MyDcmbr

Cheating a bit with today's DD, I was lining a Demeter portrait and realised it was close to midnight, so I quickly slapped some colours here. It's a work in progress that took a small detour. Two hours later, the portrait was completed though! Glad to be posting to tumblr, just gotta try and keep this a regular thing...

Well, so that's the 3 Hades portraits done. My next project is to get a painting done for my bathroom and plan what to do with a giant canvas I bought. I had some inspiration yesterday to paint a Tears of the Kingdom painting - can't recall why though? 

I'm intending to participate in more Sketch A Day challenges, but I haven't yet...

No digital projects at the moment, so maybe another 3 Hades characters? Zagreus, Thanatos and Megaera? 

........

I've been thinking about what my "thing" could be for poster prints, what the appeal of my stuff could be, and I think groups of characters? I thought a poster of Ace Attorney characters could be fun. Possibly have it so that no matter how you rotate/flip the poster, it still looks okay? 

If not Ace Attorney games, something else that's appealing for me to study.

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16/2/24 Notes on the Demeter portrait.

I sometimes look back at something I've drawn and wonder what I was even doing. So, I'm going to jot down what I remember was going through my mind and the progress on how this image formed.

From the beginning, there was the sketch.

While I'm at it, here's the sketches for the previous two Olympian gods.

Visual studies. I learned through doing these that they all have unique laurels using different plants! That was a really exciting visual motif to discover. Also, that they all have little fun motifs.

From Demeter's study, I saw that she wasn't wearing a laurel on her head, rather that it appears to be what's floating behind her head. Her story of seeking out her daughter, I found that Persephone inherited some of Demeter's visuals - the braid (both have that wheat shaped braids!) and some colouration. Another detail I never picked up on in the game, is that Demeter is holding what looks like one of the green ribbons in Persephone's design. Her frosty themes, like the snowflake shape on her shoulders, I wove into her laurel design. She grows plants, what if maybe her bitterness and resentment wove its way into the plants' form that was used in making her laurel?? Also, and I don't feel I achieved this one, the shape of her eyelashes - specifically what direction they branch out from, was intended to be hexagonal like a snowflake. 

From the jump, I was a little uneasy about drawing Demeter. I learned back in January when I was drawing the Rolled Play S2 character Graham that I really am inexperienced with drawing aged faces. Demeter was good practice for getting more comfortable with that infrequently taken road. 

I don't know how to work these into a paragraph so, dot points:

* Previous two gods, when drawing them I sketched the anatomy to build their forms. For Demeter, I just drew her and made adjustments by sight. This was SUCH a different approach, and I feel like the results, to me, feel different, more loose. I feel that pretty often my character drawings look stiff in their poses. 

* I thought, hey if I ever look for something in the old library of stuff that I want to have a go at animating someday, what if the red on her shoulders, under her snowflakes, had small red chunks of fabric that crumble and fall off, slowly dropping like snowfall. 

Lines and c o l o u r

lineweight. bringing something forward or letting it fall back, create depth.

I've found that, even though working with a small 500 x 700 canvas, I still ZOOM IN so much to get fine line details in there. When I would turn the original sketch layer back on, I found that the laurels behind her had chunkier lines than the thin, finer lines I had just used for her face and hair. Then, ZOOMING BACK OUT, I would see the disparity. I think I have to decide to either work with a bigger canvas size, or stick to what I'm doing but limit what size brush I'm using. 

*When creating a work in future, do some prep. Decide on brush size, maybe after a sketch is completed/cleaned up, map the colours. Can help decide line weight. Eg, using a DD size canvas, brush size average will be 6.0, scale from that starting point to create depth accordingly.

Another thing from studying the Hades characters I wanted to do, as well as look at the structure of their designs, was to analyse how Jen Zee uses colour. I loooovelove her use of colour. Demeter's got what could be muted, warm colours, but a lot of her shading uses a cooler tone. It really creates a good visual contrast that also works with her narrative! 

This is the final piece! For now, anyway! I'm not 100% with it, but I have to stare at it longer to pinpoint where I think could improve. I don't like that her braids look like one shape around her neck, I wanted her right braid to easily be discernible as crossing in front and the left braid drooping behind it. I thought, a highlighting line to separate them like I did for Dionysus' arm? But, idk, I actually don't like how that looks in his picture v much. 

* LINES: I had admired a technique I'd noticed a number of character illustrators do which is to colour segments of their line work (if using lines to outline, cartoon-style?). I thought about doing that for Demeter too, I realise that it helps with that depth and breaks up the design - segments things apart. 

I don't know how to credit that idea. Do I reference other artists I've seen use it? I try not to stare too long at other artists' work anymore, I tent to subconsciously study their technique and it feels like copying when I do something later and realise, oh I think I got this idea from elsewhere. 

so bad at typing this out. I'm constantly distracted. I keep wanting to check tumblr for updates on how the Demeter I posted there is doing - she's a hit! Within the first 12 hours I got more notes than either Aphrodite or Dionysus got. Not bad for the character I was the most nervous about. I wondered if I should go back and fix both of those characters so that they're as detailed as Demeter ended up being. That's the thing, I wanted them to be a triptych. But they don't look similar at all. Why did I add this light coloured border to Demeter's background? I thought it looked better than a solid colour. (also I think it's because I'd been looking at photo frames quite a bit recently, shopping around for the right one to hang up some prints I have to deco the house).

uuggg is this everything? it doesn't feel like it, but hopefully i'm reporting the significant stuff.