tempenn springs process (Patreon)

This drawing has been looong time in the making, originally it was supposed to be a pretty straight forward remake of one of my Inktoker pieces from 2018, since there's quite a few pieces from back then that I'd like to update and polish further. However I thought a straight up redo was pretty boring, the composition itself wasn't thaaaat interesting and portraying Krea in a swimsuit hapens once every few years, so I figured doing something new would be more fitting.

In my opinion an easy way to make a composition more interesting is to just move the camera somewhere else to get a better angle so I tried doing that, the general setting and idea stayed mostly the same, I clearly gave up on some way earlier than in others lol

An important thing worth noting is the palette difference between these sketches and the original one. Originally I was going to go for colors that I was pretty comfortable with, much warmer tones, but for the latter I decided to stray off a bit from my comfort zone and do a mainly green piece. Green for some reason is a color that I really dislike using lol, so I thought it'd be a fun challenge, one that didn't quite work out. Regardless it was pretty clear that the last 2 sketches would be the ones getting the thumbs up to keep being worked on:

As I was polishing this the lack of contrasting colors was starting to bother me, artists such as Moebius have an excellent use of them, and I try to incorporate some of that in my pieces. Even tho the original intention was for it to be a green piece, it was too much in my opinion, perhaps it was fine and it was just my bias against it telling me otherwise? Who knows, but it was enough to start making some changes:

At this step I decided to push more the blue tones and darken them a bit, besides the problem with how samey the colors were the values of the whole piece were also bothering me, leaving most of the greens for accents and the background, I thought it was a change for the better, since it'd also highlight the shading of the foliage in the rocks much better, the light sources. Even though I was starting to be more comfortable with the drawing, from this point onwards things were starting to fall apart, in retrospective I should've given up and restarted here, but oh well I decided to stick with it since I was more than halfways through with it

More doubts started arising, Krea's pose was completely changed since it was pretty wonky anatomy wise and it didn't feel that natural, her colors were also brightened up in comparison to the last step. Most of the changes made here were mostly polishing and value checks, such as the water being lighter to blend less with Doko, and accentuating some of the plants in the background. 

There's a few more variants of this last revision of it, but they're not remarkable enough to share, I just started putting blending layers on top of it to see what'd save it, but nothing did really, there were too many things I wasn't satisfied with in order to want to continue working on it.

Said reasons being the composition itself, I don't think it had a very strong sense of direction, your eyes are naturally dragged to Krea just because of how much her hues pop in comparison to everything else, but I don't think she's meant to be the focus of the piece? To be honest if I were to be asked where should you be looking at I wouldn't be able to give a proper answer, I don't think this had a good sense of flow and it took me far too long to realize.

Another reason being the colors themselves, perhaps due to my unfamiliarity with using greens, but like before I think I just went overboard with it, the palette chosen doesn't really make for a very appealing illustration in my opinion. In retrospective after not looking at it for weeks I can say that it's not a bad drawing, just could be a lot better.

Lastly it's the portrayal of the characters and world, mainly just Krea. She's not very expressive body language wise, so her just sitting there is in character, I just think she looks pretty out of place by not really interacting or reacting to her surroundings at all. Her face also gave me a lot of problems, hot springs are a place where she goes to relax and forget about everything, so drawing her with a smiling face while fitting didn't really express the feeling I wanted. The changes made were very subtle and borderline unnoticeable but they were there lol, there's most likely many more that I didn't save....

(You can notice it if you stare at the corners of her mouth or her top eyelid lool)

And lastly it's one tiny detail that kept bothering me the whole time since I decided to add it in, it being this little thing in the background:

Something I try to do with most of my original pieces is to slowly build up the world with small details thrown around that hopefully people catch up on, this was intended to be one of them, however it was clearly thrown in halfways through without much planning, which made it feel shoehorned in and without much value. It bothered me so much I decided to take that into an account and make it a much more important piece to the drawing as a whole when redoing it.

With all that out of the way, it's time for a new round of sketches!

The angle for this one was pretty set from the get go, I wanted the "camera" to be set much lower, slightly above ground level, and it stuck like that all the way through. Since I wanted the leftovers of the machine to have a bigger focus on this it was also stablished early on that it'd take a big chunk of the background. The challenge this time was how to position Krea in this, in the very first one she's just laying around, but she didn't feel that important to the piece, the second was better, she was meant to be petting Doko, but it kinda made no sense for her to be doing that there lol, so it got scrapped, and the other 2 were supposed to imply her about to get in the water.

While I wasn't too happy with those I just though about the context a bit more, she's at a hot spring, so it made sense for her to have a towel, so I just went with it. And with all that the time to finally start polishing again started:

At first I was going to stick pretty close to the original sketch, I thought the smaller proportions looked really cute, but it proved to be a bit troublesome when trying to get her in other poses, her hands were too big to the point of obscuring a lot and making the pose hard to read, so that had to be tweaked:

And after this it was smooth sailing! There's not too much to go in depth into, and this post has gone for far too long anyways lol. The only thing worth noting was the change in colors, similar to the original version, I felt that this piece was too warm and in my comfort zone, so I decided to just play around with colors I'm not as familiar with.

Krea's face was also something that kept getting changed slightly, but at this point it's a given and I don't have as many variants as the other one to share lol, again this went much more smoother! Little to no complications and I was much happier with the result, it only took a couple of days to do after this last step! In contrast to the original which I was working on for more than a week.

And that's it! I took the weak points of the last piece and took them into consideration to make a much better drawing:

The big leftovers of the robot, while much more noticeable, feels non-intrusive enough to the point of just being a set piece, if you look into it you could wonder what's up with it and so on, but all the same you could just ignore it and take it for granted. 

The addition of the towel for Krea is a small but very important thing! Alongside the fluffier fur, it gives the implication of having just gotten out of the water, making her feel more connected to her surroundings. 

And finally the direction itself, I think it's much clearer this time that the characters are the center piece, the values were used in a way in which it makes your eyes focus on them and mostly everything around them, the purple tones of the background being light enough to not be distracting and lacking in detail so that your eyes don't really pay a lot of attention to it.

And that's it for real for this post! Apologies if it's too long, with the lack of timelapses this month I wanted to write something much more in depth, and this drawing that basically was done twice had enough material behind it in order to share and hopefully be insightful to how my dumb picky brain works.

If you read all of this thank you for your time! I hope you enjoyed it! Big apologies again for the length <: )