This is a very old piece that I began working on again early this year. It's a personal benchmark for myself as it resembles two different artistic stuggles I faced toward the latter half of the last decade.

I took a long chunky haitus to work on my skills and improve my art, but without a real goal set as to ~why~ I was doing so other than simply knowing my work could be better.

Somewhere along the way while studying the fundamentals of shape, light, and composition I lost the intuition that I brought into pixel art initially, I lost track of that singular thing that makes a work of art a ~Carrion piece~ and around that time lost track of a lot of things in my personal life as well. My work suffered greatly for it and I was rarely happy with my own art.

All that being said, the journey was never a waste. Sometimes you have to forget who you are in order to know what you can become.

Figuring out how to merge my new found knowledge with my original style was hard, I had to break my own rules, make new rules, and then break the new ones over and over and over. I studied my own work. I sat there looking at things I made as a literal child asking myself "how did I ever do this?"

I learned a lot from that kid, but my biggest takeaway was to make art for yourself before anybody else.

The avian swordsman is the old aspect of this piece, and the remaining image is new. (Including the sword itself)

I hope you all enjoy this piece, there's a lot more to come. Happy holidays to you all! <3