Illustration #128 + rewards and some doodles

Hey! I finally managed to finish this painting. It's been an interesting one to do! For both fun and not fun reasons. 😅

I went with the sort of ancient Egypt inspired theme for this, and that's been great. I really enjoy my time with that theme, so I'd love to do some more art using that soon! The warmth of scenes like this always feels very inviting to me, and that's a feeling I really always want my work to evoke. I hope you guys like that as much as I do. 😄

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 less fun part of why this was an interesting piece to do is that I initially felt very optimistic about it, but that unfortunately didn't last until the end. It was especially the final 25% of the process that didn't feel easy. I think it's mainly due to the view angle I chose for the scene making it tough to judge what the characters' proportions are like. I kind of have a habit of not considering whether a view angle will make things challenging or not. If it seems interesting I just go for it. And in the sketch it will usually look fine enough to my eyes. It's usually rough enough that problems don't really become obvious until later in the process. The more well rendered and realistic the people become, the weirder it looks when proportions are off. In the sketch for this piece I drew the torso of the guy way too long because it was at an angle where that was less obvious to me. And the composition I did in the sketch kind of relied a little bit on it being like that, so making the torso shorter would create other problems. This kind of problem is one I run into more often than I'd like. I guess the take away from this is that I need to be a bit more mindful of good proportions in my sketches. Hopefully you guys can also learn from my mistake there. :)

The doodles this time around are mostly brush tests I suppose. Throughout working on a piece I can sometimes go through a bit of an identity crisis in terms of brushes lmao. They feel good and then they don't, and then they do again! It's weird. So I do these types of doodles as sort of a reality check for the brushes I use. It's also nice to do them as a break from the bigger piece, so I can return to it with fresher eyes. Even more so when I've been struggling with it.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention I got a new drawing tablet. That's been... interesting! I got a Huion Kamvas 16 Gen 3 pen display this time around. I haven't really used a pen display for years, and after a couple of weeks now I'm still not 100% sure how well I like it. I probably won't have made up my mind about it for another few months at least. I do know, however, that even these small pen displays are really inconvenient things to have on my desk relative to a non-screen drawing tablet lol. Maybe you guys have any cool tips for how to most comfortably work on a pen display? Or how to keep it out of the way when you're not using it?

The reason I decided to buy this pen display is because of the method of sketching that I've been wanting to improve at where I sketch with very thin solid lines. And that requires a little bit more hand-eye coordination than the more painterly approach I've been used to. So I'm hoping this will pay off. We'll see!

Anyway, thanks for supporting me, everyone! Enjoy your week. I'm looking forward to working on the next piece! :)