Deltarune 7th Anniversary Celebration Piece

DELTARUNE is a game that means a lot to me. I’ve been apart of its so-far 7 year long journey, so I wanted to make something to commemorate it.

The task was simple: create a piece in celebration of the anniversary— nothing too grand, though.

Unlike pretty much every single one of my other illustrations, for whatever reason, I went into this completely blind and without a sketch. I don’t have many in-progress screenshots, but I do have all of the palette variations that the piece went through. Ultimately, I settled on the most saturated version.

Around the time I decided to make this, I had just finished a Monthly Wallpaper Artwork for a project of mine, done for similar reasons. The only reason I had begun making this one was because I wanted something to post on my personal account— that, and I just wanted to show that much dedication to the series. I figured I’d carry over the lineless style I used for the wallpaper, both because the concept was fresh in my mind, and because I thought it’d look clean and nice.

On top of that, I also figured I could improve the method I had employed in the previous piece. The wallpaper was, admittedly, poorly optimized. Where some parts could have been better optimized for shading and layering purposes, they were instead grouped together to speed up the process (and, because it hadn’t crossed my mind). Here, I tried a lot more layering which made not only recoloring, but also making it easier to define depth, mainly when two parts of the same color overlapped each other.

It was a little bit harder to work with (or at least, remember) while in the process of drawing up the image, but it was worth its weight in gold with what i learned.

Overall, this helped me understand how I should be tackling pieces similar to this in the future, while also making me more confident in tackling them. As I stated in the wallpaper’s post, I hadn’t tried this particular style in about 3 or 4 years up to that point, so it was a nice refresher and exercise to go through. It was weird to draw without a sketch, and I don’t think I’ll be doing that again, but it was a nice change of pace nonetheless.