Everyone, meet Cara Marie Juarez

This may be news to some of you, but I’m currently working on my very first novel! I’m writing my second draft now, and I’m super excited with how it’s going so far.

Cara Marie is one of two protagonists in my book — in total, there’s three POV characters: Cara Marie, Inés (protag #2), and Leon (deuteragonist).

I’ve honestly been scared to tackle art of these characters so far because I was worried I wouldn’t be able to “perfectly” capture how they look in my head, but I hit a breakthrough with Cara Marie, and now I’m excited to finally draw the others! I am 100% going to draw some mock ups of more Cara Marie outfits, this post here was just testing how I’ll draw her!

Read below the cut for some fun facts about Cara Marie and a synopsis for the story!

Here are some fun facts about Cara Marie that I can share (without spoilers):

- She’s a black market hustler

- She likes taking things apart and putting them back together, figure out what makes them work

- She never goes anywhere without a suitable amount of weapons to defend herself

- She flies an airship she made from scratch ✨

That’s all I’ll say for now about her, but I can’t wait to share more about her and the story in the future!

“Cara Marie sighed, shifting her position to the other side of the trunk. Situating her feet in secure enough footholds and wrapping her left arm around the width of the tree, she leaned forward to inspect the transmitter. If she could disable it or disconnect it from any receiver it might have, then the kingdom could transmit all they wanted without receiving an ounce of feedback, visual or auditory.

And maybe, if she disabled it, it could be just the distraction her and Inés needed to get out of there. Small enough that the kingdom didn’t get too suspicious.”

Here’s 2/3 of the pieces I created for my digital art final, a scene from the beginning of Act 2 in my book! This is again painted in the styles of Arcane and Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse.

I was most proud of this piece honestly, I’m super happy with how it turned out. Also, the character looking up at Cara Marie is one I haven’t introduced yet ;)

“Inés’ heart plummeted into the depths of her stomach.

She saw color. So much color. Glimpses of a vibrant green jungle, of white cliffsides that bordered either side of the shimmering green-blue body of water they fell towards, which was much closer than stomach. thought.

She folded her arms over her face, the ship disappearing in the distance toward the open sea, where the rocky borders ended.”

Sigh.

So this is part one of the final project I worked on for my digital art class for a few weeks straight resulting in no time for any other art, headaches, and staring at a screen for hours at a time.

This is a scene from Act 1 of my Project TD, in which my characters Inés and Cara Marie escape… from a place :) This was meant to be painted in the style of ArcaneandSpider-Man: Into the Spiderverse with their mix of 2D and 3D animation, so the style is a bit different from what I usually do.

Because of time restraints I wasn’t able to render the foliage as best as I wanted to, so maybe sometime this summer I’ll rework it. But for now, here it is! What do you think?