The Art Themed Post

New week, new blog! As promised last week, this week’s theme is going to be about my most recent art projects. Yes, projects with an s! I originally thought I would only have one project to cover this week, but I ended up doing a challenge yesterday that left me with another piece to show off! Even though this isn’t Sapphire Verdict themed, we’re still diving in!

The Fishing Incident

About a month ago, I got an idea for a new piece themed around one of my favorite franchises, Pokemon! I’ve always enjoyed drawing creatures of all kinds, and typically is what I like to do most when it comes to artwork, but for some reason it had never occurred to me to try and make a legitimate art piece centered around Pokemon. I was sitting at my desk when I suddenly had the idea hop into my head to draw a Teddiursa and Snorunt fishing off a dock, only for them to catch a Corphish instead of an actual fish. First of all, don’t ask me where those three came from! I have no idea why I chose them. Second of all, this wasn’t supposed to be a massive piece, but… I set the canvas size wrong, and the rest is history as they say! Behold! The Fishing Incident!

This is not my most time consuming piece to date, but I do genuinely think it is my most complete! This piece took everything that I’ve learned over the past year of digital art and compacted it into one drawing to showcase how far I’ve come since the beginning, and I was VERY attentive to detail!

For starters, there are 15 Pokemon in this drawing! I don’t know if anyone was able to find them all, but they were each carefully drawn, even the tiny ones in the background! In total, there is Teddirusa, Snorunt, Corphish, two Wooper, a Lotad, three Cutieflies, a Hoppip, a Venipede, three Swablu, and an Altari! That is a LOT of pokemon!

My main goal with this piece was to create a slice of life. I wanted to showcase some pokemon just existing and being themselves in the same manner that I feel the Pokemon Snap games do, and something that I feel the mainline games horrifically fail to do. Every single pokemon in this image is up to something, mostly just existing. The Altaria flock is flying off into the sunset clouds, the Venipede is looking at what everyone else is up to, the Wooper are being… wooper, and Lotad is blending in!

One big thing I did with this piece that I’ve never done before was the presence of colored lines! Usually, I leave my outlines as black, but I wanted to go ahead and move more towards getting rid of the blacklines altogether. My solution for this was to use lines that are a darker color than the color they are outlining, but not so dark as to be black. The result, in my opinion, is a much more vivid piece that I personally feel looks way better than my previous work! Though, part of that might not be from my linework.

Lighting was probably the biggest breakthrough on this piece. Not only did I finally figure out how to make a cloud (TAKE THAT CLOUDS), but I also started to understand god rays as well as light bloom. I don’t have it perfectly understood, but I noticed a HUGE change in the appearance of my piece when I ended in several layers of gradients to create an orange wave effect across the piece to emulate the setting sun. The god rays I also feel went a long way in bringing the piece to life. The next goal will be figuring out how in the world to create water highlights, because that was definitely a weakness!

I would venture to say that another thing I want to focus on more heavily next time are trees and shrubs. I do not fully understand how to bring them to life just yet, but I made strides this time in getting them to look at least a little better! Trying to mentally conjure up how the shading looks in the darkness of the canopies is difficult, as I’m sure is evident with my big gold tree, but I started kinda toeing on the answer with the shrub. Long story short, more work required!

A Soggy Little Guy

The second surprise piece is the Soggy Little Guy! This is another slive of life piece that I came up with featuring a Zorua, and was meant to be a more focused piece with the same theme as the larger one. Show a pokemon existing in its world. In this case, Zorua has been caught in a minor rainstorm and is hiding under a big leaf as he waits for it to end, hence Soggy Little Guy. Take a look!

Now, this piece may not look as clean as the other, but there is a reason! This piece was a three-hour challenge. I had three hours to make the piece, and whatever it looked like by the end is what it looked like, and I don’t think it turned out that badly! I spent the bulk of my time getting the Zorua figured out, but even in the final product, there’s more I could have done had I given myself the time! There were some very interesting takeaways in this though.

Blurring proved to be the key to creating semi-believable grass in the background. If I did what I did before and drew every blade like I usually do, I never would have finished, but taking sweeping brushstrokes and then blurring them vertically completely changed the piece. It actually looks like grassy foliage and not just a mess of brushstrokes, so that was the first stroke of genius.

Rain was another fun one. Turns out a lot of blurred lines end up looking like falling rain when put together! This is something I will be using more in the future, but I’ll take more time next time to get it looking clean! I promise!

I started to kinda figure out the grassblades on the foreground, but I ran out of time to make them look really solid. Quick brushstrokes and small blades is definitely the key to piece of grass sticking across a road. As for the road texture itself… I got nothing. I did what I could, but dirt is not my specialty just yet. It’s coming at some point though! Promise!

Water! The droplets on the leaf ended up turning out great, at least in my opinion. I wasn’t sure how I was going to make them when I started, but I was running out of time so I just sorta did what seemed right, and I think I got pretty close! I created a blue smear, erased the interior, and then blurred the edges to give the aura of translucency. If I had more time, I would have made more of the little droplets translucent and lighter, and I think it would have been close to spot on!

The last bit of the piece I want to call out is the haze effect. I used two different layers based on what I kinda remember noticing in rainy conditions, specifically in forests. First, there is a noticeably light blue tinge to everything, which I added through a gradient. The second, obviously, is the darkness, which I feel added a lot of atmosphere to an already gloomy, damp piece! There’s so much more I would have liked to have done for this piece, but I’m sticking to the spirit of the challenge! I’m taking what I learned from this and moving ahead to the next piece, which will be a character driven slice of life of… Sentret! Sentret fans rejoice!

How I Pick my Subjects

It’s random. I literally put no thought into it. I just kinda sit throughout the day doing other things when an idea or scene will just pop into my head like someone slid it in there. No idea why I pick what I pick, but here I am. I don’t even necessarily pick ones I like! Seriously, I have a Klink piece planned! A Klink! The next two subjects are planned, Sentret and Mawile, but if anyone reading this has any requests for slice of life, feel free to let me know!

Conclusion

That’s it for this week, but I feel that’s enough for once! Next week will be a new chapter in Tearna’s Journal as well as an update on the Sapphire Verdict. We’ll see if I have anything else when we get around to it, but, for now, CHEERS!

The Flying Fennec