Drenched in Gold

I've had an itch to go back to my roots as an artist and finally drew my lovely character Dalik'in (aka Dax). I feel like it's been some time since I've really sat down to render something and even longer since I've used my all-time favorite palette. As much as I adore a good desaturated cool color scheme, nothing beats greens and golds. Something about the color scheme brings an indescribable sense of satisfaction. Maybe it's because it's so deeply associated with Dax. He is my original comfort character after all. 

I've actually been thinking about him a lot these days. For those of y'all who may have only followed me in recent times, before working on NPCs, I was primarily focused on my series I generally just call Legacy. I didn't want it to be my first try at a webcomic so I'd chosen a different story to work on instead (which then became my job, so funny that).

I'd wanted Legacy to be my magnum opus when I was younger. I was so certain I would spend my whole life working on it and telling the very lengthy story of Dax's life. Nowadays, I realize that there is, in fact, such a thing as overstaying your welcome, even if Dax and his world had been my entire world since I was 12. I was convinced I'd reach One Piece levels of plotting, but as much as I adore Dax, I've learned to love my other characters and stories and would love to give them attention too lol! There's only so much one man can be and, ironically, his story dealt with living in the shadow of other people's legacies. It seemed a bit mean to drag him along for years and years, into so many different iterations you could barely recognize him.

To be fair, that's just what happens when you've had a character for a decade. They change over time until they're hardly recognizable. Nowadays, when I think of Dax, he's less of the 15-year-old unnecessarily sassy kid meant to change the world like every shounen manga I was obsessed with and more of the chronically in pain, loving man who just wants to live his life, love those in his community, and make the tangible changes he can as a single entity. He's tried his hand at making history and it's left him exhausted and a little reclusive.

He's still drop-dead gorgeous though ;). I really put my whole heart and soul into making his design the ideal beauty to me. It's everything I love drawing in one person. His whole story and world are just everything I've loved in one place. It's a  queer historical high fantasy with a lot of disability representation that I never quite got to include in NPCs (though even then I literally cannot stop myself from including at least some. Sue me, it's a major part of my and my community's life). The majority of characters in the world of Legacy deal with disabilities and neurodivergence in one way or another and I guess that was my way of coping in my life when I was younger. Would love to psychoanalyze 12-year-old me, but maybe another day.

Thanks for reading this if you did! I didn't think I'd make this as sappy as I did, but it was the impetus for me to make the piece so I couldn't help myself. Consider it my weird artist statement.