Reference Study - Fey Boat

As I was preparing my art practice goals for the new year I knew I wanted to practice finishing pieces more often. My WAP weeks were about expanding my mental library of images and drawing things I don’t often draw. But those barely ever left the sketch phase as they were focused on getting the shapes down. The style studies are a lot of fun and I’ll keep doing them but they mean working in a very focused way to achieve a rather limited goal, matching someone else’s style. And while these will help me learn things that will eventually become my style, the execution won’t always feel natural.

And so I came up with this new exercise after watching a few “learning from references” art tutorial videos on YouTube. Basically the idea is that instead of just using one image as inspiration you use multiple so you’re leaning less on one particular artist or style.

Last week in my beetles WAP I wrote about how this would go. Rolling dice to select 3 images and then go from there. So we’ll start with my 3 images:

Reference Images

I was pretty excited about getting the boat first. Thought I could do some sort of Dredge inspired piece with it. The piece is by concept artist Arthus Pilorget.

But then I got the colour palette… which isn’t very Dredge like at all. The Genshin Impact Kazuha palette was put together by Caramello__o over on Ko-fi.

Dice roll 3 added these nature spirit guys by dagasi_yk on Twitter as the main characters.

Wanting to expand my ideas beyond just the three images so I made a mini board of things I felt were in a similar vibe. Full board.

Thumbnailing

First step was to do some basic brainstorming. Starting with what first came to mind and then pushing the POV around to see if the scene got more interesting from other angles.

Basic colours and shapes

I had a decent amount of time on Sunday so after choosing which thumbnail to go with I enlarged it and started to play around with the main colours. I was fairly fixated on have a big orange sky, which may have not been the best choice in the end but I found it rather pleasant to work with as it gave a quickly, otherworldly-ness, to the piece.

Day 1 progress

It’s not often that I give myself a whole week to work on a single piece. During my Root style study week I made 3 complete pieces in 7 days. Having 7 days for one felt extravagant.

Or at least it did until I started painting. I couldn’t choose how I wanted to do the piece. Did I want hard black lines? Did I want lineless? A softer painting style? Or flat and blocky?

While I had 3 images as references to build the piece, I didn’t use any of them to really dictate the style. So I pulled up some digital painting videos and waited for inspiration to reach me. Eventually, I got my first piece down; the roof.

I was pretty happy with how these shingles looked but my attempt to make it more readable by changing the colours instantly broke my colour palette and also made the scene look like it was made out of candy. But I already felt myself floundering so I pushed on. Grabbing the part of the image that interested me most, the little guys.

These guys I was happy with. With these guys I could end my day not hating the piece.

Work continues

With the weekend done I made it a goal to try to put 1 hour into the piece everyday after work. Some days saw more progress than others. By Tuesday I had most of a boat.

After that I kind of stopped saving progress shots….

I finished most of the boat before going to the background. I returned to my struggles of choosing a stylistic choice once more and you can see me growing impatient by turning to leaf brushes for the tree and grass brushes to fill in the small islands. I’m not against using these kinds of brushes but since I only use them for these 2 features and they’re off to the side on their own island it does make them stand out more by not being consistent with the rest of the piece. If I had thought ahead and maybe balanced the islands in the background differently I could probably have made it look more normalized. But I’m kind of a “just push through” kind of artist. A habit I’m going to try to fix.

Final piece

I was able to wrap up the whole thing on Saturday, rushing to get it done before running D&D and having taken the morning off to make a map and draw some goblins for the game.

Overall I think about somewhere between 10-15 hours went into this piece. Being able to take my time led to some parts I’m really happy with, like some of the wood texturing on the boat, how textured the clouds look, the little plant guys. There are definitely some areas I rushed either because I didn’t know how to accomplish what I wanted or because I was losing interest. I think next time I do this challenge I’m going to try to give myself a Friday deadline so I can spend a whole Saturday just working on light and shadows and colour corrections because that’s something I really enjoy but rarely give myself enough time to do properly.

I’m not sure how well I was able to stick to the palette. I probably wouldn’t have chosen these colours on my own so it was nice to have the restriction, but it also made me constantly worry about deviating too far when wanting to do some hue shifted shadows. I also didn't keep some of the main points I highlighted in my thumbnails. I didn't keep the side wheel which I really wanted, or have there be plants on the boat. It just felt like I had enough going on when I made the choices but I kind of regret it now.

Conclusion

While I could talk about all the cut corners and the things I’m not particularly pleased with, this was a very big project for me and it makes me happy when I look at it. I do wish I had played with more foreground/background stuff but this was my first project in this practice format so plenty of time to take more chances in the future. Maybe I’ll even enforce the palette further by not allowing any shifts and having to use only the chosen colours as highlights and shadows. Lots of options for the next one!

Next week I’m going back to anatomy studies as it’s another facet I want to keep improving at and the secret to that one is basically just keep doing it.