We Were Born Here | Digital Painting

hadley4(74)

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Alien Art Hive

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Hello again and happy start of the week to all of you. Today I bring you the craziest thing I've done, yes, before I said the same with my illustration of the Battle of Thermopylae, but there is no comparison this I've done full of faces with that battle where I only had to make bodies of soldiers, see for yourself.

I made this illustration for an illustrators tournament on instagram where the main theme is "Venezuela and the weather", there was a chance to participate from September 15 to 30, and I didn't come up with any good idea until three days before the deadline to submit the entry.

So I painted and painted until September 30 at 23:20 that I delivered my participation, my first concern was solved, I was already within the deadline, now I had to solve the second, this is not a normal contest where a jury decides the winners and that's it, no, here if there is a jury, but it is to choose the 40 illustrations that seemed to them that are within the theme and then they will face each other in Instagram stories, here is my new concern, where would I get so many people to vote for me to win! ? But this was solved today when the tournament started, as the 40 participants were announced and I wasn't among them, so super F for me. Unexpected ending right? let's take it step by step before I get sad.

_Source

Tools:

Gaomon S620
Photoshop
Brushes courtesy of Imad Awan: Download here

🔰Process🔰

-Step 1:

As I said before, I had no idea what I wanted to do, so the best thing to do was to make crazy lines looking for something good to emerge from there, and it did, between so many lines I thought to try a little fisheye style photography, although it was a challenge to fit so many characters in that perspective, plus I wanted to use faces of real Venezuelan characters, so many times finding good reference photos and fit them to this perspective became very very difficult, but after about 5 sketches I got something good.

-Step 2:

Already decided that the sketches were going to stay in that exact position, I could start coloring all the characters without much worry than using good color palettes, although I was really worried about the girl downstairs, but let me give you context, she’s Yuli Red Sea, Gold medalist in Tokyo 2020 and current world record holder in female triple jump, so she’s an idol here in Venezuela, but a couple of months ago a mural made by a street artist went viral, but not because it was amazing and well done, but on the contrary, the anatomy and proportions there went on sabbatical, honey, so the mural was erased, but the worst thing in the story is that the artist showed up and said he would make a mural even better than that, and of course he did something even worse, which was interpreted as mocking as it did not reach the level sufficient for a caricature or a parody. That’s why I was a little nervous about not being able to portray Yulimar correctly and was modifying her and doing the smallest detail over and over again

-Step 3:

Once Yulimar was more like herself, I continued painting the faces of the other characters of the scene taking more attention in the lady (Yolanda Moreno), Simon Bolivar and cyclist Daniel Dhers who was also a medalist in Tokyo 2020 in professional BMX, So the changes don’t look that big, but it took me at least an hour to make each face and then I would come back to touch them up.

-Step 4:

My vision of "Venezuela and time" was to make diverse iconical characters of the current Venezuelan history until the independence era, highlighting "quickly" cultural elements and denoting that all of them were formed in the same land that we call Venezuela, In addition to dreaming a little about the future with that child holding the world cup and wearing the shirt of the Venezuelan soccer team, which until now has never managed to qualify to the world cup.

-Step 5:

Ok I had already portrayed a lot of characters, now how should I make them harmonize within the composition? the best way I could think of was to add a little land to settle them all, the Venezuelan land, but I was short of time and this work would be presented in smart phones, So many details would not be appreciated so I took the liberty of clumsily joining the characters with the map, on the computer it looks horrible, but on my smart phone it looks beautiful. So tell me where you see it from, Smartphone or PC?

I will leave you a GIF with the whole process on it, so you can better appreciate the illustration process.