Elf Blood

ART SHIFT!

It’s a little crude, I’ll admit, but I’m quite pleased with the effect granted by illustrating the goddess figure in a completely different style. As you may already know, I’ve been doing a lot more acrylic painting recently, and I’ve been picking up a lot of good tips and tricks along the way. Key of which is to hold one’s nerve, and not to panic when things go wrong; if you make a mistake, it’s not the end of the world, you can always fix things by painting it out or letting it dry and painting over it. One video tutorial I looked at (and then abandoned because it was really more of an extended advert for the artist’s work) summarised the experience well,  saying that when painting using acrylics, all you’re really doing is pushing paint around the canvas.

That experience came into play when illustrating the goddess figure. Previously, when I’ve been trying for a painted look, I’ve always tried it in a rather counter-productive comic-esque way, focussing on the edges and lines of the characters. Where I’ve gained confidence in is in painting three-dimensional surfaces, giving depth to the mask and volume to the hair (the cloak could still use a fair whack of work, though). Because I’ve also goten more confident in my ability to recover from my mistakes, rather than attempting to separate every color out into its own layer, I was able to split it into three parts: the mask, the cloak, and the hair. This allowed me to mix colors within their own group, getting a more authentic-looking painted effect as opposed to the very stiff, artificial look I’d been getting previously.

Anyway, I look forward to doing more acrylic work in the near future, and transferring some skills from that over to the comic!

Art; the neverending adventure. Hooray!

M.