Amber Portrait - By the Ocean

Taken from my Instagram:

It's 2021 but I've done my share of thinking about 2020. A year that everyone lost, in terms of time, life, trust... I hope people can find a way to create better lives for themselves, each other, and the world going forward. There's so much to lose still.

There's many feelings I've struggled to unpack and process in recent years. Much of it relates to my dreams of becoming a professional artist, and how much I've dragged my feet identifying what that entails long-term. I hope to find the answer to those questions, to blow away that perpetual cloud hanging over my head. I guess this was one way of addressing it, by painting a character close to my heart, in a scene that best describes her disposition and outlook on living... If anyone could overcome all these struggles, in a way that best defined how I wish I could do so, it'd be her.

This is Amber, a main character from the universe of a book I wrote in high school. She's basically a waterbender/healer, but to a much more extreme degree (think Helryx from BIONICLE and how she suspended a tidal wave over an armada). A lot of my characters are influenced by BIONICLE, Final Fantasy, etc. Amber in particular is a character I've had since elementary school, at least in terms of her basic look/colors and abilities, and I've sunken way too many hours into her design, which is based on veiltail goldfish/butterfly koi. I'd been noodling with the drawing too much recently, so I decided to call it a day to keep myself from spending an unnecessarily long time on it. Hope you guys like it.