In spite of irl taking all of the time and energy out of me I'm still hoping to do Artfight this year as well even if it's just one attack.
That being said there was some ideas involving artfight I wanted to follow through on once I learned of them.
One was having each of my OCs' ref sheets include their character number/id (not done yet, since that's gonna take a lot of file revisits),
The other was making a blindbox button
I made it thanks to learning of the idea through NeonArcadeStars' youtube video on the idea.
The other was making a custom No Team artfight card;
Not because you can choose to participate w/o a team (cause you can't) but more to satiate the nitpicky part of my brain that doesn't want to touch my profile until the Teams get announced.
Crossover!- Holly isn't the only paladin I have; Warlock!Terra (ex paladin) and her make neat foils of each other, so I drew them sitting by a campfire after stumbling upon each other during a battle- (Laphi, Bard!Harriet, and Terra's demonic sword are at a separate campfire to give them space)
The last world I got to get in-on during a vket session was the botanical garden one. I'm delighted there's a section where you can illustrate your own ficitonal flora. /I meant to choose the "draw your avatar as a flower/ prompt 😅
I have been doing doodles on/off but most I've done either weren't worth their standalone post (maybe I'll do a video post with me turning the pages? Would y'all like that?) or were topically more relevant to the nsfw alt.
While this specific drawing is part of a suggestive doodle for the nsfw alt, I still had to crop the context cause I wanted to share
Long overdue- Demauria's dragon form designed for a ref sheet. A good chunk of my OCs are dragons but for the life of me many of them have NOT had their dragon forms designed 😅 needed to start fixing that to make me feel less guilty having them under the "dragongirl" tag for artfight…
Terra's 2025 oufit redesign reference sheet in colour.
Bless past-gato for keeping the old reference sheet with the body as a template, made slapping this together quicker if I hadn't (even if the arms/legs anatomically are a little scuffed).
Monster Hunter World's MR Pukei armorset inspired me to try to redesign Terra's outfit; one of her earlier iterations I often drew her in a (clumsily designed) Musketeer themed outfit, so I revisited the idea but with better knowledge, and while trying to use beats of her main design most of you are already familiar with.
It's definitely a striking look. I've drawn this outfit (with some tweaks/modifications) onto my reference sheet template for her so I can maybe add the design to artfight for the fun of it.
Also if you're confused about the chibi Harriet being like "my leggings!" it's just a small joke cause Harriet's oldest design had armored boots way back when.
Boom, after months the Harriet pinup piece is completed, with 6 variants to boot. She sneaked off a grilled fish from the kitchen before it was officially mealtime, tsk tsk.
Session 2- Process till completion? But where're the other sessions?? Well that escalated both quickly and slowly
The last report was Early September 2024…. Dear god it’s been almost 7 months since last report. I would’ve like to have split what comes next into 2 more sessions but- it is what it is. This is gonna go all over the place so apologies.
Finding some dissatisfaction with my end result in last-session I tweaked the fish-holding arm and the dangling leg a little bit more to my liking and sketched again.
The nips got finally drawn and with it- the censor will now have to drop to keep tumblr-compliant and also to keep this blog sfw, hope you enjoy the humor (Harriet doesn’t).
The wings kept feeling wrong (looking more stretched and unnaturally tacked on vs being naturally relaxing from her backside) so between struggling wing csp assets to reference (not super great when there are no flipper-esque wings) and some more direct input from a friend I ended up landing on a more natural look.
Linearting
Now for my nemesis- linearting.
Despite my disdain for the process I did not want to half ass it by just cleaning up the sketchwork like I normally do. While I struggle to grasp its use, I really wanted to implement lineweight in my lineart. From what I’ve seen lineweight can be used in a lot of different ways; purely randomly, to emphasize mass, or to emphasize the light source of the piece. Of all the choices I tried to stick to the last option since I felt I could best understand it enough to attempt it.
I also decided to try a feature I’ve never used before; linearting with vector lines instead of rasterized ones. For those who don’t know what the difference is I’ll do the extremely dumbed down explanation; rasterized lineart is more common (I think) and is less memory intensive, vector lines are more common in graphic design (since they can be resized w/o the pixel distortion you can encounter with raster lines). I wanted to try this method in an attempt to make the process of linearting a little less painful; with vectors I can adjust the lineart without having to redraw said line if it’s a small tweak, and changing colours is a lot quicker too.
Sadly during this phase my tablet pen's nib broke in a way that was unfixable (leaving the broken part of the nib DEEP in the pen), and due to pricing (tldr- the pen was more expensive than just replacing the entire tablet, in which case it's better to upgrade altogether if possible) had to wait for a new tablet after researching my best choice for a replacement; definitely was a great upgrade but GOD I did not like that happening when it did. Upon a friend’s suggestion I adjusted pen sensitivity so I could try to avoid putting so much force on the pen when doing the thicker lines.
I think I’ve grown a little more confidence on linearting, but it’s still far from my favourite step. I both enjoyed and hated the process of using vectors for the lineart. I felt like there’s probably a lot more I could’ve done with the vectors than what I was doing, but in my opinion it is not that bad for someone jumping in with very minimal knowledge/understanding.
Colouring/Shading
Being colouring is one of my favourite steps I couldn’t resist I rushed right into it. Though I actually ended up doing the shading before the colouring this time. I did the method I’ve heard/seen for digital artists where you block the subject with just black/dark, and then erase it off where the lighting/highlights would be. I’ll say I definitely found this method put more strength into my shading from usual.
