[ Heart of Stone ] 10 💧 Rekindling (Patreon)

PREVIOUS: [ Heart of Stone ] 9 🔶💧 Flowers>> NEXT: [ Heart of Stone ] 11 🔶 Over AgainRead from the beginning: [ Heart of Stone ] 1 🔶 The Sorrow of the God-

New episode is finally here!! 🔥

Heart of Stone never meant to be this long. It was a fleeting concept that 2 years ago I turned into 4 comic pages for the sake of it. The idea was having a AU I could have fun with, doodling something from time to time to expand on it - just silly scenarios of Geodaddy fighting with technology and Baizhu supporting his bff Kaveh on his goofy attempts to get noticed by his crush... but you responded with so much enthusiasm that it boosted my confidence, and I wanted to give the story a shot to become something more! 💜 since then, HoS became my passion project and I enjoyed exploring the themes of death and love with my favorite ship SO MUCH! At some point of the story development I realized I needed to brainstorm Wrio and Neuvi backstory in order to justify Neuvillette's behavior and personality at the time Zhongli met him, and it took me so long and I poured so much into it that when it was completed I was like... "no way I'm going to shrink all this into a couple dialogues" but also "no way I can draw all of this". I REALLY wanted to bring you more of Wrio and Neuvi but I'm also conscious of my limits: I can only draw so much and I unfortunately my English knowledge is not enough for literature... but I love a story narrated through different medias so I asked a talented Wriolette author I've been a long time fan of if she was down to write them for Heart of Stone∼I was lucky enough that Maleficar accepted my commission! 💙 We've been having a lot of fun working together on different projects over the last year, and this one was no exception!! I'm extremely grateful for the amount of passion and hard work she dedicated to this fic, there's been a lot of back-and-forth on the story details and she was so patient with me correcting all the bits that needed reworking! There were parts I wrote in my very basic English that she turned into emotional masterpieces - I hope you'll enjoy our joint effort in this fic!! 🫶💙💙💙Another person deserving all my thanks is my best friend Keiki who not only did flat colors for most of this comic's pages, but, during the brainstorming stage, they listened to my ideas, witnessed the lore evolution, and always gave me their pov and shared crucial insights on the canon Genshin lore that I could use to enrich the AU! HoS wouldn't be half as interesting without their contribution 🙏🧡🧡🧡

Thanks to all of you too for reading and supporting Heart of Stone so far!! I hope you enjoy this episode and continue enjoy future updates! 💜

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Art insights

You may remember from [ JUN 25 ] ART Recap that I mentioned I've been redrawing all of the comic's background, this one's the first chapter I've created backgrounds entirely by myself (it's just a little something I'm proud of because I like how it turned out haha) 🙏I've also used monochrome for some panels and I really like the look of it!

I had experimented with halftones in two variants too, but in the end I still preferred the use of colors, I think they add a lot with a little extra effort! I would still like to play with halftones more, maybe on different comics!

And this is a fun comparison of AU Neuvi and Wrio, 10 years apart... 👀

Part 11 is in the making∼ 💐