Barrol (January 2017) Redraw (Patreon)

This one was fun!  I'm glad I got to show Barrol some love after nearly five years.  I still really like her design today, even if I didn't have the skills to fully do her justice back then.

I made the original 2017 piece while I was in my first year of college, living away at my grandparents'.  I'd doodled her initial design while sitting through class (I forget what the subject was) in one of those big lecture halls with 1000+ students.  A little over a week later, late at night when I probably should have been studying, I made this piece on my old laptop.  Thing was pretty weak, despite being massive (I could hardly call it portable).  I was still pretty new to digital art at the time and it shows through a lot of my decisions with this piece.  Barrol was drawn on a single layer.  I didn't know I could draw different elements on separate layers and set them to over lap each other.  I also didn't know how to lock pixels.  If I wanted to change an element's color or avoid drawing outside her pixels, I'd have to use the wand tool.  This is why I drew with a pixel brush instead of a soft-edge, which would be impossible to select.  At the time, trying to comprehend how people did anything more complicated with digital art was overwhelming for me.

All that being said though, this piece is one of the few that I can still tolerate from this era... well, before I redrew it anyways.  Now it sucks lol