I don't often talk about my art, let alone in frontpaged posts, as I am primarily a musician. Today, given the recent commissions I've had, I want to talk about them, and about the banners I did for myself and Two Meeps. Seeing Quarl's post about the illustrations for her new EP, Spare Change, prompted me.

It feels a particular kind of surreal, being able to lend your penmanship to people's aesthetic and musicianship. For context, I draw many of my own album sleeves and socials banners. For a long time, I had this two-monitor wallpaper I drew for myself double as my own Bandcamp banner:

Being one half of the band, Two Meeps, I am also the band's artist:

This banner was not intended as a socials banner, but as a two-monitor wallpaper for my desktop computer. The aspect ratio made it double up as a socials banner pretty well.

As @Quarl wrote, I did her banner image for Bandcamp:

I'd not done chibis in a good while, and it felt fun to come back to this art style and these colours after having trained myself to draw figures, backgrounds, etc. The things on this banner were things that she requested, and two of the elements in this drawing actually come from a work that immediately predates it, a work that alludes to recent events:

The burning bridge, the burst fire hydrant, the cracked road, are all symbols of a cascade of events that I feel deserve their own, separate Newgrounds post, if I ever get around to making it. I borrowed the fire and the burst fire hydrant for Quarl's banner image.

At around the same time that Quarl commissioned me to do her current Bandcamp banner, @DisOmikron commissioned me to do the YouTube banner for his second channel, one he recently set up. This one was full of referential humour and nods to friends, including myself.

I'm only glad that things like these have seen me become a lot more confident about my artwork. Above all, it's shown me that there are people out there who place confidence in my work and the way I deliver it, something which sobers me and makes me want to keep doing what I'm doing, and somehow find a way to do it that little bit better each time. For me, I can work on personal drawings and they are a good way of expressing my emotions or thought processes surrounding an event. Commissions hit differently. They aren't just a means of putting food on the table, they are a sign of trust in my work that I hope to be worthy of.