2025 Blue Horizon art progress page by naila moonsi.
08/06/25. WIP sketch of clockwise Leila Hadid-Salah, Nasir Hadid-Salah, Shakir, and Luna Adebayo. AKA the Ancient selves of Layla Chandrani, Antonio Chandrani-Rivera, Alejandro [Caldera-]Altaha and Alia [Atif-]Akinyemi.
THIS SKETCH has been in blog for about 6 months. I have apparently wanted to procrastinate drawing Obi and Naveen in it so much I put it off for 6 months...! Unfortunately! Since I've been wanting to show off the general skintone range of these main characters and not be reliant on very old Picrews any longer.
(Also I've learned a lot of people don't know, but Naveen is a South Asian name, haha.)
THIS SKETCH is definitely 100% still WIP, but shows off their general skintone range and Spectral Eyes for reference! Nasir wears a schenti. Luna has an ankh.
Nasir and Leila are Blasian, while Shakir and Luna are black.
Just for legacy reasons (and I'll likely delete one day), here's the ancient Picrew set that had all of the characters...! Here's the ancient set where Antonio and Alejandro make eyes alongside Nasir and Shakir, which I used to be super fond of prior to getting back into art. All the Picrew sets were made back in '23.
07/11/25. WIP sketch of the younger Chandrani generation.
So this is a WIP sketch, meaning even Fernando's chin will change since it needs to be more identical to Antonio's.
Farrah is interested in femme and ambiguous styles so she's wearing a lehanga here. Fernando is wearing a sherwani, Raj and Layla wear a tuxedo suit, and Antonio's wearing a lungi.
I talk casually about OC lore on Bluesky a lot, and copypasted some of it in the Tumblr post of the WIP sketch and a note on the Ranvir and Armando finished sketch on Tumblr here. I'll make a proper blog post out of those sk33ts later.
12/26/24. Painterly progress #2. OC Antonio Chandrani-Rivera red eye caliente blast. Spoilers for Blue Horizon: Bright Days, Sad Days comic 4.
It finally glows the way it's supposed to. Since I haven't tried before now, I kinda prefer the non-rendered version since it focuses on the "pupil" which houses their soul energy (empath powers). (The implication is soul light that overwhelms the color of the pupil.)
That eye glow can just be supernatural soul light instead of regular eye lights until I figure out a better way to showcase that IG hahahaha.
Note: "Caliente blast" is a play on "baja blast." My pun work is not amazing. I was otherwise going to title the post "he shall be baked by antonio's red eye alhamdulillah."
12/26/24. Painterly progress #1. Brown skin highlights. First attempt ever. Spoilers for Blue Horizon: Bright Days, Sad Days comic 4.
I like dropping WIPs too much. SO.
A big goal of mine was trying out painterly style for the Blue Horizon OCs. A thing I'm obsessed with re: some people's art is their ability to get the shine of light on brown to dark brown skin on especially old-school photographs down beautifully. I have childhood photographs of me with that look. I'm unsure if I'll get to the level of some artists do, but I decided to experiment with a panel from episode 4 of the Blue Horizon: Bright Days, Sad Days' comic on my OC Antonio Chandrani-Rivera.
I'm not totally satisfied with the last WIP attempt, but I'm unsure if it just looks odd without similarly non-cel-shade hair rendering or not. We'll see later!