a little banner for the current mastodon instance i'm on, critter.cafe, made for instance admin pebble ^_^

it gave me a really good spread of inspiration points (both for vibes and style, using my own artwork as focus). for a little while, i was having trouble figuring out the color palette. i had a few thumbnail passes.

one of my only "resolutions" this year is to do more thumbnailing before i get invested in the composition of a piece. i often get committed to a layout before having the value spread in mind, causing the piece to lose some of its 'oomph' and making things harder to process, visually speaking. so i want to dedicate some extra energy into that before i get to the coloring stage!

i am really happy with the bark texture here. ive been focusing a lot on emulating bark more faithfully, especially on pine trees (considering i encounter pine tree bark more than anything out here). i've come a long way!