guinwinifred

~~~Profile Picture~~

Introduction

Time Taken: roughly 24 hrs (December 17th 2021 – July 30th 2022)

Program used: FireAlpaca

This is the first piece that I’ve made with the intention of using it as a profile picture. It is a picture of my internet persona/mascot – whose design is still a work-in-progress. All you need to know is that they’re a girl with bat ears and wings.

Process

First Sketch

In my first draft, I used different colours in order to see the different parts of the drawing more clearly. The initial sketch looked promising. Originally, I planned to draw my persona holding a mug however this idea was scrapped by the second sketch.

I cleaned up the sketch and adjusted the position of the ears and wings. At this point, I started to dislike the drawing as I wasn’t satisfied with the hands and overall pose. At the time, I thought they looked odd and stiff. Eventually, I scrapped this sketch and did the second sketch.

Second Sketch

For the second sketch, I wanted to try a different pose in the hopes of adding character to the sketch and I chose the classic ‘bored’ pose. I think it does have more charcter than the first sketch however I didn’t like the overall proportions of the head and arms. At this point, I got a bit frustrated and decided to take a break so I could look at it again with fresh eyes.

Sketch 3

Whilst taking a break from sketch 2, I decided to try and sketch out sketch 2 again but in pencil (as I find traditional art easier to do). In the end, I liked the sketch so much so that I decided to use it as my sketch layer (after taking a picture of it first) of my third attempt of this artwork.

Lineart

I did a cleaner sketch on top of the photo in FireAlpaca and marked out the lightsource. This looked most promising out of all the sketches I did at this point. I did the sketch in blue in order to make it easier to distinguish it from the photo – I later changed the lineart to black.

Once I finalised my lineart, I duplicated the lineart layer and added a gaussian blur to soften the lineart.

Colouring

Picking my Colour Scheme
Jumper Colour 1
Jumper Colour 2
Final Jumper Colour

I wanted to use purple in my artwork so I based my colour pallette around purple. The only problem was finding a good colour for the jumper. At first, I tried darkening the colour but that made too similar to the wings and they ever so slightly clashed. Next, I tried lightening the colour and I liked it! Now that the colouring stage is done and I can now render the artwork. I also added a contrasting mint colour as the background to make it more interesting.

Shading and Finishing Touches

Adding Blush
First Round of Shading
Final Artwork

First, I airbrushed a reddish colour onto the face and hands to add blush. I also added a darker colour to the fingers of the wings to make it feel less flat. Using purple on a multiply layer, I added blocks of shadows where they would be according to the lightsource. With another multiply layer, I airbrushed more shadows (especially on the jumper) in order to make softer shadows . I added bright white highlights to the eyes and fang. In order to make the lineart softer I changed the colour from a black to a purple but I kept the lineart black in places that would be in the shadows.

Overall, I think this piece looks great. I think next time I would alter the right wing as it doesn’t seem to match the angle of the body and give the hair & jumper more texture – everything was shaded in the same way so the hair looks somewhat like a blob. Also I might try to use the airbrush to soften the shadows next time as the blur/blend tools I was using were a bit tedious to use.

Thank you for reading my first blog post, I’ll be sure to post future blog posts (don’t expect regular uploads though – I take a while to make art).

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