A Cat Always Lands on His Feet 2013

Well... I have to say I'm embarrassed to be uploading a contest entry less than a week after the contest was published, and more than three weeks from the due date... but I had originally misread it being due the 14th, leading to an all-night paint marathon Wednesday. I think I may have crossed the six hour threshold. I know that's painfully short for an art piece, but I have the attention span of a gnat.

This is my entry for `LadyLincoln's Spirit of Community: Self Improvement Contest. It is a remake of an old favorite image of mine, that has recently become more of an old shame:



The original picture was an important point for me as an artist. It was the first time I was able to apply using a reference (a photo of myself, taken by myself) to fan art, the first time I adapted a fantasy character to an anatomical reality of some kind, and my first experiment with shadows.

I made that in November. My painting style and skills have dramatically evolved since then, and by the time I made my Porygon, this had become kind of an old shame. I loved the picture and the idea I was conveying, but not the artwork I'd done. I figured in a year or two I'd do a Draw This Again of it.

Well... as soon as I saw the contest prompt, I knew what I wanted to do. I set to work almost immediately.

This piece was made in Paint mode of Art Academy: Lessons for Everyone Free Paint, on top of black textured digital paper. I chose this out of my growing dissatisfaction with pastels, and to more directly mimic the paint mode I used to create the original in Art Academy: First Semester.

Improvement Notes

The foremost improvements to this piece are to my procedure. While I used the same reference and grid setup as before with the same photograph, the way I approached the picture was much different. I sketched out an outline, deviating from my own anatomy in some obvious places, blocked it in with a soft lavender, and filled in some basic shadows and highlights. After a little blending, I used construction and framework techniques to design his face, and then went to work at "colorizing" the shadows and finalizing details. I did a lot of blending and some additional highlighting. Then I actually went back and did a little on the tree: Trying to layer paint over paint in AA:LFE is difficult unless you dry, and drying is often not advantageous for pieces like this. Finally, after blending and touching up the shadows, I used a dry brush to add some texture to his body. I was inspired to do so by the white streaks glitch in paint mode, and evoked it deliberately.

This in contrast to my method for the previous one, which was outline, color in, and try to draw the musculature in with darker colors.

The most obvious improvement is my avoidance of lines. I was still trying to evoke Sugimori official art and include lines. I've now broken out of that mold and use lines only when necessary, or when deliberately chasing that style. Still, black line art doesn't really work with paint anyway.

The improvement I'm most proud of is my use of color. *Spudfuzz taught me a lot about how to add contrasting colors into the shadows of a piece to make it look more realistic. I haven't been bold enough to do this really dramatically, but I experimented with blues and greens in the shadows underneath Mewtwo, and with reds in the shadow underneath his tail.

Another area I'm proud of is blending. I've been told this is a weak point of mine. While some of it is media (blending in pastel mode of this game is impossible), I take some credit for it. Look at what I can do...

Then there's detail. My tree and grass were... lackluster, and my sky was sloppy. While I admit they're all still not to the same level of detail as Mewtwo, nor should they be, I've gone a little further this time. I marked in a texture for the grass, I tried to give the tree some texture, and I did some experimental things with the sky.

Speaking of detail, facial expression. Wow, I used to struggle with this, and I still do, but this is a marked improvement. I managed to line his eyes up, use shadows to create some sense of head shape, and kind of give him an awkward, smirking expression befitting the roleplay scene that inspired this. He also looks a bit... older, again befitting the game, which is set about 10 years after the anime. Contrast the face that was just there before.

Last but not least, I show some very weak improvement in the area of turning the form. Using directional strokes on Mewtwo's tail and shadows on the far side of my tree, I tried to create an illusion of depth and roundness. I still need a lot of work in this area, but it's more effective than my attempts to hint at musculature in the original piece.

So, through a combination of practice and conscious effort, I took a lackluster piece based on a great idea and turned it into something I can be proud of, something that is worthy of my other work.

For those not in the know, this guy is Mewtwo from Pokemon, and he belongs to Gamefreak and Nintendo.