Day 1 - Gourmand
I was having a bit of a style crisis during the week leading up to Art Month, so I wanted to experiment a bit with my rendering style. I continued to use this scratchy rendering style until the next year's Art Month.
Day 2 - Memory Conflux
This drawing is based on one of my early encounters with the inspectors, when I first found out that eating neurons would aggro them. I was actually playing as Gourmand, but I opted to include Survivor in this piece instead since I had already drawn Gourmand for the previous prompt.
Day 3 - Spearmaster
A simpler piece meant to take place in one of the rooms leading up to the Communications Array. Spearmaster's scar would've likely healed at this point (and it did by the time I got to that area in my playthrough), but I wanted to include it anyway.
Day 4 - Pole Plants
At first, I wasn't really sure exactly where I wanted this piece to take place. I briefly considered using one of the rooms of The Wall, since earlier in the day I had almost died to a pole plant there. I ended up basing the background on Industrial Complex instead, because I wanted to be able to incorporate the pole plant's red color into a split-complementary color scheme.
Day 5 - Bubble Plant
The background lineart here is pretty thick compared to some of the other pieces. My future pieces would end up having far more looser and scratchier lineart for their background elements. Rivulet also has a few extra shines in their eyes, which I wouldn't end up including in my future depictions of them.
Day 6 - Garbage Wastes
The vultures in the top left were originally included in order to tie in with the following day's prompt, but the color palette changes I ended up making to that piece rendered them obsolete. They still serve their purpose as an anchor point for the background, though. The sky would feel rather empty without them.
Day 7 - Vultures
The vultures in this piece were originally meant to be yellow and green in order to tie in with the background vultures in the Garbage Wastes piece. I ended up drastically changing the color palette because I didn't like how it turned out. I tried out making them purple and red before settling on orange.
Day 8 - Jolly Co-op
I'm the blue slugcat in the middle, and my friends are the others :)
Day 9 - The Exterior
The color palette of the Wall during Rivulet's campaign really stuck with me.
Day 10 - Looks to the Moon
I always thought that the iterators looked like they had haloes, so I opted for a composition similar to paintings of religious figures. I did another similar piece in 2024 for the Five Pebbles prompt. I really want to redraw this piece, and maybe do more for the other iterators I haven't drawn like this.
Day 11 - Tuch
Tuch.
Day 12 - Metropolis
To be honest? I think that this and Day 31 are the few pieces that still really hold up in 2025. I had a lot of fun with the scenery and color palette here.
Day 13 - Elite Scavenger
Another piece that went through several color palette changes. I was originally thinking of making the scavenger teal, but I felt that a pinkish-purple would mesh better with the background and the color of the spear.
Day 14 - Meals
Little confession regarding Gourmand's food quest that isn't super relevant to this piece: I got frustrated trying to hunt down a red centipede for the last food item and ended up using the Beastmaster mod to spawn one in so that I could kill and eat it. I found every other food without cheating, at least!!
Day 15 - Daddy Long Legs
I think this piece could've used a bit more contrast in the background, but otherwise I was pretty happy with how it turned out.
Day 16 - Neurons
I didn't individually draw all of the neurons here, but I wanted to avoid making it look too obviously copy-pasted. My original plan was to make a neuron brush and use that for the neurons, but I didn't end up liking the way the brush turned out. I ended up drawing a handful of neurons and then copy-pasting a few at a time, adding some additional transformations so that it wouldn't be too obvious that they were copied.
Day 17 - Artificer
Went for a feeling of tension. I think I could've done more with the blood.
Day 18 - Lizards
I originally wanted to draw one of those eel lizards that were added to Shoreline, but I drew a caramel lizard instead. I really like Outer Expanse's color palette, and I wanted to draw a piece set there.
Day 19 - Blizzard
Admittedly more of a gentle snow than a full-on blizzard. I think snow is something that I really need to practice more with.
Day 20 - Eggbugs
Slugcat having a quick little snack break.
Day 21 - The Friend
When I was playing Saint's campaign, I briefly tamed a cyan lizard in Silent Construct. Later during that cycle, the lizard ended up sacrificing itself to a red spider that was trying to grab me. Rest in peace, unnamed cyan lizard. Without you, I probably would've been stuck there for several more cycles.
Day 22 - Jump
This one jump in Sky Islands pissed me off for a while during my first playthrough because I couldn't make it without a Squidcada. I started going through Drainage System to get to Filtration System instead so that I could avoid it.
Day 23 - Shoreline
Tried to focus on Saint's version of Shoreline, which I found pretty terrifying since there's now Miros Vultures and Leviathans inhabiting the same place. I would've done the water a lot differently now, it's a bit too simple for my taste.
Day 24 - Expedition
I've only ever been able to finish Hunter's expedition, but I ended up doing a Monk-focused piece instead since I don't draw them that often.
Day 25 - The Martyr
I remember struggling to think of an idea for this prompt since The Martyr is such a weirdly specific achievement. I just ended up doing something inspired by the passage art.
Day 26 - Yeek
I really like Yeeks, they give me jerboa vibes.
Day 27 - Aquapede
I had a clear idea of this composition for this piece pretty early on. It's actually one of the first prompts I did a sketch for, and it's probably the one that underwent the least amount of changes.
Day 28 - 6th Anniversary
A fun little celebration with everyone!
Day 29 - Karma 10
One early draft for this piece involved Pebbles, but the sketch didn't exactly match the vision I had for this prompt (though I ended up recycling the sketch for this piece.)
Day 30 - Noodleflies
A piece based on a situation I got caught in during my very first playthrough. I got stuck in Sky Islands because I couldn't find any other food besides a baby noodlefly. This was before I learned that eating baby noodleflies would make the mama angry. What followed was a very rough couple of cycles where I would get repeatedly killed by the mama noodlefly that managed to squeeze itself into my shelter.
Day 31 - Ancient
Funnily enough, I don't really call the precursors ancients
anymore. This piece is based on the cover art from Queen's album News of the World.