In truth a lot of my works now are more full of emotion lol back then I was just a teenager concerned with drawing something "pretty", my emotions tend to pour out more now that I'm older and I'm not restricting myself to a style, a process, a formula or so on. These old pieces are highly detailed and I feel a lot of the detail and color hides the poor art beneath it. Of course it's fine if you like them, but from my POV as the artist I can pretty much assure you these old pieces were done as eye candy for the most part lol. My own personality is probably a lot different from what people may assume from my older works. For example, [link] was a highly emotional piece that I put a lot of thought/emotion/planning into. the DEITY piece was inspired more by a desire to draw something pretty and CLAMPish in style and I was listening to a piece of music that had a sort of shamany feel to it.

That isn't to say that these image are void of emotion. I tend to "roleplay" through my art and, in doing so, it could just be that you like this character and I have not drawn (or in this case, "been" ) him in a very long time. I've always been a firm believer that you should be able to feel SOME emotion through a piece to make it really worth anything.

I still draw for pleasure tho... I just want to make sure you don't think i've lost my soul or anything. I'm doing what i've wanted to do since I was a child, work in animation and cartoons. of course I like dark works a lot and I do still do them ("Trickst Priest" isn't the only exception tho, there are still more lol ) I think a lot of my older works were more a long the lines of "false advertising" because I was afraid of doing anything different from what people liked (and when i did it was often met with criticism or completely ignored). People liked dark works, they liked the detail and since I had the time to do such works I was able to do them.

I will say one thing that may be a bit surprising lol it's way harder to draw in a simple refined style than works like this. the time it takes to do it is simply due to it being a traditional piece and how much time the actual application and care of color takes when you can't mess up (or use layers). The actual problems of the art are easily hidden in a detailed image... however constructing a solid but simple design where you can't hide your flaws is incredibly difficult, but of course, it will look easier as it's more simple.... kind of a strange paradox I think.

sorry for rambling! I'm not angry or upset, just voicing my thoughts and I tend to get a little wordy when I let my thoughts roam free.

if I did revisit that character I would likely re-design him to get rid of some of my teenage influences.