April rewards have been sent + Behind the scenes preview for the Shylily project ! 🐰🏴☠️
Hi eveyrone!Thank you for your patience!I finally sent all the rewards so please check DM's or emails!
If you missed the timing, here are the links :
Additionally, I've been thinking for a while on how to do some behind the scenes content, especially for bigger collabs and projects like the Shylily one.I realized I never really do deep explanations of the projects I work on. Usually, the sketch and illustration process / video recording are self-explanatory. Even though it often involves more than that, like a research phase, inspirations, failed experiments 😓… and that’s just for “regular” classic illustration projects!!
So when I do those bigger projects, or collaborations, there is so much more that goes into it that I thought it might be cool to explain and describe, especially to my core audience who follow me here.
So whenever I have the time and feel like doing it, especially for those bigger projects, I’ll try to do a deep dive—sort of a post mortem of how it was made!
I will always try to share as much info as I can, but I’ll keep some things secret, either because the content might be used for later projects, NDA, or privacy, and to keep my communication with partners professional. But everything that can be shared will be!
I wanted to do it when i did projects with Sinder, but couldn't find the time, but if you like this one, I'll try to do it for every projects!
Here is just a preview of what's included in that excusive content, that you get with the reward
Shylily Casino Bunny — How It Was Made
What started as a Christmas bunny ended up debuting at Easter, so needless to say a lot happened from when we first approved the project, to the actual release! I will do my best using discord messages, sketch and various WIP files, to walk you through how this project was made...
Step 1 : Pre production / Planification
After I first brought up to Lily the idea of doing a project together, and that I really liked her model, and we agreed it would be fun, a loooooot of time passed with nothing really happening. (It was back in 2024.)
Basically, with my schedule being super packed, we didn’t really discuss a theme or release date before months had passed. 😅
When I finally had time to think about it, I wanted to find the perfect theme that would make Lily and her shrimpies happy, but also one I would have a lot of fun to work on.
At this point, it was on me to bring a cool idea to Lily, as she was super flexible and had no specific request.
I’m working a lot in Milanote when preparing my planning and illustration projects. It’s a great whiteboard software, where I can visualize things a lot better. I love it 🥰
So I noted all my ideas, took a few days to find references, and sent them to Lily.
As you can see there were quite a lot, so it took a few days for Lily to browse through, but when she came back… it was in full caps lock 😭I was super happy that some of my own tastes and ideas were hitting the mark for both of us.
After taking some time to think about it, and having a hard time to decide, ultimately it was the bunny who won, Lily wanting one for a long time. She then came up with the idea of having a jacket, or shoulder accessory that would be comfy and fluffy.
So I went back to Milanote, and made a more focused moodboard, to really nail down the bunny elements, the mood, the poses, the Gacha girls inspiration.
To be honest, I was afraid that with all those ideas from the first moodboard, it would be a long process for Lily to choose from, but she knew what she wanted, so it actually made it easier for her, she told me. We now had enough elements to talk about dates and actual production.
Because seasons and events can influence the design a lot, I tried to see when I would have time to work on it, talking with WZ to understand his constraints, and obviously asking Lily for timeframes to make sure it wouldn’t collide with her other projects.
Since we talked about doing the winter coat, and fluffy jacket, it was evolving into a winter bunny, so obviously we discussed about a release for Christmas or January. It was still a long time away, so enough for me to plan things.
After agreeing we would target Christmas, we all went back into silence for some time, working on our other projects and finishing everything to have time to work on the illustration.
At this time, I was planning to start working on the actual sketch in October.
So come October… and...
This was just the preview, please Read the full Behind the Scene directly from your reward pack!
Here are a couple of the WIP and preview files I'm sharing on that, and I would love to hear your feedback on that type of content for fun and bigger projects like this, that are more than just illustrations.Tell me what you'd like to know on future ones!