I FINISHED AN ART.... AFTER 5 MILLION YEARS.... (8 MONTHS)
wips and talking about the piece under the cut
I went through the full gambit of emotions with this one, almost throwing away all the work i spent on finishing it to just go cleanup the sketch lmaoo
So I really wanted to start my art journey back off on the right foot, seeing as I've been in mental health hibernation all winter. As you've seen, I started doing daily gestures (not so daily, but they're to get me doing art on days I don't do any real art. So the fact I didn't do any gestures once I started working on this isn't a failure in my eyes (but i should still warm up with them).
I follow this artist and sometimes pop in for their streams, HOAIartworks, https://hoaiartworks.carrd.co/
They do phenomenal stuff, watching their process is always a joy. They also post timelapses of their illustrations, which is what got me on the right track for this piece/doing fancier art in general. Like YEAH thumbnailing is important but seeing how they approach starting out their work so zoomed out in a lil box really gave me a good way to do that digitally that meshes with what I'm capable of wrapping my brain around. Go check out their twitter for what I'm talking about, they post timelapses of all their pieces.
Anyhow I started out with what I thought was a good sized rectangle for an illustration
This piece also goes off the box which is what's nice about this tech imo, it lets me feel everything is in place and doesn't require redrawing if I decide to rotate them or whatnot. All that is clipped off there due to using the Clip layer function though, secret vox lines.
After that I zoomed in, made the canvas bigger since I didn't plan to even do real art, and tried to lay down the sketch 2 phase.
I'm a fiend for lineart... I tried not to be too precise and fancy but I actually like these lines a lot lmaooo
I also realized a shocking discovery
PURPLE SABER...
Anyhow I finished sketch 2, and slapped on the colours to nail down what I wanted before committing to the finished bit.
The issue is.... I really like this sketch. A lot. This would be a finished piece to me most of the time!!! I could easily just tidy this up and call it a day! The bold lines give her a very charming and cute face! I love this sketch, which is why I'm making this writeup, so you have to see her. At this point I also just nailed down the shawl and used that for the final piece.
I was doubting myself hardcore while working on the final. I should of got the base shades all done and setup nearly before working so much on the hair and face, but I will never stop being a stupid bitch who goes hehe anime face :) and focus there. I also wasn't working with the head with the everything looking like this, because of how the rough shade was setup, I actually had the fullbody shade off at the time. I'm at by the end I ditched my piece by piece method for the shadows and just used the big shade layer I used to get it all down pat.
I also made a discover of why I just wasn't feeling rendered Vox vs sketch Vox....
I FORGOT HER EYEBROWS!!!! Adding eyebrows made everything come together and gave me my second wind to finish this piece!!
I'm reposting the final piece down here so the last thing you see when you click away isn't eyebrowless Vox
Plus, as you can see, I also decided to pull her closer. As I said, I'm partial to faces, and since I was putting so much work into this damn head I felt I should bring it closer and give it more real estate. So even if I flopped on shading the dress you'd be more distracted by the head
Honestly? The hair could be done better. A weakness of mine is large chunks of hair, if you've noticed in my fluffy ponytail pieces. I don't know exactly what I'm doing there, I need to actually sit down and study drawing long hair so I can stop using a blobby backlit bandaid. I also wanted more dynamism with her holding her dress, better perspective but I couldn't figure it out this time and went back to how I started it out. As someone who mainly does sketches and doesn't finish pieces, I valued me finishing this piece more than I did redoing it until I had it 20% better and/or potentially just giving up and moving on.
Overall? I'm really happy with this! I went from almost 0 art to this fancy piece! I managed to figure out a background which provided a lightsource from the thumbnail phase which I never do!!! This made the entire piece!! I did want to do the vines on the gate as well, but just couldn't figure out how to draw them in nicely so while the gate is sparse, it also isn't stealing attention away with poorly painted vines. I'm a level 1 background artist ohhhh you have to be patient with meeee
