BTS: Making Art for an Upcoming Book 🖤📚 + Happy October! ✨

Hi everyone & happy October! 🍂 I hope you’ve all been having a lovely start to the month:)

I can finally share what I’ve been working on for the past month! 😍 One of my favorite fantasy authors, Adalyn Grace, commissioned me to draw the main characters for her new trilogy she just announced: The Wretched Divine ☁️✨

I’ve loved her books ever since reading Belladona, and I still can’t believe I got to work with her 😭💗 Here’s the book info:

You can also read her interview about the book series here 🥰

I thought I would share some behind the scenes as well! I originally made five concept sketches, each one exploring different poses for the characters.

There were poses and vibes that Adalyn liked in each one, but I needed to make several adjustments to fit her vision. Since the characters are in a love triangle, she wanted them to be more close and interactive, and Aurelie (the female character) needed to look more fierce and less soft, since she’s a knight.

So I created this one:

And Adalyn and I both loved this concept the most! 😍 I tried to show the competitive nature between Yuri (the angel) and Severin (the demon), and I also adjusted Aurelie’s expression/facial structure to be more angular and fierce.

Next came the refined sketch:

This phase was all about capturing and refining all the character details: expressions, outfit plans, hair and wings. Both male leads have wings, and at first I was skeptical about whether I could make them fit one canvas with THREE characters, but drawing them all really close to each other helped :)

Once the refined sketch was approved, I made a bunch of color palette concepts to choose from.

It was mainly color options for Aurelie’s dress :) We ended up going with option #1, but with the black neck-cuff.

Then I got to work on rendering!

I spent a total of 30 hours on the rendering (my longest drawing process ever), but I had so much fun with every detail! 🖤 It was such a dream to work with my fav author, I was fangirling the whole time hehe 🤭

Anywho, I am SUPER excited to dive into a new month with all of you! 😍 Can you believe it’s already October?! This is one of my fav months and I’m ready to create all the cozy content 😌🍁✨

Thank you so much to all of you for your support!! Let’s have a fun month together 🥰

Love,

Lydia 💌