Wow, this took a long time. Oo;;

Okay, so recently Ash showed up to visit Seti in our chat!RP, so of course, I had to figure out what he looked like nowadays. Not too different, I suppose - new hat, replacement wrist accessory, penchant for layers, same earrings... All in all, he went pretty easy.

Which obviously meant I had to challenge myself somehow, and my torture of choice was coloring. Rather than my usual cel-like shading, I decided try out a different way of soft-shading. Yes, I know, doesn't look all that different from other times I've used soft-shading, but the technique was different. After some trial and error, got everything to the point where I was pretty happy with it. So happy, in fact, that I thought he deserved a background.

Originally, I planned on something simple: a nice, easy wall with Ash's name in hieroglyphics on it. Almost as soon as I began, I made a quick mental revision to cut the wall off to show the desert behind it (take note: DO NOT use Kit's way of composing pictures. Plan things out ahead of time! ). But the wall decided to be difficult... so I nixed the wall and decided to just do the desert. Besides, I need the background practice.

After looking through lots of reference photos to get a feeling for the desert, I got to work on that, but I still wanted to get Ash's name in there... so I decided to have an old obelisk sticking up out of the sand. But just having his name on there (inside the oval thingy, if you're curious) looked pretty empty, so I dug out my handy dandy Understanding Hieroglyphs book and hashed together a few of Ash's titles to stick on there as well. It's supposed to say something along the lines of "Divine Lord of Libya, Revered Lord of the Red Land, Ash, Beloved of Set."

Folks who do understand hieroglyphs fluently: I don't. The only dead language I've studied is Old English. I just looked through an introductory guide, so if it's grammatically wrong or something, don't pounce all over me, kay?

Overall, though, I think the three days of work were worth it. ^_^