Tears Unnumbered - lineart and How to Steal like a Fantasy Artist

Sketching and finishing this went far quicker than any of my last pieces. This felt a bit like a compulsion. 

Here's a closeup of the bottom half (a lot of this piece is going to be sky). 

With this one, I felt like talking about one thing that I've been doing here a lot. Those of you who are artists as well probably know the book "How to steal like an artist" by Austin Kleon. It's a fascinating read, particularly for a Fantasy and fandom artist. If you're not familiar with the work or could use a refresher, here's a good writeup: https://medium.com/@skueong/steal-like-an-artist-10-things-nobody-told-you-about-being-creative-book-notes-af8d8813fcab 

One of the most important ideas in that book is this: 

• Every new idea is a mashup of 1 or more previous ideas.
• You are a mashup of what you let into your life, e.g friends, music, books, movies etc.

This idea is particularly relevant for how I approach clothes, armour etc. 

• Find out what sort of visuals you love, and surround yourself with them. Put them in scrapbooks, or sketchbooks, or a Pinterest wall, or a folder on your computer. (I'm very inconsistent; I do all four, and frequently forget where I put what). 
• Gain a deeper level of understanding these things by finding out why the original designer designed them in this way. What influences went into their design - medieval, Viking, Eastern, Sci-Fi? Identify these underlying ideas and you're a huge step closer to being able to mash them up.
• When you mash them up, go for an outline here, a pattern there, an angle here. 
• Don't copy an entire design, costume, set of poses from any image, movie, or comic. 
• Be aware that your audience is very likely to love the same things you do. They are bound to recognise them. When they do, this can go very different ways. If you copy a pose from a comic or favourite movie and don't mention this when you share your work, people will recognise it and will feel they caught you cheating, even if you changed a lot.
  If you use that pose but say so in the description, people will feel that you're bowing to the inspirations you love - as do they.
• In my case, I try to avoid anything that is very clearly derived from Weta Workshop designs. While I adore to pieces what they did with Elven arms and armour in the movies, the designs (helms, curved swords, those shields) are extremely noticeable - and they're everywhere in fandom. I've always prided myself on my designs that go back to before the films came out, and while I took the underlying design ideas and let them flow my work, I left curved swords and lamellae breastplates well alone. 

For the armour here, I went on what I call a Google inspiration spree. I entered "Elven armour" into the image search, and just kept scrolling down, picking a bit here and a bit there (and foregoing the Weta Workshop designs as well as all-too ubiquitous metal bikinis that'll pop up) while trying to make sure what I picked would work with each other.