Hey Hive!
Happy New Year! 🎉 I hope everyone had a fun and/or relaxing new year celebration while staying safe! I bet everyone is relieved that 2020 is over and that 2021 is finally here. It's a fresh start, a clean slate. Today being New Years' Day kinda has me feeling introspective as I reflect back on 2020, and I might post about it but it's pretty personal so we'll see.
Anyway, it's Friday and that means it's time for another Art Attack! If you're new to the series, this is where I share my drawings and the process behind them. A behind-the-scenes look at my artwork, if you will. This is not to say that I'm very good at art, or that I'm a professional in any way. In fact this is the opposite, and serves as a reminder to how I first started, and lets me track my progress too!
So a couple months back, I shared one of my favourite watercolour paintings that I've ever done. It's based on a beautiful stage called Sunset Shore from Donkey Kong Country Returns and it was my first ever attempt at silhouette art.
But it had been a while since then and I had been watching a playthrough of Donkey Kong Country Returns: Tropical Freeze by the adorable MasaeAnela. There are some really beautiful stages in the same silhouette style in that game too (since it's the sequel), and I thought I'd try my hand at silhouette art once again.
The stage I chose this time is also the first silhouette stage in Tropical Freeze, called Busted Bayou, and the art style is this is just fantastic.
Source: Donkey Kong Wiki Fandom
There was this portion in the stage where you slide down a rope and there would be branches and leaves in the foreground like this:
Source: Gamekyo
Unlike the last one, the background for this is much more complicated, with the tall mangrove-like trees and the boats in the water, along with their respective reflections. But all the branches and leaves in the foreground meant that I wouldn't have to draw so much of the background so I chose this part to base my painting on.
And since I drew Diddy Kong with DK last time, I thought drawing Dixie with him would be cute. Cranky is cool too, but I liked the contrast of pink with Dixie.
It took a while but I finally came up with a decent sketch:
Next was outlining!
As with the previous silhouette piece, I refrained from outlining the background since I only wanted the foreground and characters to have bold lines. But I was afraid of losing the shape of the boat if I erased it so I decided to outline that as well. Unfortunately my marker was running out of ink so it's not a very smooth line but it's alright.
I redid it with another marker before painting the background.
It was tougher to make the distinctions between the foreground and background for this one since there were gaps in the foreground. So I had to paint the water near the bottom a darker shade, which is tough to achieve with watercolours as you can imagine.
Time to shade!
Unfortunately I think I screwed up a little bit here, since the ship was supposed to be dark green instead of black. But the dark green marker I had was not waterproof and I was afraid of it smudging all over the place, so I just made it black instead.
I did make the reflection dark green though, even though it looks black.
Next were the trees, which I did using markers as well.
And since I didn't draw the leaves on the left, I thought it looked a little empty so I drew another tree there as well.
After adding in another tree on the right, and attempting to make the sky stand out a little more compared to the swamp fog, here's the final piece!
Tbh I think the first one I did looks better overall, but I think this one still looks nice. I didn't have a lot of choices for blue and green paint so I did the best I could with whatever I had. And unlike the first one, I didn't have any references for this piece so I basically had to translate 2.5D HD graphics into watercolours, which is quite a challenge in itself.
I might have screwed up the reflection a little bit tho. Maybe I should've just drawn more leaves in the foreground to cover it up, but I felt like this was plenty already. Oh well. I think it was still a pretty decent attempt at least.
Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
Check out my previous post in this series!
