Feral Spirit | An attempt at rejoining the splinterlands art challenge | Week 255

Hey Hey Hey! Look who's back and finally drawing again UwU
For today, I'm going to attempt to join the weekly splinterlands art challenge since it has been such a long time since I've popped up there. And I think I have to draw regularly now since the inktober art prompts will be out any day now and right now, my friend has been asking me to join him on the sketchtember frenzy. We'd be doing this to build up consistency and to start improving since we've both been trying to level up our art skills in these last few days.
Also because I still have goals I want to fulfill before this year ends and I already missed my account's anniversary so I owe it to myself to catch up to everything that I've missed.
For this week, I tried my hand on the Feral spirit that looks so much like the cheshire cat of Alice in wonderland. I am a huge fan of the movie and book so I really wanted to do this piece and it kind of gives off that hypnotic vibe the original cheshire cat has

Materials used: pink highlighter, rainbow pen, white gel pen
Duration: 3 hours on and off

I also tried to give it a mysterious vibe but I think it came out creepy in the end with that multi-toothed grin. Even my coworkers said it looked creepy when I was working on this one during break. Crazy thoughts, really but it's really nice to get back on paper after a month of no creativity from me.

This was my reference character for that:

As you can see, the original card was kind of evaporating into the background and I tried to pull that off here but it's kind of hard with pens XD

So here's my work flow:
I actually used highlighter ink as my base layer since I didn't have an ink with that kind of color XD

And apparently, using highlighter ink actually took much longer to dry than my regular ink so If I do this again, i should definitely do the inking at night so I can wake up to dry paper.

Then I worked on building up the layers to give it more life and detalis And I thought this was pretty complete already without having to struggle with the smoke effect because he does fade out at some point.

This is all from me for today UwU by the start of september, I'll attempt to post daily for my sketchtember practice
Until then, please don't mind the intervals in my posting, I'm preparing myself for these art challenges I only wished to join back when I was in college. It is an honor to finally realize some of the things I've always wanted to do for a really long time.

I'm also opening myself to commissions in case there are any, though I will focus on traditional art for now.
Feel free to contact me through the comments UwU

Thank you for your time!