Illustration #125 + rewards and sketches!

Happy new year! I hope your holidays were nice and relaxing. :) Here's the illustration I worked on in December to keep me in the holiday spirit! Santa's elves have been hard at work this Christmas. 😏I hope you guys got the presents without stains on them.

I've put all the rewards for this illustration in the attachments here, but you can also get them through these links:
WIP images
Short time lapse video
Long time lapse video
PSD file
Krita file

By the way, now that the attachment size limit is much less restrictive here on Patreon, is it fine if I stop including the external download links in future posts and just use the attachments for sharing rewards? It seems like it should be fine, but there might be benefits to having the external links that I haven't thought about yet, so I just wanna ask.

I hope you'll check out the process this time around! I'm very happy with how smoothly the process went relative to many previous paintings. If you watch the video you'll notice I did the sketch using a method I've only briefly sniffed at in the past but haven't really given a proper try. Basically, I did the sketch using very simple solid lines. They're lines I can't use to render the sketch, so it keeps my focus on just drawing forms. The idea behind it basically falls in line with my other methods of forcing good habits through limitations that I've talked about a bunch in the past. It keeps working really well. 👍

When I had a sketch I was happy with I started adding colors that establish the color palette and mood of the picture. I only used big soft brushes here until I was happy, and then gradually sharpened the edges to fit the sketch lines. It feels to me like an effective way to start the painting process.

The painting process for this painting has been the most painless I've experienced in a long time, so it's been really good for my motivation and I'm excited to make more pictures!

I've also added some of the sketches I've done to get me into the flow of sketching the way I did. You can probably tell I'm not entirely used to it just yet, lol. There's a lot more room for improvement there, so I hope to practice that a bunch more in the next few months! If you're curious, it was the work of Jadony that nudged me towards wanting to try sketching like this, particularly sketches like these ones. They do a great job of capturing forms using very simple lines, and I hope I can get better at doing the same. For a long time I've felt like drawing hasn't been as strong a part of my skillset as painting is, so this year I hope to put some effort towards equalizing that through practicing doing these types of sketches. Let's see how that goes!

Thanks for supporting me through 2024! I'll try my best to make a bunch of stuff worth supporting in 2025 too. 🤓