Final Calendar Artwork! [PART 1]

Hello lovely people, 

My apologies for my silence these past few weeks. 

I was away for most of October, first visiting my family and then on my first holiday of the year with my partner. I had grand plans to schedule a bunch of posts for you during my first week off, but I fell ill almost as soon as I stepped off the plane, so that plan crumbled very quickly. 

Once I got back, I had to focus on creating the last few pieces for the calendar so I can put the order in asap and get them on their way to everyone, so that's what my time was taken up by up until now. 

The good news is, since I am now done with those pieces, you get to see them before I post them everywhere! Along with the preliminary sketches of course.

All pieces in the calendar follow the same theme (Light), but I tried to vary the type of light somewhat between concepts.

I decided to create 2 small A5 pieces for the pages of the calendar, and one slightly bigger one for the cover and back. This post will be about the 2 smaller pieces, and I'll have another post tomorrow for the bigger one.

I was keen to explore moonlight a little more, as I only had one piece featuring it at that point, so I started with that.

[This concept exploration will be the topic of this month's Deep-Dive video.]

My initial idea was the one you see in the thumbnails above ; a being impaled by a crescent moon, as a nod to the concept of the unicorn.

This is still an idea I want to paint, but I couldn't settle on a composition that clicked for me, and since I needed to get the artwork made fairly rapidly, I opted for a simpler image instead.

Hands are my comfort subject when it comes to painting smaller pieces, I always derive a lot of pleasure from drawing them and find the results almost always satisfying these days. 

I made a quick mock-up in Procreate using an image of my own hand (right above) and then set to painting!

Here is the final painting, LUNE :

The second small piece I created was less chaotic. The idea came to me very quickly, and I felt the need for very few changes :

I dreamt of an eclipse the night before and was looking up images when this idea struck me, and I just decided to roll with it. 

Here are a few process images (I still need practice remembering to take those as I go, which is tricky when I also need to film everything all the time). 

I opted for a warmer halo and background while painting, and used masking fluid to isolate the flare. 

Here's the final image. ECLIPSE : 

There is a sort of Elden Rings boss vibe to this one, which I am a fan of. I can see it developing into a bigger piece one day perhaps...Who knows?

These 2 will be the calendar artwork for July and August respectively, as well as the prints for September and October. They'll probably be stickers soon too. 

Part 2 with the final artwork for the calendar will be up tomorrow, including a small rework of another older piece I'm including. 

I will also have 2 deep-dive videos for you in the coming days, one for October and one for November!

Thank you for reading, thank you for sticking by me and thank you for being wonderful. 

I hope you are all doing well, 

All my love,
M