Welcome and new projects

So what am I working on right now?

Today I just finished a Folk of Air fanart. My third one! Yes, I am a fan.

This piece was almost entirely hand-drawn with just a little bit of digital painting at the end. I don’t typically draw like this. Usually it’s about 30% by hand and then the rest gets finished digitally, but today I wanted to get back to the basics. I’m pretty happy with how it came out:

Hi and welcome to my new website! I’m going to be talking about all things art, writing, and publishing, with a little bit of tarot-talk thrown in there too. You can also find me on Bluesky at: @avdaldesigns.bsky.social

Next is the cover for “Heart of the Desert,” a fantasy romance novel to be released soon. For this project I followed my usual process of: sketch, rough draft, nearly finished, and then the final touches and special effects that really bring the piece to life. I usually do a more detailed sketch but for this piece a simple outline was enough to figure out the composition.

I used a headshot I purchased from DepositPhotos.com for the woman and then drew the man based off of references. All the digital art was done in Krita. I absolutely love that program. Maybe I’ll write a whole blog post about it someday.

Lastly, I’m working on two tarot card decks. Both are at a pretty early stage but I hope to release them on Kickstarter later this year.

The first is tentatively called “Tarot Tails.” It’s an animal inspired tarot where each species representing a suit. Otters are cups, raccoons are swords, owls are pentacles, and corgis are wands:

My second work in progress is a more traditional tarot with flowers illustrated in Art Nouveau style. I wanted to offer a deck that was less heavily themed then Tarot Tails and my two oracles. This may have a broader appeal for both professional tarot readers and collectors:

Thank you for reading! Next blog post is (probably) going to be a discussion about novellas. I’ve recently read 18 novellas over a weekend and I analyzed what themes are popular at what page length, current cover trends in short reads, and how short reads plots differ from short stories or full length novels. Keep an eye out for that post and subscribe to my newsletter below to get notified of my latest updates, and feel free to email me at avdal@avdalart.com.