Lost Art - Little Fires Cover

I've been making an effort to go through old art folders.  I've wanted to start organizing things a little better, but I also have a lot of art and characters that have been largely consigned to the bit-rot folder inside my skull, often forever lost to the void that is the failed neurological meatball that is my brain.

This image is one such find.  It was in a folder labeled 'comic2' and apparently I had planned on some kind of mini black-and-white comic featuring the gnomish lady above.  The folder even contained a template and a title-graphic(!?) called 'Little Fires'.

I don't know what the name is of the explorer in this picture.  She might have been a prelude to Ellythistle as this was around the early 2018 mark (ah, the pre-plague times).  I don't know if her name is 'Little Fires' or if that's just the name I was giving the series.  The only other notes I had in the folder were some mundane 'gutter and bleed' sizes for comic pages, and a few notes stating that the character was a 'barbaric, tribal mountain-gnome on a heavy-metal journey between Trampier-esque points of light and dark'

I ponder if I was drunk when I came up with the concept, wrote the notes, and promptly forgot about it.  (I probably wasn't.  I don't really get drunk, but whatever the hell I was thinking sure was more caffeine-induced than I'm used to).

I figure I owed it to the now lost little lady to ink the picture and share it.  It was in a fairly rough sketch state, but I managed to rescue it, at least briefly, from the swirling drain that a lot of these folks disappear into.  The project is probably dead and gone forever, but at least the cover of 'issue one' survived :)

-T.J.

"Don't forget to paint the boat with bread, Wally.  Dad said he'd be home any minute."