Illustration #131 + rewards, sketches with videos and extra doodles

Hey everyone! Here's a new painting for you, along with some extra stuff as usual. :)

I feel like it's been a little while since I've painted a close-up scene like this one, so it was about time! I hope you guys 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!

The changes I recently made to my workflow continue to feel pretty good. Before, when I would paint everything as if it's merged together on one layer, I ended up spending a lot of time cleaning up edges and trying not to ruin edges again later in the process. It involves a lot of careful painting around the silhouettes of things. Having everything separated to different layers and making use of transparency lock seems to eliminate a lot of that work. So, even if there is more time spent managing layers, it seems to be a net positive.

I've attached the time lapse videos for the two sketches I did before starting this painting, I know some of you have been interested in those. I should have shared them earlier, sorry about that. :)

The doodles this time around ended up being a range of different art style experiments. They're all pretty unfinished, but I've sort of learned what I wanted to from them, so I'll leave them like that for now unless I find inspiration to pick them back up. The third one in particular helped me a lot with internalizing in a more concrete way how to layer things and use fog between layers to create depth, which was something I was struggling to get right in the main painting I was doing. In that third doodle I also tried using the Vivid Light blending mode for painting the lighting, which seemed to work at first, but ultimately has problems applying in a nice way on top of darker values. So I sort of hit a dead end with that picture where it would've taken too much work to fix it. But all in all a very useful experiment!

This post came in a little bit later than I intended, but don't worry, I haven't just been lazy! 😄 I had to take advantage of inspiration when it struck, and the experiments that have come out of that recently are ones I think will have a relatively big impact on my work going forward. I had sort of felt like I was in a rut with my painting process earlier this year, but things have started to feel better again. So I feel optimistic about the next pieces I'll be doing! I've got some other interesting experiments in progress to share later too that are quite a bit different, so I'll be curious to see how you guys feel about those.

Looking forward to doing more paintings! Thank you again for supporting that!