A while ago I posted a series of portraits copied from Old Masters. In light of my recent decision to shift my focus away from realism to the cartoony fantasy art I tend to be better at (and, historically, far more embarrassed about), I decided to do the same thing with some of the contemporary digital art I admire. While I planned to do a more extensive series of these, I ended up basically drawing just from a couple of video games. Although, the first thing I did when I decided to really go ahead with making digital art for its own sake was to emulate an actual Old Master:
This was pretty fun and I actually think it turned out really well, but ultimately my goal here was to emulate digital art I liked, not keep trying to make digital art that mimicked traditional media (which requires better equipment and expertise than I have anyway). I started by revisiting one of the game series that helped me learn how to draw people in the first place over ten years ago, Fire Emblem. I first tried a portrait of Lucina, a character from one of the newest games, using what I learned about traditional comic book and manga techniques from the experiments I discussed in my last post. I did this first using a rougher style I'm more used to, and then repeated it using techniques truer to what manga artists actually use:
Or maybe it was the other way around. I don't know. The "cleaner" image took a lot longer and was less fun to make, which at first sort of fed into my negative idea about myself that I am lazy and don't like to complete finished work. I think I've proven to myself since that that's not necessarily true.
This was an attempt to emulate a really interesting art style from the concept art for The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (the image itself comes from Hyrule Historia). I really enjoyed doing the inking on this one; the difference between this and the previous one is that I used a pen tool that varied the thickness of the lines, allowing for greater expression in the drawing. I pretty much completely failed at emulating the shading I was going for though; I probably could have tried harder but at a certain point I just felt like I should move on to other things.
Lately I have been playing a lot of indie games, and I have especially been interested in games that have impressive and interesting art styles. There is a wide variety of these, but the one that has stuck out to me the most as having a similar style to what I am going for in my own art is Sunless Sea, a "Lovecraftian" steampunk game in which Victorian London has fallen through the earth's crust and become a part of a sort of "underworld." It's lots of fun and the writing is fantastic, but the art style is one of my favorite aspects. As such, I copied several character portraits for the game to get a feel of how I might go about producing similar artwork:
This one was a relatively rough sketch but it gave me a feel for what I was going for, and got me excited to really work on developing my style.
Aside from the background, this one is actually pretty polished; I got really absorbed in the details, which made me feel like maybe I'm not eternally destined for sloppy, incomplete work after all.
What was really ironic about this is that it was one of the first "complete" paintings I did using digital art as an end and not simply a means to practicing for oil paintings... and yet, the actual process of creating it felt more like oil painting than any of those practice paintings ever did. I can add that to my extensive list of times I have gotten myself into trouble by overthinking things.
Not much else to say about this one; it's in the same style, and I also carried this one to completion and really enjoyed it.
I think you can see at which point on this one I got bored and gave up. I don't remember exactly why, but there was something about the technique I was using that got really frustrating.
Finally, the header image for this post was sort of an attempt to merge the different styles featured here. It's by far the one I'm most satisfied; it also took the longest time and the most effort by far, but that's to be expected for something that feels really polished. The bright side of how long it took is that I now know for sure that when I am really invested in something and really enjoy the process, I'm perfectly willing to spend the time and effort to make it good. I'm not eternally cursed with laziness after all.
A note on this being "part II" of my Copying the Masters "series": It's actually kind of funny... I've had 3 or 4 posts that I've first labeled as "part I" of something, and then changed the name when I never got around to finishing that series. I'll talk more about this in a later post, but that meticulous planning of exercises has actually led to me sort of painting myself into a corner--excuse the pun.