Happy New Year, all! First off, I’d like to share my last few personal works of 2022.

I finally completed the main sprite for Erika, AKA the Phantom, for my Phantom of the Opera visual novel adaptation. I had a lot of fun researching late-Victorian mourning gowns for her costume. At one point, I was really into the idea of having a veil attached to her hat, but I nixed it for practical reasons. It would have obscured her facial expressions too much and been difficult to deal with in Live2D animation.

This piece I knocked out relatively quickly during the time I had off for the holidays. It’s inspired by a lot of the reading I’ve been doing lately about medieval women mystics and “female homoeroticism” (for lack of a better term) in the Middle Ages.

I have several goals/activities planned for 2023. Starting in late January, I’ll be taking a short course on graphic novels. I love sequential art, and I’m really interested in creating some – so this is me taking the plunge. I also, of course, am going to keep working on my visual novel project, now titled Beneath the Opera House. There are only two more basic character sprites to go before I have art for the complete cast. I’m looking into commissioning a couple of short original tracks for the soundtrack as well. A Phantom of the Opera story has to have good music!