G'day, Hive, and hello to the new year! It's been a while, true. Life got busy with work and we've been getting an unnatural amount of thunderstorms for the past 2 months (for reference, I live in a semi-desert!) that has been messing with my internet connection a lot.
The other thing was that I'd been working on another project here on HIVE. Aside from being an artist, I'm also an amateur arachnologist, focusing on the native spiders in South Africa. Every now and then I search HIVE for posts about arachnids, specifically spiders, and while I find a lot of macro photography, I struggled to find well thought-out posts or observations, etc. I struggled to find the science aspect of having an interest in spiders, or any other arachnid to boot.
So I created a HIVE community to provide a place for this, where fellow arachnid enthusiasts, scientists, and even those just curious in the critters can go to find informative, interesting, and even comical posts about arachnids right here on HIVE.
This community is simply called "Arachnids" and it's now live. There's also a quick introduction post to explain it a bit more. So, you can expect a few spider posts from me in between my art. Because arachnids matter.
But enough of that for now. Here's some art!
I realised a while back that my portfolio was severely lacking in science-fiction paintings. It lacked horror, too, but I boosted that already. It was time to focus on scifi! And I thought it fitting to painting something post-apocalyptic with a tyrannical mech! Because mechs are awesome and also because I've had Metallica's "Spit Out The Bone" in my head for weeks now.
But post-apocalyptic is only tantalising if there's a ray of hope, of human persistence and resilience. Of us defeating those who'd suppress us, destroy us. And that's what I aimed to depict: human tenacity for freedom!
Liberty or death.
Here, the sketch was noisy and rough, working lines over line and erasing and erasing because the composition for this piece was much more important than the others I've done before. This one needed to show the direness of the scene; the predator, and its prey fighting for his life. I also wanted to add the sense of temptation -- to want to give up, go to the enemy and surrender. To do that, I needed to pull the viewer in, so I added a waning river.
When I was happy with the sketch, I started working on the background. The major challenge was in how to show the sheer size of the mech without having the mech dominate the space. I figured a dramatic distance distortion was in order. So the gradient of values had to change sharply from the bright greens in the foreground to the vague blues of the background.
I also thought the river was on the wrong side and it led AWAY from the mech, which was not what I wanted. So I flipped the pieces in the background to fit the river being on the right side now. I also ended up playing around with some custom brushes for the grass, trying to work out an anime-style into the semi-realism that is my style. Because experimenting is fun!
Again, I deviated from the sketch and made the subject a woman instead of a man. This was because a woman shows more fragility but also more resilience in sacrificing for her loved ones. And also because the femininity of a woman shows the future generations of mankind at stake in this story. I gave her armour, too. No nudity this time, haha. Simply because it didn't work for this piece.
Finally, it was time to paint in the mech! I based its design on the plate amour of the European middle ages, working them to fit with the bulky and staggered movements of a human-piloted mechanised walking vehicle (what a mouthful!).
Because this mech is huge, I had to make sure it appeared to be far away. And for the scene, it had to suggest that even far away, it was deadly to the woman. So details were sacrificed. Basically, all I did was add shadows and highlights on the major angles and points. Right now, in this screenshot, the mech's values are way too high. That needed to change, the mech needed to get more blue to fit somewhere in the midground.
Once the values were lined up and everything flowed smoothly out, I saved the image and imported the .png again. This is usually how I add that soft fuzzy effect to my art: I take that .png, desaturate it (the values change for each painting so play around with them and see which works best for each art piece), then I add a Gaussian blur (between 20-30%, whichever works best). Once that renders, I lower the layer opacity to around 30% (play around with the opacity). Basically, just play around!
All-in-all, I was hoping the painting would have come out better than this. I guess it helps that I have no idea how my art will look until it's done and I actually see it with my eyes, but still, the disappointment happens. It happens to the best of us, too. Not every painting will be the best you've made to-date. Some will fail to meet expectations.
And that's fine.
Just take a break for a day or two, and try another painting. And that's exactly what I'm going to do. There's a particular spider card in Splinterlands I'm dying to make fan art out of!
Don't be afraid to bail. I know that saying is a skateboarding thing but it counts for art, too! Fear of making mistakes, or having a failed painting, keeps you from leaving your "safe space" and that in turn prevents you from growing, improving, and also from developing a thicker skin that lets you deal with bails easier and easier. It also, in a that way, helps you prepare for criticism and critique of your work. So make all the mistakes, and learn from them.
Thanks for stopping by and reading and supporting!
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