Art Attack! #51: Sun's Out, Crops Out 🌞

Hey Hive!

We're back again with 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!

Time for more game-related art! But today's one is a little different because it's not just an ordinary art piece but it's functional too!

So a couple of months ago, I shared this piece I did of the Spring Calendar in Stardew Valley!

Stardew Valley is an indie farming simulator that is so beautiful and wholesome. You take over your grandfather's farm in a place called Stardew Valley and build a life there with the residents of Pelican Town. It's one of my all-time favourite games!

But anyway, in the game there are 4 seasons and calendars for each season indicating the various events in the game and the different NPC birthdays:

Source: Scribd

My initial idea was to combine a season-based Stardew painting with the calendar so not only will it look good, but it can be used for reference too! And since I already did a Spring one I had to do the other 3 so back in August 2020, I started working on the Summer one!

The template would of course be the same, with the title on top, the calendar below it, and finally the painting itself. My idea of drawing the farm came from watching this video by MalMakes!

But I thought it'd be boring to see the same scene throughout all 4 seasons so I came up with the idea to change it up from season to season, showing progression like you would have in the game. You'll see.

This time would be much easier than the last since I could trace the calendar and the title from the Spring calendar I did, which saved me a ton of sketching time:

What took up more time was actually drawing the character icons since again, I wanted it to be a blend of the cute pixel graphics and their actual character portraits in-game which look like this:

Source: Reddit

This isn't my tier list btw, I just couldn't find any other picture with all the original/un-modded NPC portraits.

But anyway, this was what I ended up sketching:

Next was figuring out the sketch for the farmhouse. This was my initial sketch from the Spring one:

But then I remembered my plan to show progression and had to redraw it. So in the game, there are 4 stages of the farmhouse. The first one I drew was the default house you start with, but in the game you can upgrade your house to make it bigger and more functional, and the exterior changes as well, like so:

Source: Stardew Valley Wiki

So since there are 4 stages, it would fit just nicely with each of the 4 seasons! You see where I'm going with this.

So after redrawing the farmhouse, this was my sketch of stage 2. It was kinda difficult achieving the same perspective as the Spring house because of the shape, but I tried my best.

I also wanted to show the different farm buildings available in the game, so I decided to draw a barn beside the house this time, with different animals of course.

Eventually, this was my final sketch:

So the first hurdle was over, next was time to outline!

Again, outlining is tricky since I was using watercolours and I didn't have waterproof ink pens so I had to be careful with smudging. I also outlined the buildings and the animals, but those were waterproof so no worries there.

I used markers to colour in the dwarf and dwarf scarecrow since I had those colours and it would just be easier.
Next was time to paint!

I thought I did a pretty good job with painting the NPC icons this time; at least there weren't any obvious smudges.

Next was the last big hurdle; painting the background! This one took a while but at least I got some techniques down from the previous piece. I changed the colours a little bit, to resemble more of the yellowish green you'd see in the actual game.

So in the Spring calendar, I painted a sunrise for the sky. But for this one, I wanted a sunny afternoon sky, which meant painting the sun front and center. Or at least that was my plan. And I realised too late that there would be a problem since I wrote the words in ink pen and would have to paint over it with watercolours! I was really scared of smudging so I tried my best not to paint over the NPC squares too much which resulted in an oddly-shaped sun:

And I kept trying to correct it again and again:

But I don't think I improved it, unfortunately. So eventually I just gave up and we get this:

I think if you don't look at it too long it looks kinda alright overall. I mean, the painting below is nice at least. Other than the sun, I really like how this piece came out!

So this was my progress into painting the calendars so far! Hopefully I managed to capture the game's aesthetics and progression well.