Bonus content!! Please feel free to enjoy the process timelapse of the most recent thing I made for the Avantris Valentines gift exchange!
I am gonna have a little ramble about some thoughts on this one below the cut, mostly for my own future reference and anyone curious!
Hey there! fun fact I turned on recording a few art projects ago and I think its genuinely helping me a lot to keep a reference like it for how each process vs finished product was!
First of all, please do not pay mind to the janky final few seconds, I cut the canvas size down and clearly the recording did not enjoy that :')
As usual, had a bit of a hard time figuring out exactly what I wanted to do, and just threw shit at the wall literally doodling anything and everything, and literally just ended up thinking lol, thats kinda funny and building from there
Generally, I do a super rough thumbnail style idea, then one of very large shapes to block out what goes where before finally going onto do the first draft, that I try do real fast so I can get all ideas on paper and all mistakes visible before I dedicate in too hard
(I was feeling stuck honestly at this stage, so I decided to slap some colours on for fun to see if I even like the big picture at all, and funny enough a good few friends did suggest that thats totally good enough right? But it didn't feel like something I was proud of so I got a week or so of a break before breaking into the full clean drawing/lining process which does take ages but turned out quite lovely here I think
Praise be references again!! Granted, here I got off quite easy, I really only used the official character art + a few screenshots of Andy + a pretty crow I found online. No, wait actually, I remember I had a terrible horrible time trying to find the exact kind of pose or even hand reference online for some reason, so I did take my own photos to make it work!
Oh so the thing I learned, idk if you can spot it, in the colouring in stage, I was trudging through Jericho on the left as I normally do, dreading the lack of time I had left and how long just flat colours would take, right? Then by Marius I was exhausted, worried I would actually have nothing to gift my giftee, and decided hell at least I can make a highly stylised just filled in with a relevant colour thing, right? And if I do have the time to finish it, I can always use them as a sort of wash/colour unifying overlay! Here, I remembered the fill tool exists hahh, and I just had to make a few lil work arounds like not letting colours touch each other and boom, speed!
but thing is, I was still spending forever gently outlining my tiny 4 pixel wide lines to not make it sloppy, when I learned about this groovy lil contiguous selection tool (lil magic wand icon!) and boom I can select a coloured in region, invert selection and colour in with like a few broad strokes total! Absolutely a game changer
So I did manage to absolutely speed through the rest, deciding fuck it I am gonna do my best to do at least a lil rendering, even if doing a beautiful full perfect job wouldve taken at least an extra week probably, and I think it doesn't suffer much for it!
The background btw is from my lovely friends suggestions, something simple that suggests a vaguely transitional moment in time, and i thought some sunset like colours would also be a bit valentines appropriate!
And, this recording is 69,441 frames long (would've been so god damn funny if it was 69,420 though) and I crunched some numbers, where I wouldve spent at minimum like 20 hours of active constant drawing on this! Thats, a good chunk honestly and maybe hopefully now with this colouring trick I can get even more efficient!
Anyway, despite the rush at the end where I felt like my hand would fall off from drawing so much so quickly (felt about as stressed in a good way as for my thesis lol) I am beginning to be proud of the end result and i'm very glad my giftee liked it too!! Time to face the scary concept of sharing this in the big discord server hahaaaaahh
Heres to trying to draw a bit more and hopefully be more chill about it!! Although, I do love the satisfaction I get from making all the lil details too (fun fact, I hid a ton of tiny lil hearts super subtly all throughout them, i.e. in the rose centres)
I don't imagine anyone has made it here and read all this, but hi! if you did, please do leave a like or a comment or so, I'm very interested to know if this was at all interesting to anyone but me! Also I love chatting about art!!
