Illustration #118 + a few doodles! (Patreon)

Finally finished this painting, I hope you like it. 😄 Meant to have this posted a couple of days ago, but May has unfortunately been a weird and busy month with a lot of non-art stuff occupying the ol' mindspace. Hopefully things calm down a bit over the next few weeks.

Here are the download links for the rewards for this illustration so you can check out the process if you want:
WIP images
Short time lapse video
Long time lapse video
PSD files

If you watch the time lapse you might notice that the painting got away from me a little bit this time. I didn't do a good enough job nailing stuff down in the sketch, and ended up changing stuff later in the process. That always leads to problems lol. It's a helpful reminder for myself, though, to spend the necessary time on the sketch!

It probably also didn't help the situation that I was working in a software I'm not fully comfortable in yet. 😅For the past couple of years I've been doing my paintings in Paintstorm Studio, and it's been a very comfortable experience for me with the workflow I'm used to. However, there are a few features I'm unable to make use of in Paintstorm, and I've been thinking about giving Clip Studio Paint a more serious try to see if I can end up getting as comfortable there as I have been in Paintstorm. So I did the painting in CSP this time around (except the initial sketch). I'm cautiously optimistic. It definitely takes a little bit of getting used to, finding comfortable brush settings and hotkeys and all that, and it unfortunately isn't as silky smooth to work in as Paintstorm has been, but I'll keep at it for a little while longer. It's still too early to tell which I'll prefer.

Was happy to have found a little bit of time for low pressure doodling on the side of working on the painting this time around too, so I included those here as well. I continue to feel that doing those drawings where there's no pressure to finish them is really good for my mental health, and helps me feel more relaxed and positive about my art in general. Having that space to explore and experiment with no pressure is great. I've been happy to see you guys respond well to that too, even when those drawings are mostly quick unfinished stuff.

Sort of related to that, I've recently been very tempted to put some real effort into getting better at doing line art drawings. You can maybe see some signs of that in the doodles here. I feel like it lends itself better to getting quick results I enjoy, which in the long term would hopefully also mean I could have a higher quantity of art to share. So I'd like to chase that inspiration and focus a bit on that in the coming weeks and see how that goes.

As always, I really appreciate you guys supporting me, thank you. 😄