New beginnings 🌌 (+ Shallow Sleep ramblings +plans from here on out)

Hello my gemlins~ 💜

It is time for me to return to the desk in full swing! 

Over the next few weeks I want to share some illustrations (+other work) I've done this year that I haven't posted anywhere yet, because I'm good at making things, but really bad at sharing them 😂 I'll talk a bit about some thoughts regarding Shallow Sleep and other stuff in those posts too, so I hope you're looking forward to potential walls of text full of ramblings with some nice artwork attached :3c 

Most of the art will be Shallow Sleep related (there's also going to be some more #MUTED stuff!!), as I've been spending a lot of time in Charon and Leo's world over the last few weeks. You might remember the post I wrote about Charon's identity and pronouns. I'm already not on the same page as past me about the whole topic anymore LOL Or rather.. I kind of am but I'm also having personal different thoughts on the matter after writing it all out back then, and the only conclusion I came to that feels fully "correct" for me is to go back to he/him pronouns, at least when I talk about Charon. They/them works just fine as well, so most of what I wrote in that post still holds true, it just didn't feel right to fully zone in on just the one option to refer to this character, if that makes sense.
It probably doesn't matter much for anyone but me, I've just been thinking about Charon a lot for the past 19ish years 😂

Both Charon and Leo are truly a result of the person I used to be in 2003 and since picking their story back up I've felt a bit torn between letting them be what they used to be vs. adjusting them to be more fitting for the present.

In the end.... Charon is the one who stayed mostly the same, only Leo went through some visual changes, and I changed him again just a few weeks ago. Over the years I'm slowly honing in on the version of him that feels right! 

Leo had blue hair for the first 10 years of his life:

(his name also used to be Ryou because I was, of course, super weeb and had to give OCs Japanese names despite them not being Japanese 😂😂)

In 2015 I decided his blue hair was A Bit Much and toned his design down a bit:

This was also when his starry eyes and their bright blue became more important.

In 2018 I rewrote Shallow Sleep in order to draw it for a Webtoon contest, that's also when I finally took the time to give him a new name, haha.

Left is what he looked like when I drew the pages for the contest, right is from late 2021 when I figured he needed new hair or else he'd look to similar to 90% of my other OCs, because I have a thing for this particular hair style, it's too fun to draw.

And finally, two weeks ago I decided that I hate drawing the straight cut parts of Leo's hair and needed to make some changes again..... After some exploration the result in the image on top of this post is kind of what I ended up with for now.... He's meant to look a bit "bland", his eyes are the most important feature about him but I do want to finalise his design in a way where I can confidently say "yes, this is HIM". He will also retain some style elements I quite enjoyed in 2003 (Visual Kei anyone?), albeit not to the degree  that I used to like it, that'd be a bit much.

But I think that these characters deserve to remain products of their time in some ways, if I wanted them to be completely different, I should just make completely new characters, right?

I hope this is a bit interesting to read for you all! There's so many things I wanna talk about in regards to Shallow Sleep but I should probably space it out over a few posts! Since the story and characters have existed for so long and have grown alongside me.. they've gone through so many iterations almost every year, some of them super cringy, which you would certainly enjoy ahaha.

But there's also a lot of stuff I wanna talk about with their current story and existence and I hope I can do that very soon and show you all about their story ; -;)

Thank you for reading!! 💜