Art Attack! #82: Eight Maids-a-Milking 🐄 (Christmas Countdown Challenge #8)

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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!

So if you missed the last couple of posts, I've been sharing the process behind one of my biggest art challenges ever - the Christmas Countdown Challenge (which I completed back in December 2020)! This is where I draw pieces according to the song; The 12 Days of Christmas!

I'm sure everyone is familiar with that song and we're currently up to Day 8 now since we did day 7 last week - sevens swans 'a swimming!

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So the next line in the song is

On the eighth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me
Eight maids a-milking
Seven swans a-swimming
Six geese a-laying
Five golden rings
Four calling birds
Three french hens
Two turtle doves, and
A partridge in a pear tree

I didn't really know what to do about this one other than draw milkmaids milking cows so that's exactly what I did! And good news because I got to reference Stardew Valley for the cows, and goats too!

Stardew Valley is one of my favourite games of all time and it's a cute farming simulator with adorable visuals, amazing soundtrack and addictive gameplay! And they have these really cute animals in the game that you can rear too!

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As usual the challenge here was to translate these pixelated animals into smooth line art, but I basically just traced it. I actually used a cross-stitch pattern as reference, but it worked pretty well!

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So if we needed 8 milkmaids, I needed to draw 8 animals so I decided on 6 cows and 2 goats.

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And I didn't have much time left so I went with a simple barn background, similar to the coop I did for day 3.

Then it was time to draw in the maids themselves! I think I traced this from somewhere too but unfortunately I can't remember what reference I used.

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But I traced 2 positions for the milkmaids and basically just changed their colours to save time. And since the animals in Stardew also respond with a heart when you milk/pet them, I thought I'd draw in the heart too!

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And eventually, we end up with this!

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I decided to go with a nighttime sky in the background since I did a daytime one in the coop. And I know some of the maids look funny but my brain was basically dead by the time I did this piece. I also started this one basically at midnight since I was busy that day. I remember I was so relieved when I finally finished it!

I think that was my longest streak ever of drawing and posting from start to finish in the same day so it was getting tiring and I had to take shortcuts to get it done. But I still tried my best!

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!
Art Attack! #81: Sevens Swans 'a Swimming 🦆 (Christmas Countdown Challenge #7)

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