Illustration #127 + rewards and doodles

Finally got this painting finished. 😄 I hope you find these creatures a little bit interesting. A little bit of lore I have behind them is that they're sort of a prototype species created through experimental conjuration or alteration magic. The people who created them disappeared ages ago, probably because of some experiments that went very wrong. So there isn't much known about them, but the species that resulted from their experiments all share signs of their creators being horny degenerates. 😏

You can check out the rewards in the attachments here to see the painting process!

If you do check out the process you'll maybe notice things didn't go entirely as planned in the last half. I wasn't fully happy with where the painting was going, and when I feel that way I usually try to pivot in a way that helps me regain my motivation. So I tried a few things there, some of which worked out alright and some that didn't. That's also why it took a bit longer to finish it than I would have liked. I felt like I learned things though, so it was probably worth it!

One of the things I tried is to add texture to surfaces, particularly to the skin, by using textured brushes and then smudging the result a tiny bit to soften it. If it's too sharp it stands out too much. And that worked out pretty alright I think. It's quite a bit faster than the task I sometimes inflict on myself where I manually painting every little bump.

Recently I've been looking a bunch at Brad Rigney's illustrations, and in his work I really notice how much good lighting matters. It matters so much more than how carefully rendered surfaces are. So I'd really like to become better at lighting my scenes. A part of how he often achieves it is through his use of fog. It's one of those classic 80's movie lighting tricks. So I was inspired to use more fog here too. It's a great tool for controlling values in the background and foreground in a way that allow silhouettes to read well.

I look forward to practicing these things more.

The first doodle this time around is a painting of Flavie, a character from Diablo 2. I've been playing the game a little bit again recently, and felt inspired to do my own kinda horny interpretation of her. 😅 In the game she's a character you run past and probably won't interact with, but maybe you would stop and hang out if she looked like that, right? 👀
I don't do a ton of fan art, but when I do I think it's interesting to do interpretations of characters that don't have many high definition depictions already. So it's particularly fun to do paintings of characters that have mostly been shown through pixel art or low res sprites. It leaves a lot of room for creative interpretations without feeling like I'm deviating too much from the original. I may have touched on that in the past too, back when I drew Rex Vex and Blackjade from Diablo 1.

The second doodle is just a small experiment I did with a past doodle while thinking about how to control my edges when I'm using a bristly brush. The idea there is that it's probably easier to paint the broad shapes and make changes to them if all the edges are loose and kinda blurry. Making corrections doesn't have to be done so carefully, which is faster. And only when everything is in place I'll start sharpening edges, and I'll make those extra sharp edges only where I want your attention.

That's it for now! Thanks for supporting me, everyone! I hope you keep enjoying the stuff I share here. It'll feel good to start a new painting in the next few days. Come watch the live streams sometime if you wanna keep up with that. 😄