This is my first time drawing and posting fanart for Outer Wilds, I took this as a chance to do something simple and give myself a break from school work
Really happy with how the rendering turned out, kind of forgot I know how to do that
I have a sketchbook where I paint one art per piece of media I really enjoyed, and I finished my page for Outer Wilds recently.
I wanted to start sharing some of my traditional art on here - so for anyone curious, some process pics under the cut!
My first step is to always make a "sketch" in photoshop of what I want to paint, just so I can figure out placements of everything without damaging the paper in the sketchbook. Sometimes I do actual full sketches in digital, sometimes I just bash pieces from different photos or images like in this case - the point is just to figure out the composition before I touch the paper.
Once I have my composition ready I do my sketch in pencil, and adjust things from my wonky digital sketch as I go. If the piece is super complex I will print the digital sketch and use transfer paper to trace it onto the sketchbook, but most of the time I just sketch in a rough grid that splits the pages in quarters to help with the measurments and copy the rest just by eyeballing things.
For the actual painting I mostly use acrylic gouche, or markers + watercolors combo. The paper in this sketchbook is actually pretty bad for painting, but I really love the format and the marker pieces I have in it, so I just plan around the limitations. I know I won't get any good wet on wet painting going on, so I try and plan my colors ahead to avoid repainting one spot too many times.
I usually slap some random underpainting color on the areas I want to work on (like the purple under the black in the photo above), since it's super hard to judge values correcly agains the light page, especially if there's going to be a lot of darks.
And afterwards it's just a lot of laying first layer of paint, inevitably having to adjust, and doing the same over and over. Acrylic gouache is super forgiving in this aspect thankfully :D
I doodled the Stranger's Inhabitants as other owl types!!
I'm a big fan of birds and owls, along with ravens, are my favourites :D
Including the Eurasian Eagle Owl and the Eurasian Scops Owl as Inhabitant alternatives was so important to me. During summer in my country I always hear the Eurasian Scops Owl and I felt it was a must to draw because of that xD
And the Eurasian Eagle Owl is arguably my favourite of all owls! ^v^
(This post is prologue to another which covers the details of the main build! If that is what you're looking for, head there instead! Writing that up just felt incomplete without having additional thoughts and early tests put somewhere, since it was such a big part of the process!)
I said this on the main post, but I'll say it again here! I talked myself out of this like 3 times over the course of a year before I actually did it. 💀
But I had several goals that, if met, would make this feasible for me—if I could make the end result look good.
I wanted to:
do this ideally without cosplay contacts, for health reasons
have NO painstaking movie magic level makeup every time
retain the use of my facial expressions in a way that looked natural/have the entire face emote with me, namely the second pair of eyes.
For awhile, I thought that ticking these boxes might be impossible with my standards for the final product I wanted. But these points kept floating around in my head all the same.
So that was my starting point.
For Halloween, I do this bit where I'm up in the trees (or in a rope bridge over our sidewalk) as a tree fae that tells kids riddles. That outfit looks like this:
As Halloween rolled around last year, I remembered just how much this mask actually does kinda make my eyes look larger than they are. Under the right lighting and angle, my eye becomes the pupil, and shadows and imagination do the rest. This would satisfy my desire for the big-eye illusion.
Another thing that helped the idea form was that I got new glasses frames around that time. My cheeks come up a lot when I smile and I started to notice how the glasses let my face move around freely behind them while still being super close to my face. The frames I had right before that, actually touched my cheeks sometimes when I smiled, but the new ones did not. I wondered if I could do something similar with a mask, so that a drawn-on pair of eyes could slide up under a fake "lid" to squint when I smiled. This would solve the problem of the lower eyes looking static and unnatural.
Those two things gave me the idea for how I wanted to do this! And there SO MANY other reasons that a mask and hat-like headpiece would make things SO MUCH EASIER that if I'd done things any other way.
Tippertot, if this is what you meant, this is how!! This was a SUPER important part of it to me. If I lost the ability for my whole face to look expressive in a way that held up, I didn't want it.
Apart from being able to smile, the second eyes would also become shadowed just like the top ones, because they would essentially get an eyelid. I thought this would lend credence to the illusion.
Earliest tests of all this under the cut! Fair warning! ik it looks goofy!!! All part of the process. 😌 The goal was not for the tests to look good, just to give me enough to know whether the idea would work.
Thus ensued many tests of whether this idea was actually going to work or not! I tried out a couple different masks at this stage and just cut them to shape.
(I was very happy with the range of shapes and expressions I could still get the mouth to convey with those lip-lines!)
Improved double eye squinching. This was the point at which I was happy with how things looked.
But with a mask like this, and for this character in general, I knew if I hit it just a little wrong, it would look way too uncanny or sloppy and the effect would fall apart.
To see how I ended up making the final piece, the rest of the cosplay process is here!
some shrimple doodle to close out my campfire fest stuff with, these three with our cats !!
i've only been apart of two outer wilds events so far (this and the quantum entanglement exchange, which brought me out of lurking), and i've very much enjoyed both ::]]] thank you @outerwilds-events for setting these up
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