Baba Yaga's Walking Tree House

This is an illustration from 2021 that I spent a lot of time on. The original was an ink sketch that I wanted to turn into a full up color drawing and I did not take the most efficient approach.

For some background, Baba Yaga is a folklore monster... some times in movies portrayed as a male demon. I am Slavic though, and our version of Baba Yaga is an old witch that flies around on a broom stick or a mortar. When I was little my grandma used to try to scare me with stories of Baba Yaga and even told me her house was a tiny little utilty hut between the big apartment buildings we lived in. In the folklore, her house is actually mobile, and has chicken legs to move around on. Also the old crone is portrayed as cannibalistic, especially preferring the taste of young children.

I was intrigued... though I don't think I was ever really scared of the old witch. I just never found the Bulgarian "babas" scary, though other people might be onto something!

This is my interpretation of Baba Yaga's house, I like the idea of living trees that are their own characters, and chicken legs are just too tasty to be spooky!

This little wizard is not Baba Yaga, but is a visitor, and the tree is reacting to the intruder. If you pay attention to my drawings you may see this little red robed wizard show up in quite a few places. There must be a good reason to visit Baba Yaga, but we might never find out the exact cause.

Ink drawing sketch is how this started.

I refined this ink sketch digitally and then colored it. It looked cool, so I thought why not do illustration around it by placing it into a scene? This did not work out very well as the colors were clashing, the values were wrong... I spent a lot more time on this than I should have. Even now in 2025 I did some adjustments and painted in some details to clean this up. In the end some gradient maps and color overlays seem to have brought the image more together. I get frustrated looking at it though.

Big Blade - Sketch from 2012

This is a pencil sketch from 2012 that was only partially modified / colorized digitally. I love the way it turned out, especially her eyes.

Of Fire and Ice - Stibnite

This is a sketch from 2012 that also had another figure in the background. The drawing got heavily reworked and was never published before. I colorized it for the #Huevember2025 challenge over at Cara.app

The challenge was to use certain hue or color in an artwork on a specific day. On the 19th and 20th day of November the hue was "Stibnite" which is a grey-ish metal alloy which is toxic. The hues shown in the color picker for the challenge were very blue-ish though. I decided to use both a color layer to shift the drawing's colors to the blue and a gradient map with the dark values mapping to stibnite but the lighter values being mapped to warmer orange and red hues which were also part of the overall color pallete for the month of November.

The character is a fire witch.

Amanita the Axehead Assassin

This character design started as something akin to the mushroom people from Mario world, but as I went along I changed it to look more like a metallic weapon that's fused on or part of the head. Really enjoying working with pencils again last couple weeks.

Cleaned up and revised digitally, but I wanted to keep the intial pencil sketch look.

Elven Prisoner - Drawing from 2014

This is a painted over pencil drawing from 2014 that was never finished and never published. There was no particular reason I made this drawing, just a sketch.

Here's the work-in-progress animated GIF showing how the drawing was altered. The actual sketch wasn't anything special, but I liked it enough to paint over it. No references were used.

Elephant Seagull Mash

Something different, done in 2021 at the height of Covid for a challenge from Stumpy to draw something in the style of MegsMashables, here are links to both of them:

Stumpy's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stumpyfongo/

Meg's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/megsmashables/

Fun to work on this, cheers!

The Acolyte

Drawing of an Eternal Seven character from 2023.

Figure Study from 2008 - Luba Shumeyko

I used to do these studies a lot more. This was entirely done in Photoshop. The original reference photo was NSFW, recently retouched to make it more internet and general public friendly. Luba Shumeyko is on Instagram or you can search for her on the interwebs and find lots of cool shots. I ended up referencing her in other artowrks such as THIS one.

Lady - Portrait Ink Sketch from 2019

This is my take on Lady from the Black Company. The series by Glen Cook is one of my all time favorites and I can't recommend it enough to people who like fantasy.

This is an ink drawing I made in 2019, no refs used.

Hand - Fantasy Illustration

This is a mutated subhuman character from the Eternal Seven story.

Original drawing was made in 2007 and was one of the first illustrations I actually created entirely in Photoshop. It was always something I meant to go back to and to update and it received a new coat of paint in October 2025!

Never give up, skeleton!

Protoss Sketch

This is a concept art sketch of a creature from Starcraft. The original pencil sketch was made in 2007 and here were are in 2025 I finally finished it! He had hands for feet which I had to get rid of.

Modified in Photoshop.

Dragoon

This is concept art for a Dragoon warrior.

Final Fantasy 4, released as 2 in the US, is one of my favorite games of all time, and Kain Highwind was my favorite character in the game. His story arc was unexpected, and I loved how powerful he could become by the end of the story.

Oh how simple life was back in those Final Fantasy II days...

While this drawing is not meant to represent Kain, this is a similar type of spear-wielding, high-flying warrior. It may not be obvious but it's actually a woman in the drawing. Maybe a descendant of Kain, or just a fellow Deist Dragoon...

The original ink sketch was made sometime in 2021, and largely remained forgotten. In September 2025 I came back to it and spent quite a bit of time polishing the design and sketch. It was fun putting this together and I do like the end results.

Koloss Sketches from 2012

Koloss are creatures from the Mistborn series of books. These are giant modified humanoids who have grown to such massive proportions their skin is tearing in places as they become larger, the skin is blue in color, implying the humans used to create them may now be undead. There are armies of them serving the Lord Ruler, posing an existential threat to the main characters in the story.

Both of these pencil sketches were made in 2012 while I was reading Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy. Both drawings were modified in Photoshop, but you can still see their pencil origins. I have wanted to do a bigger painting featuring the Koloss in more detail, hopefully some day soon!

