i was really indecisive with what i wanted to do for the last day to the point of starting several other draws that ended up scrapped and eventually just took an old sketch i still liked and painted over it :]
i'm sad that bugborgweek is over, but it's been so much fun participating and seeing everyone else's works throughout the week! thank you to the hosts for making this happen <3!
Took an old unfinished painting, redrew it, then finished it up. This shows my general process pretty well — Rough Sketch > Sketch > Rough Paint > Less Rough Paint > Final Paint.
The original composition (not shown here because it's old and bad) had the creature in a half-zombified state... and although that’s theoretically dope as hell, it didn’t really tell a story and (as a consequence) was kind of boring. “Local Commuting Monster Surprised By Meteor” ended up working better.
The background is simple — I made an initial lasso tool shape (liquified to give it a fish-eye lens look), then used a fuzzier graphite-textured airbrush with low flow to paint the bulk of the sky. The meteor was painted on top, with some Hard Light layers and regular paint on top to make it “feel” bright without getting too white. The creature brightened up significantly as I painted, because... well, a more “realistic” look for the lighting isn’t always the best route (as much as I like the darker look, in hindsight). As a consequence, the BG had to be mildly desaturated to prevent my eyes from bleeding out.
Waffled a bit on if it should stay portrait, or make it a more standard 4:3 size... ended up going with a 4:3 proportion midway through, as well as changing the background land to dark clouds. I painted it with about an inch of margin (you can see this in the last WIP) to give me wiggle room for displaying it. Sometimes I'll add notes on top of my painting when I'm down to the wire (in the last WIP again) to help remind me what I need to focus on. For optimum progression, I added the finished painting at the end — no idea if new Tumblr will loop it to the beginning.
Starseeker, 2023.
Used Photoshop for the initial rough sketch, redrew it in Procreate, then took that back to Photoshop to do the heavy lifting. OSX as always, with a Wacom Intuos 5 as my trusty tablet.