okay i want to yap about my process for this because i did a lighting study (i'm not a professional enough artist to do lighting studies, okay).
first, I did a tracing of newt from the movie.
i actually did this one before i posted sarah come down to me, because i usually do a tracing before i get into any serious art for a fandom these days. you get a way better idea of where the proportions go on the face, especially on people with more unique facial features. this one is pretty sketchy/not too detailed, but i especially noticed the way newt's nose was squarer than i expected it was, and the way the folds of his of his eyelids intersected with them rather than falling above like i would have otherwise expected.
now, we start the actual process for THIS painting specifically. this was the original sketch/concept, that i wanted to do some sort of 'newt survives to the safe haven and is leaning against the doorframe when thomas wakes up in the final scene of tdc' situation. i had a general idea of the pose that i wanted to use, and that i wanted him to have a harsh silhouette against the background/be blocking out the light. once i had that generally down, i started to experiment with lighting. i knew that i wanted lighting to be coming from outside the hut, with the inside quite dark so that i wouldn't have to focus on the background too much because i sort of hate doing backgrounds. in this sketch, i had the lighting coming from more to the side, but i changed this in the final because i didn't like how it came out in the sketch.
at this point, i had an idea for an alteration - to make it so that newt hadn't survived, and to extend the painting downwards so that you could see that his shadow wasn't present on the floor.
i gave it a go here, but i wasn't super happy that it came across that newt was a ghost/not really there, so i changed him to be more transparent and to have a background colour that blended more with the sunset behind him.
and that was my lighting mockup done! which i have never done before in my life and it felt really weird to do, but it did make the final product look way better, so...
anyway. the rest of the process was pretty standard, but i did a full background with the sunset and everything that you can barely see in the final painting and i think it looks neat, so i'm adding it here as well. everybody appreciate my sunset.
