Week Six
November 7th through the 13th
This week has been exceptionally busy. And yet, I am very proud of the piece I managed to finish for this prompt. And just in time!
Things that went well with this week’s art piece:
~ The colors!
~ Fantastic facial shading
~ Surprisingly detailed feathers
On the not so glorious end of things:
~ The eyelashes
~ His coat???
~ White gel pen details
Raven was an exciting prompt. So many ideas were swirling around in my brain and I honestly came up with some great concept sketches. But I’ll only be showing you one of them this week.
Paying special attention to the shading of my sketches lately has really livened up my sketchbook and I’m absolutely loving it.
Fun fact, this will be the first week I’ve ever done the concept that was not voted with a majority win on social media!
The line work was not particularly time-consuming this week, as I wanted to try something a little different with the hair of this gentleman. Honestly, I adore the way this piece looks in the simplicity of the line work and shading.
Fantastic facial shading this week really has me jumping for joy at how much I have improved. However, I find that sometimes I can regress slightly with a skill like eyelashes for example. I think it was the fact that this was a masculine subject that had me struggling with the lashes. They certainly aren’t terrible but they just lack the fineness of last week.
I'm delighted by the way the feathers turned out, with the iridescent blue paint both underlying the black and acting as an accent on the top.
I used the same painting technique on the raven itself. These two parts of the painting took much longer than I had thought they would. It is common that I find myself working on an extremely micro level, painting super close to the piece and adding details that are not even visible at a normal distance. Literally making myself go cross-eyed over shit normal people likely don’t notice. Perhaps this actually lends more realism to the piece than I think it does. At least that is what I tell myself. Lol.
At the beginning of this post, I mentioned wanting to try out a new technique for the hair. The goal was to have solid black hair with lots of tiny baby hairs to add realism, but I had this internal fight between that and wanting to see some definition in the curls of his hair. This struggle produced hair that was somewhere in between the two. I don’t think I’m mad about it….
The bright orange is one of my very favorite parts of this piece. It is one of my first brightly colored pieces in a long time and I love the way the orange contrasts with the blue in the raven feathers. What I don't love is the execution of the orange. I had intended to create a sort of fuzzy jacket using my painting technique. I’m just not sure I pulled it off. Does it look terrible? No. Does it look the way I wanted it to? Also no.
*shrug*
Adding the white gel pen details has been one of my favorite parts throughout the Haunted Holidays Challenge, but I just did not know where to place them in this piece. I tried to add some much-needed fuzzy texture to his jacket, but I am only moderately satisfied with it. I do love the white lines separating the feathers, and I added some highlights to the chin and eyes as well.
Despite some shortcomings, I really like this piece. What do you think of it?
Oh! And it’s called “The Raven Eater”
