it's superstition but do whatever you want defining your new year just before midnight. i think setting intention is important whether it's scientific or not i'll be working on my novel. just broke 85k words today !

OC_tober 11. Eva #oc

when i want institutional respect i IP consult and write essays and bestsellers when i want to pay my mortgage i draw furry art

this week's craft essay is for everyone still sprinkling "he crossed his arms" between dialogue and calling it physical description. about Primal, wordless storytelling, and building scenes that work on mute.

this week's craft essay is for everyone tired of being told they're morally suspect for liking complex characters. about diegetic writing, why compelling beats likeable, and why fiction isn't an instruction manual.

Owlcat Games featured the Deadstar Logbook on their gamedev resources page 😭 owlcat.games/learning genuinely honoured. there's incredible craft analysis on there. very grateful to be included. logbook.deadstar.black

#dailyart 72 : part 1

I had the honor of making this painting for Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein.

i made a new toyhou.se for managing characters for the arpg and got carried away doing CSS and html styling for my sons toyhou.se/fangsblack

made a windows app for myself i've been planning for 2 years because nothing like it existed. just a lightweight, simple ui for adding web links and local folder path links with imgs since i'm very visual-first, this has alrdy saved me minutes of time today hunting thru project files in explorer

ughh please look at the stylisation, how the blackwork "melts" . Roberto de la Torre kills it every time. also the title treatment of the fangs + scales? chef kiss

from halloween🐺turned him into a wuff

what if your⚓officers' uniforms didn't just show rank, but encoded what gods they survived meeting? wrote about designing naval uniforms as worldbuilding—color as theology, insignia as mythology, and why competence can look like divinity 🔱 full craft breakdown:

The skeletal remains of mutants unfathomable have shaped the toxic swamps hiding in the district under the city of Scintilla. So the creature you see in the concept art continued its lifeless existence, becoming an integral part of the noxious world. #Warhammer40000 #DarkHeresy

2017 i think 💀🔥

me: i should just design some naval uniforms also me: creates entire theological argument through material culture writing about Arune's naval uniforms on tuesday. visual dev + why i'm like this logbook.deadstar.black

you improve faster studying why someone else's piece works than by only posting your own. ego protects stagnation. curiosity builds craft. the best artists I know engage deeply with peers' work. It's not optional--it's how you grow.

Happy halloween and old paintings for thee

Eramma // Riddle of Bronze

nhera AU belanor. nhera belongs to @deadstar.black go check out his dossiers on The Reply im begging

the woven // clawstar

me wiping my brow and furiously typing the script for my all male audience

if Origen is stillness, Saren is the storm that can't stop moving. wrote about designing a Rogue Trader whose entire identity is performance over void—motion as survival, gilt as armor, control as barely-contained panic. full craft breakdown:

latest update, 65k words and lots of revising, retexturing and restaging i thought i had everything planned out in detail but turns out that's somehow the easy part anyway beta readers kinda like it

I painted this one last weekend! 22"x30" oil on wood

obedience is the sharpest blade—it cuts both ways Lt. Marion Gore from my upcoming grimdark nautical horror novel, THE REPLY

🩸

🩸demons for spooky season

In a galaxy that screams, the most dangerous man whispers. Wrote about designing Origen—the character architecture, visual choices, and why stillness can be more terrifying than spectacle. Full craft breakdown:

tell me what your fave themes of grimdark fiction are. what do you think doesn't get explored -enough-, in your opinion?

new lore-centric substack post describing the Nheran Rhumb Atlas, an artifact from the novel

also latest character dossier on the substack dropped. please read about my other son

Talent isn't rare. Throw an apple & you hit someone with talent. Perseverance? rare. Work ethic? exceedingly rare; the willingness to grind. Being able to endure the scorn, rejection & privation a life in the arts dooms you to in the United States is unicorn-scarce. But talent? Talent is everywhere.

imagine you're mid-foreplay and they whip out the legal paperwork

mad abt it

before bluesky kills its platform don't forget i have a website with contact, links to my substack, linkedin (cringe) and project info and garbage. deadstar.black if this place goes to shit you can also join my mailing list that i never use deadstar.black#newsletter

just did a rough tally on my nautical horror novel, The Reply. in the last 2 months, I've logged ~570 hours between writing (45k words), illustrating, & lore exploration. that's nearly double a standard full-time job. the abyss, it seems, demands a tithe. happy to pay it tho. ⚓

just experienced 4 hours of pure, existential, soul-crushing dread. windows update crashed my PC, and when scriv came back, my entire novel was gone. i saw the abyss, and it was a blank project template. solution? external hard drive was disconnected. master of technology

whitehall, admiral of arune. for @faedread.art

my commitment to method acting is absolute. to write the perfect byronic hero, I have embraced the full experience: the brooding, the emotional unavailability, and the subsequent, crushing social isolation. my characters have never been more authentic. I have never been more alone. the process works

trust is the anchor that drowns the most fools

past 20k words today and writing bits of act 2. betas described meeting the antagonist as sexually explicit (this is a joke but i agree)

14k words 🌟 into my grimdark nautical horror novel where the captain has just made a choice that will haunt every league of his voyage home

madness is a tide that comes for every sailor

the most dangerous part isn't the accusation, but the quiet, academic curiosity that precedes it

This is incredible

"Stand by, Hexen. I am... concluding a sensitive matter."