Other Mistborn Artowrks:

Queen of Pentacles - Doomsday Dream Clan

The many meanings of the Queen of Pentacles tarot card.

This is another drawing from the archives.

Originally the concept sketch was made in 2010 when I was on a team of artists called the Doomsday Dream Clan. We participated in a team challenge in the now dead conceptart.org website. The challenge was to draw cards from a tarot deck and this is one of the cards we selected to paint. The intent was to create a complete deck from the cards drawn by all the different teams of artists who participated in the contest. I do not know if the deck was ever completed, but I know that some stunning work was done during the challenge and some famous pro artists participated in the contest.

This version of the Queen of Pentacles depicted here did not make it into our final work or submission, but was instead an original concept done by me when we first started to get some ideas. In August 2025 I decided to push this concept to a more complete state and this is the result. I have been meaning to go back and post our completed works from the Doomsday Dream Clan on a separate subsection of this website.

This project was a lot of fun to work on, and I do think we did some really good work. I honestly think that I did my best work while working with other artists. Maybe now it doesn't look so impressive, but in 2010 this was the peak of my ability. After we completed the challenge the complete lack of votes from the community was totally demoralizing. It was another showcase of how popularity skewed perspective and affected the voting results. I'm not saying we should have won, but we were close and our entries were very unique. I suffered a few years of burnout after this challenge completed where I didn't draw very much.

Burnout is a common thing for many artists and the causes may be different. For me usually art comes in waves, or as I like to call them "dumps", where I push and improve massively over a few weeks or months, but then have to take a few years to pull back and gather more energy for the next push. I'm now old, and I wish I had spent more time and effort in improving early as an artist.

The end is coming soon, maybe like most artists my work will be more valued after I'm dead. Cheers to that!

Starship Test Sketch from 2007

This is way outside the normal stuff I draw, but it was early on in my digital art career and I hope I can be forgiven!

Concept/drawing was made in 2007.

Forever Yours

My dear friend,

Years have passed, you changed my life, reshaped my destiny, but I doubt you'd recognize me.

I still think about you every day, more so lately. I wish that I could speak with you because my ime is running out. I can feel it in my bones. No, I'm not injured, or sick, at least not that I know. While I'm old enough to suddenly drop dead I don't think it's likely. I just can't shake this feeling of impending doom, not just for myself, but for us all. So I'd like to get a few things off my chest before it's too late. I was unable to speak clearly before, I failed when it mattered most. Now I hope you'll hear this whisper in the wind when it reaches you, and that you'll know...

I never meant you any harm.

If I have regrets in this life, it's that I couldn't keep you closer, that I was not good enough for you to be around.

You taught me things, so many things... Some were simple, all were needed.

You are my greatest triumph. It was brief, but with you I felt as if I walked amongst the gods.

You granted the confidence I needed desparately before you came along. Perhaps too much... but I would rather be this way, than the way I was before.

Because of you, I am so much stronger now. I survived the things that came after. You made sure I was ready.

You proved that life can be worth so much more than living.

You were the light I needed to see.

The most important lesson you taught was to let go. It's not that there was much left to hold on to in the end. Memories, ashes, darkness, and persistent agony remained once you were gone. Despite the pain, you were the thing I least wanted to let go of. But there was no choice, and I let go. This made everything I was stuck on later so much easeir to deal with.

The last things you said to me cut deeper every day. You needed an excuse, but it still hurt so much. You broke me down and I am not built to fight against you. It may be obvious to others why it happened, but I didn't understand. Your intent is clear now that the years have gone by. The pain is dull today, but in your absence it continues to grow. It won't get better, I will carry it for the rest of my days.

Things will never be the same and nothing can be done to change it.

Yet here we are. With time running out, I just want to say thank you, before it's too late. Thank you for the things you did for me, the light, and for the lessons you delivered. You were right, this is what was meant to be.

Most of all, I hope you know, that despite it all... I am forever yours!

Personal illustration, done in July 2025.

Memories flooded in as I worked on this and it became clear what it symbolizes.

I don't do WIPs as much these days. I don't think people are interested, but I still like them.

War Beast Sketch

This is a recent tiny ink sketch that was painted over in Photoshop. I've been on a kick with these scaled war beasts, the first one I drew was last year, and I've been thinking on how to incorporate them into the Eternal Seven story.

The original sketch, was just messing around when I made it.

Lust and Gluttony

This is a pencil drawing from 2008, and what I consider one of my most iconic artowrks from an era that featured some really cool art. I'm not really sure I have that same creativity in me anymore as I had during the first decade of this century. It is a goal of mine to redo this artwork and give it the justice it deserves since I have improved quite a bit since then, despite losing all creativity!

Felicia Romero - Figure Study 2008

This is a pencil drawing done in 2008. The reference is the amazing Felicia Romero who used to be an IFBB figure competitor back in the days. Check out her IG, she's still going strong!

Here's a low res version of the original reference was from FLEX magazine. It's clear that I messed up the proportions but the drawing looked pretty good for my skill at the time. I don't know where this drawing is now, or how big the size was, but looking at some of the detailed highlights makes me think that this was actually larger than my normal half-page sketches.

Annie Is Alive - Portrait 2025

It's been a very long time since I attempted a portrait, and this one was completely random. A post on Threads was suggested to me, with a drawing of this lady, and I immediately also had to draw her.

This is the source of the inspiration: https://www.threads.com/@annieisdead1

This is the original sketch, made in about 5 minutes with pencil.

The final drawing was reworked quickly in Photoshop with some overlays and shading. Under 30 mins total. While I like the result, when I put my drawing next to the original reference I can see the flaws. I wasn't trying to be perfect, should probably do more portraits again as I'm out of shape, hope I captured the essence.

Annie, if you see this, I hope you are NOT dead! You're amazing, cheers!