Reflection #60 – February 23

Phew, I can tell you, 8 days ago, I wouldn’t have thought my week would end up this way.

About two weeks ago, I was auditioning for an internship. I didn’t think too much about it, just that I needed one for my study and hadn’t quite looked around for much. That offer originally came out of the blue and I accepted because, yeah why not, let’s try it.

It was just about partaking a lottery at a carnival; it would be nice to get a price though you don’t really believe you’ll win anything. And as it would come; I got the job! Which meant I had to scrap everything I was working on at the time, cancel my open seminars and start packing bags. At the very least I had the possibility planned out so when I was calling my grannie if she could take me in her house for the next semester, it didn’t come as much of a surprise to her. Friends and family should be happy too that I can stay closer to them for a change even though it meant abandoning all school business and friends there for over 6 months…

Anyway, it all worked out so far, I’m fully moved in, only have to hang up some pictures and photos but heck, it didn’t go without a fair bit of worrying as it was all so so very rushed, there’s bound to be some loose ties somewhere, right? Well if there are, I surely hope they won’t be noticed hmhmhm.

But how did this month start out exactly?

Well up until Tuesday 7th, I was very occupied with working out my website for a school project – something I am very happy with now after it’s finished and the big troubles in the beginning are overcome. It’s gonna be a great place to store every information regarding commissions (when I ever have the time to actually do any tho) and portfolio with separate sections to divide my works into.

It was so much work that I was unable to do anything else but being my last project that semester, it gotta be worth it. And – once again – I’m very happy with the result, you can view it here: https://souvillaine.com

On the side, I had established a sketch before, which I could work out after the project deadline was met. It started as mainly a design exercise sheet for working on my 3D model on Zavi but I like that pose so much, I wanted to elaborate… and elaborate and so it got out of hand and wasn’t even sure how to render it. though the more I worked on i, the less I wanted to put time in it, so I scrapped all colours I had done beforehand and reworked it in greyscale so I could focus more on shapes and value.

The world Zavi resides in now is very desaturated and I wanted to test how she and other figures may look that way as I rarely ever work in Blacks and whites…

Working this out and publishing it had told me a couple of things:

– It was more commonly accepted that the militia portrayed here was some kind of police force, which wasn’t my intention but couldn’t find the time to design them accordingly, which I’ll have to do going further into this project.

– Pure greyscale is rather boring, maybe I’ll find some colourful accents to add some interest, though they might interfere with the focal points or I only desaturate everything less intensely.

– Zavi’s outfit is tricky to turn into 3D, I don’t want to do any physix effects on her clothing like i did with Zalumnee as it’s just stomach turning to work with. I’ll leave them to simple things like her hair single pieces of fur.

This one appeared to me quicky early into February, though back then, they were floating in a more tugged up position away from each other and the dimensions of the canvas were aligned horizontally. It turned out to be too much work though for the little time I gave myself so I decided to go for a simpler layout which also would do for a good poster.

While everything worked out just fine, it was Absinthe’s face which gave me quite some trouble. Luckily I got some help later on which fixed a lot of things and made it quite lookable, though I’m afraid I couldn’t implement the details that would turn it into something I could hang up my wall and be very proud of it.

At least, it gave me the opportunity to redesign my sona a bit. I wanted to add more neck floof for a while now and experimented with a more vulture-like beak form. While I like the former, the latter hasn’t quite convinced me yet. More sketches should help me out finalizing the head shape into something truly satisfying.

Looking at it now, I really like how I rendered the cloth, it’s simple but effective, it’s just missing some reflected light on Absinthe’s chest, ah anyway, let’s go on…

Ehhhhh, I promised I’d be honest with myself doing these reflections…

I really don’t quite like how this one turned out. It’s got a fine rendering and pose, the anatomy looks alright (I made a separate shirtless version as well) but it’s just not getting there.

I was making it in a hurry tho, didn’t want to spend much more time on it and was almost scrapping it for the sake of keeping my page ‘clean’. A friend convinced me to still upload it and yeah I can see why it’s nice to have, at the very least I can reflect on it.

Oddly enough, it gathered a lot more traction that I’d have expected from it. But it’s in the past now… I don’t know whether or not Axel’s design is to blame here or just one faulty project on my part.

I’ll have to think over it before drawing him again…

Last one, finished it just today.

I took my time to develop it further – about two more days than when I first expected it to be done. And I am glad I put in the extra mile for a change as it brought out a lot of contrast, effects and colour depth. It’s just something about these wildly coloured images that help me express myself or the music I listen to in that moment. But it’s not what I’d like to be doing for the rest of my artistic career. It’s too abstract for that sense.

Well, I have to get going again.

Tomorrow and the days after will be very new to me and I have to get up early to catch my train, still needing to eat before.

Maybe I can go through my SMs for the rest of the night.

I wish you enjoy March and hopefully it will warm up the cold weather we’re having atm…

~Souvillaine