Tranquil Night

[Image ID] A digital painting of a male character standing on a wooden, treehouse style, balcony illuminated by the glow of a paper lantern. [description end]

This painting came out of an anatomy sketch of a head viewed from below, and I ended up liking the sketch so much I wanted to do something more significant with it. As a result there isn’t much ‘context’ or ‘story’ to this painting – I simply wanted to paint Xiao. He was the character whose story intrigued me most when I started playing Genshin Impact, and one I still enjoy to this day.

The lack of ‘context’ also made the piece quite hard to name, but in the end I settled for something which reflected the idea of Xiao taking a moment of peace between fulfilling his duties of guarding the Liyue countryside from monster attacks.

[Image ID] an animated gif showing various stages, from sketch to final piece, in the process of creating the illustration  [description end]

I tried a few new painting techniques whilst working on this piece, such as switching to doing all of Xiao on one single layer instead of having a new one for each different colour. Using just one layer was something I’d always thought I’d never like, but I was pleasantly surprised to find the losing the ’editability’ of keeping everything separated wasn’t a problem at all.

The background of this painting is based off the in-game location ‘Wangshu Inn’ since its somewhere Xiao is said to spend a lot of time.

 

A timelapse (speedpaint) of the painting process can be found below, or on my YouTube channel:

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Time taken: 4.5 hours
Computer Type: Windows
Program: FireAlpaca
Drawing Tablet: Gaomon M106K
Character: Xiao, from the game ‘Genshin Impact’
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Artwork ©Dragonsflyatsunset 2025, all rights reserved.