Hey!
Today I wanted to share my latest piece on the easel.

It's a portrait of Jinx from Arcane (League of Legends) that I'm working on for a group show at Gallery Nucleus in May!

This is the first time I've been invited to a show at Gallery Nucleus so I'm pretty excited about it. I've been in the gallery scene for a few years now, especially in LA, so I definitely had Gallery Nucleus on my mind of galleries I want to show in some day. I've shown in group shows at their sister gallery in Portland, but I never heard anything from their main location. Not going to lie, I was sometimes a little sad that their main LA location didn't seem to know about me even though I was active in both the gallery and entertainment scene.

When I got the invitation to the Arcane show, I had a crazy mix of emotions of excitement but also confusion?? Like, why did they invite me to an Arcane themed show so randomly out of the blue? For a second, I thought it was a spam email lol.

A lot of my friends are really into League and the Arcane series, and I know a few people who work for Riot too, but I have never done any work or fan art or anything for them before. So, it was just funny to me that I would be connected to them in this way at this gallery that I'd hoped to show at one day haha.

I've been making my way through the Arcane series again as I'm working on this piece. The series is always a pleasure to watch since every scene is like a beautiful painting. It's definitely a great series to inspire a gallery show.

Here's a small composition and material study I did before I started the final piece to plan out my values and test how some materials layer on top of each other.

I decided to do a really simple composition of a portrait of Jinx for my piece. I was inspired by how impactful her character design is, even when it's just her face on the screen. There's hundreds of beautiful backgrounds and scenes in the show but, for some reason, I keep remembering the scenes with her pale skin and pink eyes lurking in the dark. I think the strength of her design comes from how interesting her back story and motivation is, and I think every artist who works on her is able to bring out her personality really well. I think I was just inspired to try and do that myself with my own take on her design.

I was planning to add some pink washes on her eyes, but I'm kind of having second thoughts. I tried it on my thumbnail sketch and liked how they looked but I think I'm getting a little scared to do that this far into the final piece haha.

What do you think? Do you want to see a pink wash on her eyes? Let me know!