difficult to work with the setting in particular because of his specifications, which resulted in an innumerable amount of technical issues that slowed my workflow to a crawl.

Compounding all of that was the fact that I simply didn't like where this project was going. I don't like posting a finished product that I don't like. I don't mind posting really crappy things that I mark as scrap, because it's just scrap. But for me, I need to be proud of a finished project before I can release it to the world. And with this project, I just couldn't foresee a satisfying conclusion. The only thing that I liked about what I was able to do here was the Dwarf, and only the Dwarf.

Now as you guys may know, I have a personal policy of not forcing myself to work with races that I'm not attracted to. And unfortunately, Dwarves of all flavors are now making that list. You will not be seeing any Dwarf-related content from me any time soon, outside of a cameo appearance. From this experience, I've learned very definitively that I'm simply not attracted to Dwarves at all.

So yeah, this is actually my first "failed" commission. Fortunately, my best friend is my best friend for a reason. He 100% understands my frustrations re: this project and was fully aware that I didn't like Dwarves going into this project.

For my part, I still made sure that he'd be getting something back from me, even if it wasn't the commission itself. Now I won't go into the specifics of what I did for him, but you can check out his Twitter for yourself and see what's up:

Sigvald Steelhammer (@SigvaldSteelham) / Twitter

So while I may've permanently failed the Dwarf-lovers community, I made sure that someone else will carry that torch. Happy Dwarfing!

And then the cake:

I realized how horribly compressed this image was on Twitter, so I'm gonna repost it here on Patreon too where it's actually HQ and you can see every detail.

Anyways I created this picture in record time a few weeks back for my best friend's special wolf day. Sigvald Steelhammer (@SigvaldSteelham) / Twitter in case you don't know who he is yet, Dwarf extraordinaire.

You might wanna read what I said [above] for some extra context. For those of you that can't, lemme quickly sum it up for you. Siggy commissioned me for a Dwarf project, but it ended up being the one commission ever that I failed to complete for a variety of reasons. We ended our arrangement amicably, but since he's my best friend I always felt bad for failing him.

So I wanted to use his special wolf day as an opportunity to make things right. Although this isn't what he commissioned, I would say it captures the spirit of everything that he wanted. I won't get into what that is exactly (ask him yourself since it's personal), but you can certainly glean.

Fittingly, I reused many of the spectators from his failed commission verbatim in this new picture with great success, while adding a few new ones. My original idea here was to have a variety of different people of different races and genders laughing (or being disgusted) at Siggy, but since the set and existing NPCs were already so skewed towards Alliance, it would feel weird to just have a random moo or Orc be a part of the crowd. So aside from the clear rat infestation that this tavern has, I had to be a just a little more creative with how I integrated the few members of the Horde into this shot. One of them is obviously that giant painting of Baine, another infamous cuckold. Hey, at least I haven't forgotten about him, and he's a great complement to this project.

There are also a lot of callbacks and references to some of my oldest projects and one-off pictures. I don't expect any of you to have encyclopediac knowledge of my works like I do, so I'll help you cheat with identifying one such reference. Look at the third pic that I've attached, which is from a project all the way back in 2016. It should be pretty obvious, and yet it is only one of many little references I've snuck into this pic. Try to catch them all, I suppose.

With all of this being said, unfortunately I am still resolved to not create any future content featuring Dwarves. Siggy understands that I don't particularly like them, but I'm always willing to go 110% to make him happy. If you enjoy Dwarf content yourself, you should really politely poke him (or even ak0) instead.