Renderotica's Artist of the Month - July 2025: Cloudwatcher

Cloudwatcher’s art radiates with sensual tension and layered storytelling—a provocative blend of desire, beauty, and character. Each image forms part of a larger narrative, complete with dialogue and emotion, drawing you deeper into captivating scenes.

You can check out his Artist of the Month Gallery, or his Personal Profile Gallery to see all of his work. Don't forget to click the Like button to show your appreciation!




Renderotica: What initially attracted you to digital art, and how did you first determine what software to use?
Cloudwatcher: I think it was the freedom it represented, and how easy and enjoyable I found the process. All the people I knew when I was young who could draw well just seemed to be able to do it naturally, and the idea of working on my skills until I got good enough to make drawings by hand that looked the way I wanted them to look was just beyond me. (Still is, unfortunately.) I wasn’t especially good at drawing, but with digital art there was infinite undo and no eraser marks! I loved that I could start with an approximation of what I wanted and gradually refine it until I was satisfied, no matter how long that took. My first computer graphics were done with a program called KoalaPaint, which came with the first graphics tablet I ever bought. The program was on a cartridge that plugged into my computer, which should give you an idea of how long ago we’re talking about.




Renderotica: Can you walk us through your creative process—from the initial concept to the final rendered piece?
Cloudwatcher: I generally come at it from one of two ways. Either I come up with a story idea that I like and I’m curious to see if I can bring it to life, or I’m playing around with creating characters until I like one well enough that I think she needs a story. The first way is easier, because I usually get the story idea more or less whole, and the rest is a process of filling in details and moving the plot from point A to point Z. That’s how Power Of Suggestion came about. The second is a lot less straightforward, because I can try multiple approaches until I find something that I think is a good fit for the character. Honestly, my muse has to get credit for a lot of the conceptual stuff. I can tweak things until they feel right, but what “right” feels like is her department. Plus, my characters will have their own ideas about how things should go, and they tell me what they’ll do or say and what they won’t do or say in a given situation. I’m driving but they’re navigating.

Once I’m started, I tend to parallel-track. I always spent time creating & costuming characters, building sets etc. in Daz Studio while also developing the story and writing the dialogue. I work on the story and dialogue in my head when I’m not at my computer. The amount of commute time I’ve spent agonizing over a single line of dialogue is kind of shameful. I used to write all the dialogue out in script format first, but when it came time to work it into the layout of the panels, I’d sometimes run into problems. Now I generally create the layout using screenshots of the Daz Studio viewport and composing & arranging the dialogue as I go. This way I can adjust both the dialogue and/or the shot composition as needed. I still do some writing in OneNote, but mostly I work in Affinity Designer now. I used to use Inkscape but it’s text handling pales in comparison to Affinity’s. And given how much text my work typically has, I need all the help I can get.

When the story is concluded, I have a Designer document with the more-or-less final dialogue and layouts, and a bunch of Daz Studio scene files that contain one or more panels. (I use the Studio timeline to keep multiple frames in a single scene file, based on the set and characters.) Then I render out the final images and swap them in for the screencaps, do any final edits to the dialogue until it’s as good as it’s going to get, then dump out the panels. I never start posting something until the whole thing is rendered out and finalized, because I don’t want to subject people to my many, many dead end stories that get part way and for some reason just grind to a halt. So many.



Renderotica: How would you describe your artistic style, and what unique techniques do you use to bring your digital visions to life?
Cloudwatcher: Filmmaking was my “first love” when it comes to art, and it’s still kind of where my heart is. I don’t really think of myself as a comic artist so much as a filmmaker with VERY limited resources. I play around with comic conventions sometimes (Headcase was one such experiment) but I usually tend to think of the panels I do as movie stills, or maybe some kind of animatic. I did study film in college, so I bring a lot of that visual language to my work, or try to anyway. I also straddle the line between author and illustrator, which is why my stuff is so wordy.

