Answering this question is always difficult, because I feel like I need to like. Physically show how I do it with commentary or something lol. I have a light gray layer as my paper layer. Then, on a transparent layer on top of that one set to multiply, I paint with a single dark color and an eraser in washes. Anything darker than the paper color below is just various opacities of the same color, and the brightest parts are literally just the paper layer below showing.

So when it comes time to actually color, I lock the multiply layer and start throwing down the general idea of what colors I think I want. Sometimes I use photos that give me that specific mood, blur them to hell and back, and build up from there. But because I'm throwing color on the layer beneath the transparent painting, and then color on the locked multiply layer, it gives me some interesting effects that I think throwing color down on a fully opaque black and white painting wouldn't give me. And when I'm happy with that, I make a new layer of everything merged down and then I just. Paint. Aside from the initial two layers, I paint on a single layer the rest of the time. Duplicated a bunch at various stages, but that layer I actively work on is always a single one.

Idris realized he was falling in love with Ila when she was mid-to-late teens. He understood the gravity of those feelings, though, and didn't let them affect his judgement as her parent or how he behaved around her--the very last thing he ever wants is to hurt her, and for a long time he's convinced that those feelings, if she ever knew about them or he ever acted on them, would hurt her. So he pretty comfortable just, doesn't acknowledge those feelings for many years and things are business as usual.

Ila recognizes that she has some kind of attraction to Idris around this same time period, but it doesn't blossom into a full awareness of her own feelings until after she's away at an out-of-state college and she realizes just how much she misses him. Which results in her writing and self-publishing incest fiction. Which turns into her getting harassed off-campus when she gets doxxed by a couple of determined shitheels, whiiiich sets the stage for the car accident that is the catalyst for the novel in the metal band setting.

Ila and Idris popped up in 2017 after I made a joke about a character I had at the time (can't really remember the joke anymore). Two weeks after I made the joke, and it wasn't leaving my mind and had only sunk in deeper, I made the prototype versions of Ila and Idris. Back then, they weren't really based on my husband and I--they weren't really anything. But I latched onto them really hard, and they just, stuck.

Over the years they became what they are now, and are now based very nearly 1:1 off my husband and I. But in the beginning, they absolutely were not, and I tend to prefer not to think about them from back then lol. I was not a good storyteller and I fell into a lot of the genre trappings of writing incest fetish fiction, when what I actually wanted to write was incest romance, but knew no better on how to actually do that.

Nope. Ila's in her mid-20s to early-30s in the modern/metal band setting that I've been writing in. Idris never had any feelings for Ila's mother, romantic or otherwise--their arrangement was more or less a business transaction that she could have left at any point, if only she'd said anything to him and made proper arrangements, which he was emphatic about explaining again and again to her. She still chose to walk out without a word instead.

And, she left Ila so young that she's a complete stranger to her, and she wouldn't want anything to do with her at that point. Some woman walking in and claiming to be her mother would not inspire warmth or a want for her to be in her life, so would not cause drama in that sense. She'd probably just be a nuisance.

That would be a statistics miracle and Ila would either probably terminate the pregnancy or give the child up for adoption lol. I'd thought of it in the past but it never goes beyond, "Ila would look cute pregnant and happy about it", because I am just... So uninterested in pregnancy and childbirth and child rearing and actually writing about it.

As for stories and stuff, they don't use protection because 1. Idris is in his 70s, so his sperm count is lower than it would be if he were younger, and 2. Idris had a vasectomy to make sure he never had any other children. Ila was never in his plans, and after she was born, he knew he didn't want to have the possibility of having any other children come up.

Also, 3. creampies are hot and I don't want to bother with writing either of them putting a condom on him. Unless it was like, a sexy latex kink thing. That's the only time I like condoms really--aaannddd now I've got a kink hook for another short. :v Feck.

It's fine! I understand being new and curious--it just means I should probably invest in doing a character-specific Q&A on my website to streamline folk's understanding of the characters lol.

TL;DR the set of circumstances is different for every universe. In the one I've been pretty focused on with art/short stories, Ila's mother was a one-night-stand Idris met at a bar in his mid-to-late-40s. Through nobody's fault, contraception failed and she ended up pregnant. She was young, impulsive, and bull-headed, but decided to keep the baby. Once Idris is informed of her pregnancy, he makes it his mission to financially support her. Lets her live rent-free in his home, pays for her college, and has no expectation for her to be anything more than just a roommate/co-parent.

That works... Fine. For a few years. She ends up bailing on her responsibilities as a mother and leaves one day without a word when Ila is three-ish, which leaves Idris as a single parent. Which he's fine with--she was not very grateful for what he'd done for her up until that point, and probably needed a lot of therapy that she never pursued and took out on Idris instead. She never enters the picture again, and Ila is fine with that. Idris is a nurturing, doting dad, and the women in the neighborhood probably helped with raising her too.