January 2023

Happy New Year, everybody. Antoni here. As per tradition, I shall be featuring the single pieces of work that I have done throughout this year according to the respective months they were done in. While I was branching out to more ambitious goals as an artist mainly specializing in my Inuyasha AU headcanon known as The Splendid Seven as well as getting myself into more art contests, I was also dealing with a whole bunch of obligations that I needed to fulfill from my university in terms of my last tenure as a Bachelor’s in English and Musicology student, my up and down tenure with my Bachelor’s Thesis to finally obtain my Bachelor’s Degree and my ongoing tenure as a Master’s in American Studies student. Some months saw more significant growth in my hand-drawn content on DeviantArt, while other months saw me increasing more in the amount of written content, requests done by fellow artists, and surveys for the sake of audience feedback but decreasing in hand-drawn content. Nevertheless, I still considered 2022 to be an exciting year to continue challenging myself as an artist and a content creator, and I will make 2023 an exciting year for taking more action to grow my content further as well as continue to challenge myself more often. I do not regret the journey I have had thus far, and I want to continue reaching more ambitious heights. Let us begin this trip down memory lane. January: Barnyard Line Dancing from the Abyss This marked the second to the last contest entry I made for BeardedLuckDragon’s :iconBeardedLuckDragon: and Aryaveandyou’s :iconAryaveandyou: All-American Spider Ho-Down contest. As fortune would have it, I was the only one daring enough to submit something because other fellow artists felt uncomfortable with submitting something involving spiders and dark elements. The prompt for this art contest was to have a devil playing the fiddle, a werewolf spider playing the drums, a spider playing the harmonica, a spider the piccolo, a spider playing the trumpet, one Central American in a cowboy hat and cowboy boots, one South American in a straw hat and blue jeans, and one North American in a plaid dress dancing with a bale of hay behind them, and taking place in a barn. Thanks to these ideas surging in my head, the human characters known as Alberto Horacio Julio González from Guatemala, Guatemala-born but Argentina-raised Alfonso Herberto Jaime González, and Consuelo Gloria Margarita Rodriguez y González from Monterrey, Mexico were born as well as my design for Mephistopheles, Belial the Werewolf Spider, and the Three Black Widow Spiders (Alecto, Arachne, and Aglaopheme). It was fun conjuring a story for the three hapless heroes falling under Mephistopheles’s and his spiders’ spell because there is some amusement in making a dire situation all the more exciting. I am also just as happy to keep them in my gallery as my OCs that I would love to share with my fellow artists. February: Romancing in Paradise Island Ah, after over four years of being on DeviantArt and spending my tween to early teen years of being a RobRae and Zutara partisan, I was free! It was time to draw two of my most beloved OTPs having a moment together! All joking aside, I have been wanting to draw Robin x Raven and Zuko x Katara fan art for the longest time because these were the couples that I held most dearly to my heart during my formative years. I always appreciated their moments together when they were placed center stage in their respective shows and respective networks because both couples had a lot in common despite both of them not being endgame pairings and even despite their differences. They were also the most nuanced pairings that had a lot going for them instead of what was seen in canon, but those are going to be discourses for another time. Nevertheless, fanfiction, fanart, and fan-works exist for a reason. I figured that a beach setting for RobRae and Zutara may be overdone because it is usually one of the most romantic spots for couples to engage in the usual sun and surf with some intimacy thrown in the mix. It was also my way of stating that, yes, I did grow up with films such as I Know What You Did Last Summer, plays such as William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and literary works such as Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest which have two couples coexisting in the main story. Furthermore, this was also one piece of work that I turned in for BeardedLuckDragon’s and Aryaveandyou’s Summer 2022 contest, which was the last contest they hosted. The contest was supposed to last until August 2022. However, BeardedLuckDragon cut it short because he had other real-life priorities to deal with, and I respect his decision. At least the best thing about this piece of RobRae and Zutara fan art was that I drew them having a double date at the beach and that I might potentially do a lot more with RobRae and Zutara going out on double dates. March: Princess Alexandra Sofiya Mikhailova This was done for yumikurata’s OC contest. I do not always like to get overly political or overly sociological on DeviantArt, but, with the continuous contention involving Ukraine’s oppression under Russia and the world suffering because of Vladimir Putin, it was appropriate to create an original character who symbolizes solidarity and fortitude not only for the people of Ukraine but also for the world. Step forward Princess Alexandra Sofiya Mikhailova who is a Renaissance woman always there for her people in dire times and in joyful times. Princess Alexandra is a beacon of hope and strength for her people in terms of using her medical knowledge to heal their wounds, help out soldiers in preparing for oncoming invasions, and never surrendering to anybody who dares to make her beloved Ukraine fall under the enemies’ clutches. Political duties aside, she is also an accomplished opera singer…