battlemage hex

Cohost draws, lovingly organized by @TheBlondeBass just happened. My entry was about coffee :

The first time I had coffee was at a school cafeteria, hoping it would give me some energy. It was a long coffee and I hated it, I thought it tasted like liquid wood. I added a ton of sugar to pass it.
Then I tried some cappuccino, latte etc. usually from distributors for similar reasons and grew to like it.
But ultimately I'm an espresso/short coffee person. "Black as midnight on a moonless night" is how I like it best, not to say that I won't pair it with a sweet treat ...

It was a fun thing to do but also quite an adventure.

The drawing was made on my phone with the free Sketchbook app (a seemingly out of date version because the newer one doesn't work with my phone) and a Deco mini4 tablet by XP-PEN. Since the setup is pretty unwieldy with the tablet connecting to the bottom of the phone I built a kind of cardboard stand for it.

I was set !

But really it's been a while since I drew anything digital and I had to remember techniques to color the illustration after I had the linework down. Given how much time I spent fixing the fill tool's work on borders, I probably haven't found any efficient techniques yet.
Often I wish what I had was a very basic app that work exactly like Microsoft Paint, the old one before the "fancy" brushes and stuff. Something that lets you work on pixels but also easily import images and manipulate them. If anybody knows of something like that for Android phones I'd be grateful if you shared the info.

Now about the image itself. The top coffee is obviously the one from the school cafeteria. The logo on the cup is made up. The owl on the tree is supposed to be a kind of reference to Twin Peaks, showing how "evil" that coffee was.
The middle coffee doesn't really reflect the kind of sweet coffees I had afterwards but I thought that showing something kinda fancy with a whipped cream topping communicated the idea of these sweet dessert-like coffes better than a more accurate slightly foamy brighter liquid in another paper cup would.
Lastly the bottom coffee is the ideal one. A thick liquid in a fancy little porcelain cup.
There's a small chocolate tablet on the side because I love to drink a bitter coffee with a sweet dessert. Once again I rarely if ever get anything fancy like that. I'm even somewhat ashamed to admit that most of the coffee I have these days is either from distributors or instant

instant

Initially I thought I'd add more stuff. Maybe a more explicit reference to Twin Peaks to contextualize the owl better, like a Dale Cooper thumb-upping the coffee. I also thought of trying to make a red-blue 3D illustration. But given how long it took me to start making this I decided I'd take a more direct approach.