In which I showcase and scream about my art. I've been the art kid since I could hold hold a pencil, so be prepared for lots of ramblings and the occasional journal entry/essay thing that doesn't even include a picture about my artistic journey thus...
if you've ever met an artist, ever, at any point, or if you are an artist, you know we don't frequently love our own work. we usually spot the hundred things wrong with it that the others can't even see. even if it's nice it's not always what we had in mind and so we hate it anyway.
that's not the case today! i decided to do a grand piece of allura by recycling an old work sketch, and so far i'm VERY proud of the results!
i used to doodle a lot during my lunch breaks, back when i actually had lunch breaks because i worked enough hours. i freehand draw so infrequently that i tend to save these in the hopes that i can recycle them into pieces later. the following is a piece i sketched in 2016 (with my old signature edited out to hide my irl identity):
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
cool slightly elven girl with flowers. half of my freehand doodles are just exactly that. i decided to save her so that i could trace over her face and head at a later date— i'm still not good at "drawing" digitally and often draw things on paper first. anyway, i decided to turn her into a piece of allura! the flowers could be juniberries and Allura already has pointy ears.
needless to say, the project got away from me a bit. i've invested over ten hours into it already because i spent a while fiddling with my sketch, then copied the sketch to a new canvas, where i intended to "thumbnail", essentially. i now understand why real artists do that. the thumbnailing turned into just drawing my foreground and background elements, and here we are!
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
isn't she fantastic?! obviously she still needs clothes/jewelry and this needs to be rendered and shaded. allura herself is going to take a while because she was originally a scribble meant to mark her place and colors while i picked bg colors and decided on what to do for the foreground (the speedpaint of this makes me look like a lunatic), but i kept detailing it and now it's... sort of an underdrawing? i'm far along enough in the piece to get the main point across and i really like what i have so far. she might end up being my best piece!
when it's finished i plan to call it something like "split the sky apart" and it'll look like the skies are sort of bleeding into each other, which may be a challenge to paint, but whatever! i have locked myself into this hell. i plan to flesh out the clouds, and this doesn't include the details that i'll add of her clothes and jewelry, the flowers in her hair, or the star particles floating around her. allura's essentially supposed to be producing the sun and the stars.
wish me luck in deciding how the hell to paint this! i have something in mind for the clouds and skies and stuff, but allura's face is definitely giving me trouble. i MIGHT give her a more open-mouthed smile and/or open her eyes. i've already spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to find out how to paint her eyelashes— i tried making them the color of her hair, but no matter what i do it looks silly. i'm gonna have to boost the contrast in her skin somehow so you can actually see her features, but i don't wanna lighten her if i can help it!
i haven't been really excited about the prospect of a piece in a while, so this has been a refreshing thing to work on.
