Reflection #28 – March 20

Hey you all wanna hear a joke? Wanna hear me joke about deleting my profile and beginning a new life in the wilderness? No? Good! ‘Cause I’m merely writing this journal because I didn’t have time for it yesterday and the date is barely a minor inconvenience.

 I’ve never been a fan of April Fool’s day to begin with…

Well it’s been quite a month! I mean for pretty much everyone else as my daily routine hasn’t changed a bit even though I am quarantined. Well, I’d like to be honest with you, I didn’t take this whole Covid-19 outbreak seriously. I took it for just another panic-spread mass hysteria caused by a few deaths to linger on by the media and suck it dry for all its publicity. Turned out I was wrong, and while I was joking with friends about the whole thing, 3 weeks into March and my reception for the risk of getting infected grew to serious highs. And even though it doesn’t affect me all that much (the only downside I get from it for now is no physical social interactions), I am very aware how bad the situation is for the ones not used to this lifestyle or are left unable to do their jobs or threatened to lose it due to the ongoing safety precautions or are overstrained by the inhumane conditions they have to work under in order to keep our system running. My mother works in a nursing home for the disabled and she cannot afford to get infected as – let alone the effects of a spreading infection there would cause a lot of problems – if she were not able to work there, people might actually die from not being taken care of as it has happened in the past due to mismanagement and way too little workers in the establishment.

 My worries are also stretched by the well-being of my only remaining grandparent who I live with and what the damage to our economy might be to even secure my chances of getting an apprenticeship or place at an university.

I’m writing this all out because I am my most devoted reader and because I don’t want to leave brackets in here.

Because I doubt it will all be over at the end of April, I’ll leave anything else to my next reflection and sincerely hope I can look back at this with a brighter and more clearer attitude towards all our near future. Now I wanna talk about my creative activity during this month.

Artworks

Her First Arcane Performance [Contest]

My first project has started around February 18th when I made a handful of sketch-concepts to determine what the result to the Arcane-Idol contest would be. Another valuable example to how doing more than one or two concepts can lead to your favourite result. I made 4 until I had gone to search the Idol in my own entourage of characters and decided to flesh out Zalumnee’s history in the same breath of challenging my skills, endurance and timeliness. The result was a freakishly long project with an amount of complexity, only topped by my so-labelled My 100th deviation… an amount I hope to never to return to. In between sessions I actually feared I wouldn’t make it but towards the end, I grew more and more confident so I could do some additional polishing and detailed rendering. But in the end, I realize a project was way too long when I just throw it out there and don’t spend a while looking over it and correcting some minor mistakes that I can spot and eliminate.

 I wanted to achieve this high quality to have a show-off in my portfolio and to actually compete with other artists. But man, I didn’t expect the competition to be so fierce xD I’m not frustrated that I didn’t make it to the selection pool of winners as I never intended to win it, it was merely another push to tickle all I had out of me to make this as great as I could.

 My future artworks ended up being a lot more fun, even though I couldn’t take myself serious when my next artwork would end up being just another detail-drowned scene…

Giant Burrow Lizards [Creature Design]

During project (especially the long and tedious ones), I sometimes drift away and imagine what I could do next. And The idea of drawing a bearded dragon somehow grew more and more fond to me. I used to have a couple and they are just adorable. But I wanted to create something new so I decided to turn it into a creature design. It has been two years since my last one and my initial thought was to portray it as my last approach. But the more I sketched, the more I wanted to portray this creature in its natural habitat to truly give a feel to how it lives and acts. Thus this scene was created and almost doubled the time I had planned it to last… Well it only took about 7 days once I had a sketch to work with so not much of a hassle but still not quite what I imagined it to when I thought about a simple design when I was working hard on her first arcane performance…

 This lizard is a mash-up of a frilled-lizard, an armadillo and a mole and features the body structure of the bearded dragon as well as the smile of a gecko :3

Souvillaine’s Eternal DOOM [Fanart]

As stated in it’s description, I didn’t intend to work this one out as planned… at first. But a series of non-determined projects and random sketches more leaned me into this direction… it also helped that the game it was for is so goddamn good, didn’t last long until I played through it… and then again and then tried out the multiplayer. But I’m digressing…

This is the first artwork that I made real use of the silhouette technique to first determine the shape and then work the lines out from there. It was a little clunky at first but overall it did a nice service. I’ll see myself using this method often in the future.

 I’m also glad I took my time and spend another day on this background. It really turned this piece around I must say and wasn’t looking very good on its own in front of a bland background. This might be a sign that I’ll never really step away from some scenery in one form or another.

Upcoming Stuff & preplanning

My daily studies have been pretty much dropped-off at this point. Once I start a new project, it’s too much fun to stay working on it than to do some unrelated side stuff… Ahh but I’ll try to get back to it. Not day-specific tasks though, I want to practice whole body anatomy and render some exercises, I also should be doing a crash-course at drawing clothes properly… i get the feeling my shirts and pants aren’t very convincing if not using photo references.

 Ideas for projects are there. I think the next thing to tackle would be a redesign of my very, very first few characters. I don’t wanna spoil too much but I hold them very dear and they will be part of a more expansive project of mine…

Artist Shoutout

My one and only shoutout this month goes to…

 GrimmuzA

I really enjoy their use of the comic style for rendering and depiction while keeping it fresh with the digital medium. The scenes portrayed are lively, the colours match and the imagery, while brutal very often, looks just fantastic!

See you next time! Stay safe and healthy!
 ~Souvillaine