Hey , How are you!
Tonight I want to share with you one of the portraits from my Ennéa Arcana series. The first one I made was Selene, inspired by the Moon. Then came Solis, the piece that represents the Sun 🌞. It was part of the first drop, along with two others and Selene again.

She radiates without promising warmth. Solis faces forward, with golden light rising from within—like restrained fire about to bloom.

For Solis, I had to completely change the base I used for the Moon and adapt everything to the sun’s concept: warm colors, more light, more energy. I started by adjusting the tones and searching for a palette that really felt like pure sunlight.

One thing I always aim for in these pieces is texture. I love that style that mimics traditional painting, where you can see the brushstrokes — not quite impasto, because that's another (amazing) level, but I'm still experimenting... and honestly, I'm still learning a lot with Corel Painter 😅.

I had a little technical hiccup and lost all my settings, brushes, shortcuts… EVERYTHING. I had to reinstall the program and start from scratch — not fun at all. Still don’t know what happened loool 🤣😵.

In Corel Painter, I use a bunch of different brushes (unlike Photoshop where I just stick to one lol). I was drawing this piece live while streaming on Arena and spent quite a while looking for the perfect brush for the hair hahaha — and even though it kinda got lost under all that sunlight later on, it was still worth the try.

I recorded a video of the process and I'm figuring out how to share it. I saw you can add links to posts now, but I’m not sure if it works with YouTube, X, or Instagram links. If anyone knows, please tell me!😌 🙏

I like showing little snippets of the process from the video — I feel like close-ups or zooms on certain areas help to show the textures and decision making better than a full step by step, like I used to do. I haven’t really followed a super detailed step by step this time either, but I’ll still show you a bit of how it went.