Commission - Star Wars (Patreon)

god, I love this one. It kills me that I have to wait to share it with the world... because the commissioner is having it printed on a cake for their wife's birthday later this month, and I want to post the artwork next to a picture of the real cake! I'm so hyped that my art is going to be on a cake. This is the first cake commission I've ever gotten, and I really hope there are more to come in the future. I've had people ask to have my art tattooed (although they've never sent me pictures, so I don't know if those plans ever came to fruition), I've seen my art carved into pumpkins... but this is the first cake!

Well, not technically my first cake. My mom had a drawing of mine printed on a cake for one of my middle school birthdays, and I always remembered how cool that was-- and how awkwardly stiff and paperlike the printed frosting was to eat. I hope printable frosting technology has improved since the early 2000s!

I also love the subject matter they chose-- I love a good parody, and the little goblin (the commissioner's DnD character-- the orc is their wife's character) posed like Princess Leia is everything I love. The style of the poster is also just so cool and dynamic that it felt like I was doing an art study at the same time. I tried to pay attention to the use of intense, dark pools of shadow and the contrast between the cool blue background and warm, illuminated characters. I actually got so focused on the painting that I forgot to take more screenshots of the process... but really, the most interesting/unusual thing I did here was use a sized-up textured brush as a sort of stamp to make all those stars.

In the last few screenshots, you can see how I made the artwork fit the 9" circle shape the final piece had to be for printing onto a cake. As I was painting, I was working on layers that were set as masks over a solid circle, to help me "color inside the lines"-- and then I duplicated the artwork (which always do before collapsing layers, just in case) and squashed everything down. Turning off the solid background layer to create a transparent background (displayed in photoshop as that gray checkered pattern) for the final image was the last step, and it's all ready for printing!