That feeling when you get a new skill.
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4K picture, click to enlarge.
I'm still training my brushwork and my speed to complete artwork. My goal, is to sort of bypass drawing or inking totally and draw later with the thin brush while painting. After many failed tests, this one is starting to bring together a lot of aspects that I like. A good reason to share it with you. I hope you'll like it.
Process:
I don't have a lot of snapshots of this one, but this early 'block' painting of the process might give you clue of the technique used. I spent a lot of time finding a good brush to block volumes quickly while still having a little texture and not too much mixing or opacity variation to resist doing too early 'over modeling'.
1 comment
This image gives a nice sense of space and fresh air. The light is atmospheric, and the greyer, more diffuse light implies the clouds you can't see. The cliff behind the figure looks like limestone, realistically faulted and eroded, the thicker clouds could be cumulus congestus forming off the cliff's thermal plume, and the flatter ground could be an alpine meadow or grazing-land over, say, shale bedrock (it's rough enough, not as smooth as, say, chalk). Not sure about the wedge-shaped feature in front of the figure.
Despite (or maybe partly because of) being fairly impressionistic, the background gives a sense that it is an impression of reality, not an impression of a cartoon convention. It's nice to see cartoon art without the clouds that look like oversimplified thought bubbles, the mountains that look like vaguely conical spikes, and the vegetal growth forms that no botanist has ever seen.
I mean there's nothing wrong with stylization, but it can get so abstracted and unoriginal that it doesn't bring real experience to mind. It's not possible to convey the feeling of a cold front is coming in and that it might rain soon with thought-bubble clouds, anymore than one can conjure up an ancient oak woodland with trees that look like lollipops. Even if the viewer has never experienced these things, impressions of them have a feel of reality and richness that collections of artistic stereotypes don't.
The contrast between the rough background, smooth metal, and bright hair is also neat.
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