commission for @elle-thereafter, an original character named Perran from her CR fanfic Gate Building: See also, Bargaining with Archfey, Complications of! El wanted to know what her character would look like if put on canvas, and helping people visualize their lovely brainchildren is one of my most favorite things, so i was very happy to work on this portrait. thank you for commissioning me! 💜
a little study i did to try to depict Essek looking as realistic (within my style) as possible. you can tell i was serious by the fact that i blacked out his clothes so as not to get distracted from the task at hand /j
i encounter a few persistent issues when i draw Essek; it’s not only in him not being a real person that i can’t look at to then draw accurately as far as his facial features are concerned, but also in the fact that purple people don’t exist. i can’t study, from pictures or real life, how skin of that color would behave in different lighting, how the blood vessels would appear from underneath it, what shade the sebum would highlight the nose and forehead with, and on and on and on. i can only make an educated guess, and it takes a lot of mental math each time 🤭 so here i tried paying special attention to the realism of it all, to see if i’ll learn something! my art is somewhat (semi-)realistic as is, but there still is a fair amount of stylizing going on, and i wanted to have a bit of fun figuring out where it happens. so far noticed that i tend to exaggerate facial features and make them larger than they would probably be on a real person (noses and eyes in particular), and my art could benefit from more different hues when i’m doing skin, especially green.
a little study i did to try to depict Essek looking as realistic (within my style) as possible. you can tell i was serious by the fact that i blacked out his clothes so as not to get distracted from the task at hand /j
i encounter a few persistent issues when i draw Essek; it’s not only in him not being a real person that i can’t look at to then draw accurately as far as his facial features are concerned, but also in the fact that purple people don’t exist. i can’t study, from pictures or real life, how skin of that color would behave in different lighting, how the blood vessels would appear from underneath it, what shade the sebum would highlight the nose and forehead with, and on and on and on. i can only make an educated guess, and it takes a lot of mental math each time 🤭 so here i tried paying special attention to the realism of it all, to see if i’ll learn something! my art is somewhat (semi-)realistic as is, but there still is a fair amount of stylizing going on, and i wanted to have a bit of fun figuring out where it happens. so far noticed that i tend to exaggerate facial features and make them larger than they would probably be on a real person (noses and eyes in particular), and my art could benefit from more different hues when i’m doing skin, especially green.
a Caleb study to go with the Essek study i posted a couple days ago!
just like with Essek, i tried to focus on the realism here 👀 it’s easier with Caleb because he is a human and photo references are easier to come by for humans, but he is still not a real person i can observe so there is a fair bit of theatre of the mind modeling going on when i draw him 🤭
p.s. also i’m aware that i’m posting art right after some exciting things have happened in c3, so just to make it clear: guys PLEASE do not spoil anything in the tags. thank you \o/
I love your art deeply and love the painterly quality of it. Thus I've been wondering if you have any traditional art you can share? I've seen the watercolor nature paintings you did and loved them, as I also love working with water colors.
Have you every worked with oils, or gouache?
hi, thank you so much for this sweet message 🥺 you inspired me to do a study of a tulip i saw on my walk today! it had a bird cherry bloom inside of it and i found that incredibly charming.
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as for oils and gouache: when i work digitally i 100% employ the principles used in oil painting (and other types of opaque paints, as opposed to watercolors), but funnily enough i have always hated working with gouache, and i have never worked with oils! mostly because i was very young and very broke when i was a traditional painter, and oil painting is Expensive. or at least it seemed so at the time 😔 now that i’m considering it though, i think i might try oil painting in the future. could be fun to roll around in real paint!
this picture was a very fun challenge for me from the point of view of posing, and y'all know me. always happy to draw ropes 💜 thank you for commissioning me!
Is there a magic secret I never learned in all the art classes I've taken? How do you pick the colors you use??? I'm in love with all your choices. Like the little bits of color that don't match what color it's near... how do you decide where the color goes? Is it like the shadows and highlights? Your color palettes are gorgeous. Your art is so beautiful.
thank you!
there is no magic secret! it is all about how you choose to interpret the color you see—i.e., your personal stylization.
look at this wonderful picture of fuji apples:
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(By Scott Bauer, USDA ARS, Public Domain)
the local color of the fuji apples above is red, and they’re lit and photographed in a way that makes them appear pretty uniformly red in hue as well. but you can still pick up some small variations in hue, as well as saturation (chroma) and value!
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you can go the hyper-realistic route, carefully observing and replicating the colors you see to create a painting of fuji apples that is as close to real life as possible. you can also choose to stylize and interpret the colors through a certain lens, which may help convey a certain mood or just make the image more aesthetically pleasing (humans usually enjoy limited palettes it seems).
there is an infinite number of ways you can do that! which is where the fun of experimenting and developing your own style lies. the important thing you need to remember is that, while i picked those little swatches with the eyedropper tool, you should observe and depict any color in relation to its neighbor and not on its own. is this patch cooler or warmer in hue in relation to its neighbor? is it more or less saturated? is it lighter or darker in color?
once you have analyzed those properties, you can think of how you want to stylize them. would you like to lean the darker shades red? would you like to make one object more saturated than everything else in the picture, to draw the viewer’s attention to it? would you like to make all the lighter colors lighter and all the darker colors darker in order to up the contrast of your painting? the possibilities are endless.
here’s my little 15 minute study!
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i made the background more green in hue because i wanted the apples to stand out more, pushed the highlights away from white and towards light green to make the color scheme more harmonious, and added purple to the shadows because that’s what i do. : ) among other things. it has changed both the mood and the lighting of the original photo! and you don’t have to follow this algorithm for everything, or indeed anything—you can play around with color any way you want.
you can do this kind of color nudging with color overlays in graphic software too, to a certain extent. for example, if you set a solid yellow layer to ‘darken color’ over a picture, it will turn all the pixels of that picture that are lighter in value than that particular yellow into that yellow. things like that can make your color palette more cohesive/limited, and doing those adjustments in your head as you paint (as opposed to on a separate layer) can make them look more varied and fun. no shame in color correction, use it! it’s a tool just like any traditional glaze is, and if you have a favorite 'glaze’, with practice you will figure out what it is you like about it and start incorporating that right at the painting stage.
tl;dr: observe the colors around you in relation to each other, experiment with them, and most importantly paint and practice a lot! thankfully there are no magical secrets, only color theory and practice 💪( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
for color theory reading, i recommend James Gurney’s Color and Light! it was recommended to me last year, and introduced me to the gamut map approach, which i hadn’t been familiar with before. i’ve only used it once but it was tremendous fun and taught me a couple new things.
i have finally watched episode 94! welcome back hot boy 💜
y'all might know that i am a staunch supporter of short haired Essek, so when i learned about his new hairstyle i went mmmmm not sure about that! but it took me like. two and a half hours to change my mind. it’s cool to experiment with your appearance! the dude deserves some cute fancy curls, as a treat. also zmeess you’ve been growing out your hair from a buzz cut for years, now he’s just like you fr or whatever the kids say.
so yeah, i support you man, you go and dazzle everyone with your fabulous Xhorhassian looks
commission for @mozzys-stuff, his half-elf druid Nele! i don’t often work with warm color schemes, so this sweetheart was a genuine treat to paint 💚 thank you for commissioning me!
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