Weekly Art Practice - Week 20
Took a bit of an art break over the last two weeks while getting married. Still did some work on an Altar Stone animation and also drew my Elden Ring character as we’re deep into the DLC.
This week kicked off more focused practice time and I’m returning with: 1 - Focusing on a single piece for a week 2 - A childhood re-draw
Day 1 - Pose
Here’s the original piece I started with.
I can’t remember any of the context for the design or composition. All I know is that this was done in pencil crayon and was likely one of my main pieces for art class when I was 17. So big into my Always Online internet years.
I’m following the workflow that was covered in the One Week Character program, so day 1 was mostly gathering reference, choosing a pose and getting the composition down.
Day 2 - Outfit
The outfit was already established in the original but I made some minor changes to the wing designs to make them more easily recognizable as Butterfly. I deleted my sketch layers so I don’t have a great image for this day. This is a screenshot of the video replay in Procreate.
Day 3 - Colours
I generated a palette from a monarch butterfly dress which gave me a good starting point. I lightened the colour of the dress by a fair bit as I didn’t want to work so heavily with black while also assuming I would end up darkening everything in the shading phase.
I also changed the hair colour as the bright pink was just too random for me. Or at least 35 year old me.
Day 4 & 5 - Shading and details
I didn’t take any inbetween screenshots of this process. I’ve found a trick to how I approach shading. Often I don’t go hard enough on my shadows so I figured out I could just duplicate my Multiply layer I was using and then the shadows really pop.
I spent a rather long time on the magic circle, trying to make it look interesting. Then went hard on the rim lighting where the body is closest to the circle. Just a fair bit of experimental choices to try to make the circle pop will not pulling in all the attention by being too bright.
Something that was new for me was colouring in my black lines. I painted over them with an airbrush to bring them closer to their nearest colour and I feel like this does a nice job of smoothing things out. The place with the most black lines no longer draws in a lot of attention by being a place of high contrast. I’ll try this out again in the future but maybe will commit to it harder instead of doing light airbrushing.
I probably could have spent time adding more details and texture to the skin and the long part of the dress. I wrapped up the piece Thursday night as I was generally happy with it and didn’t want to stress out my back muscles too much more by adding another day of fine tuning.
Conclusion
Going to make next week an anatomy week by drawing waltz poses. However I am a little worried that most references will have people in rather ornate outfits, making it difficult to see exact limb poses.
Pinterest board for butterfly princess