Decided for this daily that I would be ahead of the curve and try to do it before I go to sleep. I stayed up later than I'd like, but It's fine.

I wouldn't really be any good at the prompt itself, but then I realised I should do Skull Knight from Berserk. Started with the character itself then I did a basic background with some tree elements and a stepped gradient. There was an empty space in the top left corner that I realised I could use to add the Berserk logo, making this look a little more like an album cover.

I did a lot of things that were different from my typical workflow. I found it best to start with just two colours (a single dark value and a single light value) to block out rough shapes, then I refined those shapes as I brought in a third value, a midtone. With this midtone, I also painted antialiasing into the existing light tone to smooth it out.

I learned a few things about Aseprite's functionality. Most importantly, I figured out how to paint dithering and tiling across an area without it leaving "Solitaire-like" smears behind it. I leveraged this feature to paint large areas of dithering in the scene, as well as the bark on the big tree behind Skull Knight.

I've also learned that it's vital to know what you're drawing before you draw it! On multiple occasions I had to make corrections to skull knight's design in this artwork because I had misinterpreted my references a few times. And even then, the result is not a perfectly accurate depiction of the character; the number of ribs on the chest is wrong, and the armour on the lower torso doesn't look quite right. The face doesn't feel quite as "masculine" as I'd want it to be.

I'm overall very proud of this piece. Learned a decent bit

(By the way, I've only seen the 1997 Berserk anime which did not actually feature Skull Knight. I have yet to read the manga.)