Illustration #132 + rewards and extra doodles!

Hey, everyone! Here's a new painting for you. :) Revisited the ancient egyptian inspired theme for this one, which I always enjoy. I wanted to show a priestess performing a blessing during a fertility ritual. I hope you like it!

Check out the rewards in the attachments! You can also always find them in the rewards collection post, alongside all other past rewards you might have missed!

This painting took a bit of extra effort to get out the door unfortunately. The start of the process went very smoothly, but towards the end I started struggling with it. The problem I ran into was one I wasn't quite able to put my finger on for a while. I felt like I had stared at the painting for too long to have an objective view on it, so I put it down for a few days and did some prep work for future paintings before coming back with a fresh view of it. I realized I was making unimportant parts of the image too sharp, which draws focus away from the focal points, so I ended up doing a pass where I softened edges a bit, and I'm happier with the result of that.
I'd like to be a bit better at taking breaks from a piece instead of just trying to power through it. It does help a lot in maintaining that slightly more objective view of the piece. So I should consider maybe working on multiple pieces in parallel to allow it without having too much downtime.

Last month I talked a bit about very low resolution sketches, this painting is the first I've finished using those. While the painting process did have the problem mentioned above, the rest of the process went very well, and the way I did the sketch played a part in that. Working at that low resolution is a limitation that forces good habits when sketching. It helps me avoid getting caught up in drawing details too early and focuses me square on the picture's composition, colors and lighting. It's been effective for me, so I wanted to do a little experiment with pushing that to its logical extreme, going even lower than those 320x180 sketches I showed last month. The 64x36 resolution examples I'm showing here turned out to be too small, as expected I suppose. You can get a loose idea of what the composition is, but it's too difficult to plan a complex scene with any small objects in them, so it likely limits what I choose to draw. 128x72 is a bit better, but I still feel like it might subconsciously steer me away from drawing things that are hard to describe at that resolution. So, for me, 320x180 is a size that is small enough to have the benefits of working small while still not being so small that it limits what I choose to draw. I'll probably keep doing sketches at 320x180 until I maybe find some less obvious disadvantages of that approach. It feels good right now.

The bottom sketch in the batch of 320x180 doodles here is an interesting example where I took a stock photo of some trees and a field, shrank it down to 320x180, and then drew characters on top of it and added extra details. I wanted to see how easy it is to match the style and lighting of the photo. It feels like mixing photo bashing and manual painting works really well at that size. It's pretty easy to mesh them together. I should try to go out and shoot more photos I can use in that way.

If you haven't tried drawing on top of very low resolution photos like that, give it a try! And try to pay attention to how the low resolution allows your imagination to fill in details. It's pretty fun!

That's it for now, I hope you're all doing great! Thanks for the support, I appreciate you guys. :)