Reflection #54 – July 22

Oh wow what a month!

I have been looking through the reflection from a year ago and the change of pace is really astounding as I couldn’t remember the workload that my exams had put on me during that time. This year – and to extension the semester – definitely was more relaxed than the last.

My exams weren’t quite demanding or hard in the end and the few projects that I still had to finish weren’t as ambitious as during the winter semester. It had the positive side effect that I could dedicate more time to Art Fight this year. But what I didn’t expect was how my productivity exceeded even my most active month before (given how much other things I had to tackle in the meantime). While I had saved me 16 characters to portray – well knowing I wouldn’t be able to depict all of them – I still managed to finish 8 Attacks including 11 characters plus one more giftart for a friend. And i won’t talk about all of them here but there’s a few things to address:

With the first one, I realized how easy it was for me to drift into dim-lit approaches in rendering. And while fitting for this particular piece, it made a clear composition all the harder and colours more difficult to balance. So I decided to use brighter tones and a more evenly lit rendering approach in the future.

I don’t really know if this was the main reason for it, but rendering metal and clothing in this one was particularly difficult. If possible, I should start practising some armour pieces in my free time and avoid relying on layer modes for shading, overlay and additional lighting.

Regardless of my criticism, I’m happy with this piece. It is quite – very dark yes but I wouldn’t be able to figure out a more fitting ambience for a vampire in front of an eclipse <v<

Though I remembered my role was that of team bloom this year and I did want to portray more uplifting themes for the rest of artfight…

Next up was a long overdue animation exercise. Since my animation project is still in the preplanning phase, I need to figure out exactly how it is even executable. This here is a little experiment as to how it could be structured; without much complexity in the lines, no shading in the figures themselves, a colour correction overlay and minor additional effects. It also was a nice opportunity to throw some sounds together for some much needed spice! And I have to thank my side job for that…

It’s hard for me to have to choose which pieces to feature here as all of them have at least some thing to remark on. But with this one here, I wanted to point out the wacky styleshift from my other recent artworks. It is a lot wilder, more daring with its colourations – something I am very careful with. But despite my impulsiveness, it fits together quite well in the end. A tool that helped me here was the AI generated art machine Wombo that I used for the background colours to paint over. It gave me a hint of where to move this artwork thematically and I’m happy with the result. It also shows the fun I have with messing with the layer modes. You know, the way I render my logo is different in every artwork so to at least find out new combinations of styles that way, I’m beginning to make that my way of adding more colour to these pieces entirely.

I see potential in this and want to pursue it in the future.

In the last Week of ArtFight, I wanted to finish one project – then did so in 5 days and made this in between. It’s the outcome of a quick afterthought: “can I do a poster in no more than 2 days?” – it was clear it couldn’t be something very detailed and the composition had to be very easy to read since it would be featured in the background. Out came a fairly simple project that relies strongly on shapes and contrast rather than colour and detail. And I think it succeeds in those regards. I often think ahead and here, I had my animation project in mind, which also builds up on its simplicity. Cartoons are something that were always in the back of my head for me but I never really tried to improve my skillset in that regard, which will change for sure. I’ve been crazed by my need for detail for years that the fundamentals were often disregarded and I do feel the struggle to keep up sometimes even now. But I’ve bettered myself. This event has been my proof that I am very eager to experiment and mix and match my styles to see what best fits and I don’t think there’s any regression as long as I keep experimenting and training as well.

All of the 9 projects this month feature a slightly different look to the way I approach things, even though I do see me relying a bit too much on lines but that’s okay. Working for artfight has robbed me of my eagerness to think everything through and kinda loose my creativity on the process. I’ve been more impulsive this time. Yes doing multiple concepts for each project but also just going with it once I’ve found something I like. And it’s through finishing projects and reflecting on them that I think I learn the most instead of trying to make the one perfect result. And I think that’s a reason why I’ve felt this inactive over the last 12 months.

Once again, I am amazed at how much energy ArtFight has brought me and I’m looking forward to the next.

While we’re in the future already, let me quickly state my plans for the following month:

My main goal will be to flesh out Zalumnee’s world with story, lore and designs but I am also keen to try out some other projects including giftart and some commissions. Maybe I’ll tackle them simultaneously; so Zalu stuff in the morning and afternoon, personal things in the evening. That should help keep a steady pace, but I’ll have to see when ‘s most convenient.

Also, I can happily announce that I’ll be at EuroFur Con in August, my first bigger con and I am very excited for it, although I can already see how it’s draining my monetary resources TvT The time from late August to early September will be crammed with vacation though so I’m afraid I won’t be able to do much then, including writing the next reflection. I’ll see what I’ll do about it when the time arrives.

Until then, I wish you a wonderful August and probably vacation as well!

See you when it’s convenient :3

~Souvillaine