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View on deviantArt: "Spooky Scary Scaredy-Cat"
Knocked out another pic for silly game reasons but I'm pretty pleased with it on a few fronts: composition stuff (hard but I feel like I succeeded ok) & the fun of drawing (I had a good time!)
I knew I wanted dramatic lighting which means a wide value scale.1 I decided to keep the hue scale pretty flat; ended up plonking a single Hue-mode layer of cyan over everything, which worked out very nicely. For saturation I went back to flailing around but I did 2/3 on purpose!! Release me from these torments!! RESULT: high-contrast lighting with very dark darks and very bright lights, staggering the greyscale and pops of color, and all sticking to the same green-blue (it felt like the right choice for cold/spooky). Success! I think theoretically there's a more perfect color combo, but I did good by my standards.
Prior to this particular picture I have always hidden as much fin as possible behind convenient props and scenery. But now that I've drawn the whole nine yards... my power is vast and my delight is maniacal.
BONUS: once I got started on drawing all the grass and arranging the cobblestones2 it was kinda fun seeing them come together.
Anyways the Beauty Contest is optional– you don't have to enter it at all, whatsoever. But:
Knocked out another pic for silly game reasons but I'm pretty pleased with it on a few fronts: composition stuff (hard but I feel like I succeeded ok) & the fun of drawing (I had a good time!)
1) Composition: wrestled a bear and approximately won
I'm very glad I lucked into the book "Simplifying Design & Color for Artists" by Linda Kemp at the library because otherwise I would still be utterly helpless and flailing to figure out why the colors I arrange on a canvas look like mud compared to the image in my head. I am still, I must emphasize, very not good at solving this and wish I could luck into an art class with a teacher who could fix me. But for this pic I thought very hard on purpose about what I wanted and how it might actually be accomplished. And it worked!I knew I wanted dramatic lighting which means a wide value scale.1 I decided to keep the hue scale pretty flat; ended up plonking a single Hue-mode layer of cyan over everything, which worked out very nicely. For saturation I went back to flailing around but I did 2/3 on purpose!! Release me from these torments!! RESULT: high-contrast lighting with very dark darks and very bright lights, staggering the greyscale and pops of color, and all sticking to the same green-blue (it felt like the right choice for cold/spooky). Success! I think theoretically there's a more perfect color combo, but I did good by my standards.
2) Drawing It: actually very enjoyable??
When I was designing this character I was determined to give her the fanciest ribboned fins I could... and dreaded the day I had to actually draw them. Well I am here from the future to report they are actually very fun to draw! The wiggling folds are a type of "ehh just eyeball it" that's not stressful to plot out, and painting on the dark/light lines is always more fun than I think it will be.Prior to this particular picture I have always hidden as much fin as possible behind convenient props and scenery. But now that I've drawn the whole nine yards... my power is vast and my delight is maniacal.
BONUS: once I got started on drawing all the grass and arranging the cobblestones2 it was kinda fun seeing them come together.
3) I love loot
Having noted my artistic feelings about this pic, my ARTPG feelings about this pic are "heh heh heh heh *rubs hands together*". The galvanizing force behind this pic was a gentle, optional-ish deadline: the Beauty Contest in this game concludes the latest round on the 15th of every month. If I wanted to enter I couldn't put it off forever, but I started early enough that I did all the "blehhhhh I hate this and this pic sucks" phases as pseudo-Pomodoros: I promised myself I'd work for a single hour and when the timer was up I was free for the day. I put much more than one hour into the later sessions, but for the early bits that made the whole thing waaaay more tolerable!Anyways the Beauty Contest is optional– you don't have to enter it at all, whatsoever. But:
- Characters get guaranteed loot & experience points just for entering at all.
- There are three winners regardless of how many entries they get. Even on rounds where only 1-3 people enter at all.3
- Value, Hue and Saturation are terms for describing colors relative one another:
- Value is the scale for how light/dark color(s) are, ranging from white to black.
- Hue is the scale for where on the rainbow color(s) are: is it red, is it blue, is it purple, etc.
- Saturation is the scale for how vibrant color(s) are, ranging from super washed out/colorless to neon.
So for example, this color:
... could be described as "high (ie light) value, teal/cyan hue, medium saturation". Or in the HSV color system, H191 S50 V100. (Yep, the H, S and V just stand for Hue, Saturation and Value!) - I drew a big piece of cobblestone wall once, by hand, and really put my everything into it until it lined up nicely as a perfectly repeating tile. And ever since when I need a cobbled wall I just pull that out and set it as a repeating tile. At worst I drag it around a bit until the rocks look slightly nicer. ✦ Work smarter, not harder. ✦
- You may wonder, if the rewards are so great why would a large game with many players struggle to get 3 entries in a month? And my answer is, as best I can tell people keep forgetting it's there! I think it's a victim of being permanently available but never applying external pressure to galvanize people to do it– like an inverse of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). Call it an irrational CIGTI (Confidence I'll Get To It) which deprioritizes it so hard almost nobody does it at all.
