Magickal Fowl

Long time, no post! I’ve been so preoccupied with school, I haven’t had much time for art-related blogging.

After over a year of no polished digital art, I’m making my comeback wiiiiiith…

Wizard chicken!

Here’s the initial sketch, which I was originally just going to use as a design concept for a more dynamically posed painting…

…but then I got pretty invested in what I was drawing and ended up with some nice (although undersized compared to the resolution I’d usually work at) lineart. Woo!

Base colours determining the light source and such!

Adding more colour, strengthening the highlights and shadows.

More of the same process, adding some feather details and such.

ALMOST DONE. There’s a background now! Woo! And magical energy stuff and more splatter texture abuse!

And after being indecisive and playing around with colour adjustments, I finally ended up with this! Yay colours!

So yes. I’m hoping to improve my use of colour and understanding of light/shadow. If things go well, I’ll find the time and inspiration to do more than one piece of art each year! It was pretty fun to work on and a nice break from animating.

I have actually done a lot of sketching during the last year at least, just not a lot of coloured work.

Get Your Own Complete

I never wrote a blog entry for the completed image! I finished it last December, so I can’t remember what I might’ve wanted to write about. Here it is anyway!

As much as I loved those rocks to the right and put so much effort into them, that whole right-side chunk of the image really doesn’t add anything compositionally…! As always though, the image was a huge learning experience!

Get Your Own WIP V

Original: 8th Dec, 2011

It’s been a while since I worked on this, but I’d like to get it done, so I spent a bit of time on it last night!

I was originally trying to draw out basically every individual blade of grass, but ugh, that’s not really a great idea. Grass doesn’t need to be drawn in so much detail when it’s not even what the piece is about. I shouldn’t have spent so much time refining the rocks either since, again, the piece isn’t about the rocks or the grass, it’s about the general autumn mood and temperature and the characters’ interactions.

So I grabbed a texturey brush I made and scribbled grassy colours all over the already grass-coloured areas, drew some individual grass blades here and there to make it look a bit more uh… grassy. I went over areas with the same textured brush to add fallen leaf colours and went over THAT that with some leaf-coloured blobs of paint. Yay.

Get Your Own WIP V

Original: 8th Dec, 2011

It’s been a while since I worked on this, but I’d like to get it done, so I spent a bit of time on it last night!

I was originally trying to draw out basically every individual blade of grass, but ugh, that’s not really a great idea. Grass doesn’t need to be drawn in so much detail when it’s not even what the piece is about. I shouldn’t have spent so much time refining the rocks either since, again, the piece isn’t about the rocks or the grass, it’s about the general autumn mood and temperature and the characters’ interactions.

So I grabbed a texturey brush I made and scribbled grassy colours all over the already grass-coloured areas, drew some individual grass blades here and there to make it look a bit more uh… grassy. I went over areas with the same textured brush to add fallen leaf colours and went over THAT that with some leaf-coloured blobs of paint. Yay.

Get Your Own WIP IV

Original: 12th Nov, 2011

I don’t think I’ve worked on this since the day I last posted about it! But I got back to it tonight and started refining rocks.

So very many rocks, indeed. But actually, they’ve been sort of fun to work on. I’m not sure how much I’m looking forward to the grass, though I’ll have to remind myself to try not to make it just *grass*. It should be grass and leaves and twigs and all manner of foresty floor things. Y’know.

I’ve worked on the dragon and the girl a bit, though they’ve still got a long way to go. I’m finding it more entertaining to work on background elements at the moment. I made the decision to thin out the leaves of the trees since it’s autumn and they’d be missing a lot of leaves anyway. Actually, I never uploaded a screenshot of the version where that was a problem, so you wouldn’t know. The excessive amount of bright orangey yellow was bothering me and that seemed like a good way to solve that problem, so two birds with one stone, I suppose!

Get Your Own WIP III

Original: 8th Nov, 2011

Edit:
Here’s an update of work done over the last few hours.

I need to find a better way to draw foliage because I’m not entirely satisfied with what I’ve got currently…! We’ll see what I can do though.

—

Some more progress!

Working out tree details and making the landscape a little less uh… vague. I’m not really happy with what’s going on with the land around that little stream, so I’ll be changing that.

Get Your Own WIP II

Original: 6th Nov, 2011

I’ve been working on that ‘Get Your Own’ image some more!

I adjusted the girl’s pose and gave her some clothes. I’m not entirely sure I’ll be keeping her current clothing colours, so that may change in the future. I changed the dragon’s head position and expression. This time, I was going for a sort of ‘eager dopey dog wants your food’ type of look.

And, of course, I added base colours to give myself and others an idea of where I was going with the look of the environment.

Get Your Own WIP

Original: 5th Nov, 2011

Or, that will be the title for now. I might change it later, but who knows.

Anyway, after working on that Sleepy Forest thing for a while and receiving some helpful critique on it, I decided to rethink my approach to an autumnal scene. So now I’m challenging myself not only with a full nature scene, but also character interaction and drawing and painting a human being.

I’m probably going to adjust the dragon’s facial expression and head position to make it look more like it was just trying to sneak a lick of whatever hot beverage your imagination desires to be in that mug. I’ll have to examine that girl’s proportions and pose a little more to make sure everything’s okay and make any necessary adjustments, then I’ll move onto colouring!

Sleepy Forest WIP

Original: 14th Oct, 2011

After doing some shorter, quicker forest paintings for practise, I’ve now moved onto a larger painting as a challenge to test what I’ve learned! Here are some progress images:

I’d drawn a smallish sketch to start, then I enlarged it and scribbled the rough colours over it. I did this last night before I went to bed.

I pulled up some references and decided I wasn’t entirely happy with the colour of the grass, so I scribbled over that with some more orangey colours. Refined the rocks a bit and started drawing branches on trees! Also turned that orange blob to the left into something. Sort of.

And I started painting foliage on the trees. I don’t like how empty the space at the bottom of the canvas is, so I hope I can think of some way to use it.

And I don’t know if I have time to get much further on it until tomorrow!

Forest Speed Paintings

Original: 13th Oct, 2011

After posting the previous blog post to my deviantART account, Lhune gave me some helpful advice about how I’m probably not as enthusiastic about painting things because I’m not improving a whole lot and suggested I try painting landscapes and things from photos. I can agree with her since I feel like I’m bored of my skill level and would like to draw things in a new, improved, ‘fresh’ way or something.

So I’ve been doing what she suggested and have been doing quick 30-minute speed painting things of various landscapes (mostly mountains, hills, and forests) and have since painted a couple of little forest things from imagination. They’re far from perfect, but considering they in themselves were speed painting things that started off as loose scribbles and weren’t carefully planned in any way, I can say that they’re quite an improvement over my previous attempts to paint similar things!

This is the first one, which I did a few days ago:

Foliage is definitely a challenge. I’m not sure I have any particularly good brushes to help me make masses of foliage, so I end up scribbling a lot of little lines and dots here and there to try and make it hopefully look like there are a lot of leaves in the scene.

And this is one I did today:

This one feels like an improvement over the first one, and I probably spent more time on it too! I’ll probably try to think more about composition and stuff in future speed painting things, which I wasn’t really at all with these ones. I’m interested in trying more little nature scene things though, and hopefully I can see a lot more improvement in my landscape-involving artworks.

I should mention also that this is something similar that I tried painting a few weeks ago:

I think it’s safe to say that my colour choices have become far more natural and believable after painting several landscapes from photos.