Then I rushed to colouring Harriet herself. Just did the ol-colour picker from her refsheet to throw her colours on, then did some adjustments to colour her nipples and tanlines (cause I WANTED DEM TANLINES!!!!!) though I tried to not make the latter too bold of a contrast since she imo has darker skin and not just tanned.
Then from there there was colouring the background and mast and just wrestling the colour balance and blends, there was a lot of it so I’m just gonna share one of the ones I went through.
At one point I even took a sunset from google and maxed its size on the background (and crashed CSP as a consequence due to the large image resolution- which lead to me shrinking the canvas/image during this process) to try to help me get an idea of what I MIGHT want to do for the background.
Clouds 💢
After a point I started trying to make my own clouds- the first attempt wasn’t too bad save for the tiny little problem that was the brush made the clouds look wayyy too sharp and grainy on closer inspection so had to scrap them and try again, even going as far as looking at irl clouds to try to get an idea of how to emulate them.
I ended up using a generic soft brush and tried my best to do clouds again. It was okay, but not great and kept getting adjusted between other steps. fortunately we’ll better revisit/redux on these clouds far later in the chain-of-events.
Like the clouds I has having problems getting the nice folds look for the sails, grabbed some refs and kept trying to get it right. The results are far from perfection but they are sufficient. Folds on this sort gonna be a pain in general.
Clothes roughs
I did some rough draw-ups of different alternative outfits for her to wear. After a lot of wrestling I settled on her just wearing an opened poet’s shirt and the other two ideas got discarded.
Added a bi-colour bra to make it that I don't have there's a variant that I can share in sfw spaces, and then I lined and coloured the rest of it up, only to stumble into an unfortunate realization-
Ew that went wrong for clothes- reference and redo
[image source 1, 2, and sadly 3 only leads to a pinterest result or a malicious site so 🤷]
With extreme dissatisfaction I ended up trying to tackle them again; I learned the term for the kind of shirt I was after (poet’s shirt, that way it also reduced the amount of AI messing with my results), got several reference photos then tried again while trying to mimic what I was seeing.
MUCH better.
Clouds redo
With that, let’s get the clouds looking better. I checked this tutorial to try to get a better idea, and found some cloud brushes that are in Official CSP but weren’t downloaded thanks to another tutorial and used them, used them then used the tutorial to help further elevate them a little bit. To further elevate said clouds I hilariously used my previous crummy clouds as a overlay to help the new clouds pop. Much better, and with that it’s done, slap dat signature and watermarks! Ready to throw onto the internets
Personal Evaluation on this project
This project ended up taking much longer than I wanted; Some of it was due to real life kicking my butt, and some of it was from clumsy planning and impulsiveness to get to certain steps quicker.
I liked it taking longer cause it gave me more time to think about certain steps and chisel away at parts when I had time, like working on a super large puzzle. On the opposite end it ended up making me much more intimate with the flaws with the piece/project than I’d like to be during the process, since most artists nowadays including myself tend to hit that stage after they’ve completed and posted a work online.
This lead to a lot of times asking “am I gonna shrug off this flaw or go through the time/trouble to redo a part to make it better?” For the case of the clouds and clothes, yes I felt the redo was necessary and it helped strengthen the overall piece, but there were many other flaws I chose to ignore cause I was too far into it to be worth the backtrack.
The biggest example flaw is ironically the anatomy/perspective when sketching Harriet’s body; while using the 3D tool was very helpful, I feel I should’ve did more perspective exaggeration for certain parts of her body (the biggest case being her hands; they imo would’ve looked much better if I made them and her fingers a little bit bigger and chonkier). Another case were the folded sails of the ship that I feel could’ve been better shaped and the folds could’ve been more sensible, ironic for me to say considering I had done several references and do-overs for that part of the piece. Conversely there are probably still various flaws in the lineart itself; despite the convenience of being able to edit the lineart via the vector points it is still a lot of nitpicking if you don’t decide that it’d be better to just move on so long as the idea is brought across via the art, flaws be damned.
When it came to the clothes stage, in my opinion I should’ve done that LONG before colouring/shading Harriet’s body and back when I had just finished the lineart, as it would’ve lead to less visual confusion for my eyes when I had to sketch the clothes out. Some ofher steps were out of order enough to cause confusion to myself, but I won’t bash myself about it since this is probably the first piece I’ve worked on that’s taken this long, plus this winter alone has been very mentally taxing so dumb decisions are bound to happen thanks to that.
That being said, I’m glad I did this project. I got to experiment and test out strategies and tools I’ve never even considered delving into before, and I may even end up using some of them again. There were even some points in this project where said tools I just thought “well this could be handy for [this group of drawing ideas]”. It’s also lead to beautiful results and is probably my biggest high effort piece I’ve done in a long time, probably rivaling if not outclassing some of my bigger pieces that I still admire today from back in my highschool days.
Hearing from one friend talk about the flow of the piece made me happy since, despite never mentioning it during the journaling of this project, that it was something in the back of my mind on/off while working on this piece; the flow of the ladder and clouds all intentionally despite to try to point the eyes of the audience towards Harriet who’s meant to be the main feature of the piece. It really proves that considering flow is a vital element when you want to make a piece work.
I may actually try to print one of the several variants as a print to put on my wall. Not that I will hold my breath on the results as my track record of digital-to-print for my artworks has always been a hard hit/miss for results.
Thank you for those who decided to follow along on the journaling of this art project.
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