Reflection #42 – June 21

“Summer has finally arrived” – writing while it’s raining outside.

Hello again!

This month was a crazy one weather wise. I got reports from my hometown of hail, and storms and flooding, luckily it wasn’t too bad and nobody got hurt. However, over here, it’s all a lot calmer, I can’t complain a bit, just hope that it won’t get too heavy when the heat-have will eventually come.

Today was the last day with lectures for this semester and the exams are creeping up. I’m not too afraid of them, but I do get the challenge and I want to be prepared. This is the reason why I won’t have much time on my hands to be working on attacks next month because yes, I want to do ArtFight again! But it will be important to have my time properly managed.

Other than that, I try to be a lot more sporty and do some occasional workout, been monitoring my weight and got my first dose of vaccine. Hopefully this whole pandemic thing will slowly get to an end. I think we all can agree that we gotta leave this behind us as soon as possible.

But let’s finally dive in and discuss the process of arting:

My promised Fruit-Hat piece was a real tough one at first, the transition from linework to paint just wasn’t time efficient as it left artifacts left and right that I needed to do over. The nasty part about these artworks is sometimes, they only start coming together with the last step of the making. But when it finally did, I had lots of fun again and going crazy with the colour usage definitely helped to push my comfort and thus getting me to tickle the rest out of this piece. I got heavily inspired by a photo-study I made that you’ll see in my speedpainting-collection.

Anyway, I think I’m having enough of the brush I use for rendering (at least for figures that is). It’s time to get back to smooth shading again, which shows off better results with less hassle to get good shapes.

Nevertheless, I am very happy with this result and think it captures my visual style of the past couple of months so that it is distinct in retrospect.

Next up: Sketch and Design

All in all, nothing has changed that much. It feels like there have been more character-based drawings and less general posework, but I didn’t do direct comparisons. However, I wanted to do more characters on location to maybe get back to more ambitious pieces.

There’s definitely a trade-off of how much time I spend with these small things instead of usual full-scale projects and while I’d like to work more on big stuff, I do realize that these daily sketches help a little with getting into ‘the zone’. I have kept up 91 days of consecutive sketch-paging and it would be great to keep that number going.

The only hurdle to take with these is to get ideas and motivation. Luckily, my friends tend to help out with that and I couldn’t be happier with their support ^v^

Speedpainting was slow this time. After the Fruit hat was done, I felt a little confused as to what theme to adapt and incorporate into these. No wonder why these feel a little more random than usual. I think with a clearer direction, these would be much easier to pick and develop. At least there were a couple of reference-less paintings this time… basic, but a start.

I don’t think I’ll keep doing them next month though, as ArtFight will take up too much time of my already limited schedule…

And lastly, the experimental portion of labour.

The monochrome pieces stemmed from some fooling about with my chalk brush and while the first result (bottom-right) surprised me, the following pieces were hardly appealing enough for me to continue with this method… Still, as sketching light studies, this might hold up very well in the future.

After that, I did a small speedpainting with character showcase (top-right) but discontinued the refinement-process.

Then, I wanted to do more light and shape-based composition, trying to work with high contrasts: only a silhouette and then filling in some spaces with light. And the results became more and more intriguing to me. They definitely have something going on for them, especially messing around with colours was a lot of fun. They just couldn’t be as refined as I wanted them to, hence they’ll stay experiments for now; aesthetic ones I’d say but still nothing more than some glossy sketch-work.

Alright, I think this should about cover my reflection this month.

As usual, I’ll try to keep it up, maybe even do more than that and hope I’ll be able to make lots of people happy with my Attacks next month.

I see you all, hopefully very soon!

Until then, have a lovely time!

~Souvillaine