Art and Comics by Kieran Thompson
I write fanfic sometimes and one of the things I like to do is draw little cover arts for the chapters I post. I spent most of the day on this one. The characters are minor characters from Final Fantasy XIV, because I guess I’m also the sort of person who likes to latch onto minor characters and flesh them out.
One of these days I’ll write an original romance/fantasy novel and I’ll draw the cover for that too.
I spent maybe way too long on this. I think I’m getting better at painting though.
There’s this photo that’s apparently from a production of 12th knight going around that many people have done drawings based on and I also wanted to do one.
It took a few tries but I put it on my inprnt page https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kytri/knights/
I just posted the cover over on it’s own site. Which can be found here: https://cryptsandcantrips.kytri.net/
I won’t be making blog posts for every webcomic update because it would quickly be most of the feed but I may do a key one every chapter or so. Usually posting a chapter, 32 pages + the covers, takes a few months.
Anyway I think it is a good chapter and I hope people will enjoy it. I’m honestly excited to start on the next one.
I’ll leave you with a fun, tangentially related anecdote: Hali’s outfit here is inspired by the outfit Lucy Lawless wore in Xena: Warrior Princess. I was a fan of the show when I was a teen and I guess I saw a post or something about it or the actress recently enough to remind me of it. Anyway when I was in high school my family also had a dog called Xena. I didn’t name her that, my mother did. Mom didn’t watch the show but we only had one TV with satellite access so she’d see me watch it. Xena (the dog) was a very timid animal and Mom said she wanted to inspire her to be brave with the name.
I’ve been trying to teach myself to paint digitally for years and I think maybe I’m finally making some progress. I’ve become rather fond of the default gouache brush in CSP.
I have an untitled novel project I was working on this year and this orc guy (I’m calling him Gesh currently but that may change.) would be from that. So far I’ve made a lot less progress on the novel than I hoped.
This is partially just to make sure this works but here’s a sketch I posted on Bluesky yesterday.
I’ve gotten very into Final Fantasy XIV over the past few years, which is surprising as historically I don’t like MMOs very much. I do tend to like Final Fantasy games though. I play a duskwight elezen, essentially the setting’s version of a dark elf, named Thilan. It’s fairly popular to ship one’s character with another player’s character or an NPC in the story. I picked an NPC named Haurchefant, which is perhaps a bit basic since he is very popular, but I’m quite fond of him.