My dearest friend and platonic life partner introduced me to Procreate on my iPad pretty early on in my art journey, and that began a long foray into digital art! Around the same time I discovered Hades and the incredible art of Jen Zee. I got obsessed.

“God of Blood” | Digital portrait of the cosplayer Poisonne in his Zagreus cosplay | click for his Instagram!

For a while I really wanted to do figure and character art, so to learn I essentially created “tribute pieces” of much of the Hades character art. When I began posting my Hades tribute art, I started getting a lot of positive attention from my friends and family on social media and it gave me a lot of motivation to keep working my way through the character art.

Artemis

The Olympians

Orpheus and Eurydice

Persephone

Somewhat unwisely, I also started posting my WIPs and completed tribute art pieces to r/Hades. For a while, people were very kind but for the most part the Reddit community was very cruel, with multiple people telling me that I had no talent, no eye for art, and that I should just quit art so that I wouldn’t have to make other people look at what I’d drawn. It was awful and I ended up taking a break from art for about 9-12 months. The encouragement from my wonderful friends and community eventually led me to pick it back up again, and I’m so glad I did.

I have a lot of fondness for these pieces now because I remember having so much fun making them. I loved getting to immerse myself in Jen Zee’s art style and characters and I loved what I learned in terms of character creation and anatomy.

Ultimately, figure drawing and character art isn’t my passion, but I loved making all of these pieces nonetheless.

Nyx