I used to do more realistic characters but lately I’ve been leaning more into the toon style. I think it suits the medium better. My stories are all a bit sugary and simplistic anyway, so I think it’s a good match there too. And I don’t see as much of it out there, so I feel like I’m in a slightly less crowded niche. Road Buddy was my first foray into that, and the approach has grown on me. I still do things with conventionally proportioned characters, but fewer of them are making their way into final production.

Interestingly, I seem to have completely internalized the “5 panels at a time” posting rules of Renderotica. My stories break themselves down into groups of 5 shots. I can do other numbers, but it’s harder. If I have to break a scene in the middle of a 5-frame sequence I get antsy.



Renderotica: How do you stay inspired and innovative in an ever-evolving digital art landscape?
Cloudwatcher: I’m just overly curious and want to try new things all the time, and I love seeing how I can bash things together. I dabble in lots of stuff just to see how it works. There’s been a lot of hate for LLMs lately, but recently I needed a model of an insulated pizza delivery bag and there wasn’t anything remotely like it I could find. So I tried out a LLM 3D mesh generator to see what it could do. The results looked really janky, but I got my pizza bag! Plus I feel like I’m still not very far along my artistic journey, and I look forward to learning new things to bring to my work. I’ve been wanting to learn more Blender for a long time, but working in it is still a struggle compared to Daz Studio, so I’m making slow progress. I can only use a tiny fraction of Blender’s 82,500,000 features. (I’m maybe exaggerating that number. Maybe.)



Renderotica: What role does community feedback play in shaping your art, and can you share an example where it influenced a project?
Cloudwatcher: I pretty much create stuff for myself, but I share it on the off-chance that somebody else might like it too. Since I don’t do long-running series and my stories are all complete before I start posting them, there isn’t a lot of room for give-and-take. That said, the feedback I get is pretty much the payoff that makes all the work worthwhile. I do this for fun, I don’t want to bring money into it because that would make it less fun, but every time somebody takes a moment to tell me they liked my work I feel like I just won the lottery. Especially when somebody says they connected emotionally to one of my stories. I will look at naughty renders all day and get a lot of joy from them, but the happiness THAT kind of feedback brings me is next-level!

However I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that I received a big boost at the beginning of my CGI storytelling adventure in 2006 when my writing won a contest on a then-recently-formed website for sharing spicy 3D, and the prize was the latest version of Poser! It was the first time my writing ever won anything, or really got read by anybody, and the prize gave me a lot of enthusiasm to dive deeper into 3D. The website that ran the contest was called Renderotica. I wonder if they’re still around...


Renderotica: How do you balance the technical aspects of digital rendering with your personal creative expression?
Cloudwatcher: I’m still really working on this. My hardware is kind of old and underpowered, which really slows my workflow and requires compromises. I don’t spend a lot of time doing post work on my renders, and I feel kind of guilty when I see how much better the work is of people who put in that extra level of effort. I consider myself a storyteller first, an illustrator second, and sometimes the visual work suffers due to my impatience in getting the thing done.



Renderotica: What advice would you offer emerging digital artists who are just beginning to navigate the technical and creative sides of this medium?
Cloudwatcher: Don’t hate stuff. Anything. Don’t hate LLM art, look at it, find what’s good about it and what’s terrible about it. Learn what it has to teach, whatever that is. Don’t hate how hard the technical stuff is and how steep the learning curve can be. Art is a lifelong journey, and while you can sprint for some small parts of it, mostly it’s a long hike. You’ll have a better time if you learn to enjoy the rocky hills and rainstorms as well as the meadows and sunshine. And don’t ever, ever let your own dissatisfaction with your work discourage you from doing it anyway. I heard an interview once with Paul Simon from about 20 years ago where he talked about how he had a little voice telling him his music wasn’t very good (Paul Simon?!) Hokusai was similarly dissatisfied with his own ability to draw. Learning new stuff and learning to enjoy new stuff all along the way is the only real fountain of youth we have. But you gotta drink from it!