le vent se lève

I stated this piece really fighting my brain to just draw something, anything. I had exactly 0 composition ideas and I was really winging it from start to finish. The first 5 steps of the gif were drawn on an airplane where I had no references so I just had to draw from memory. Not having references also meant that I had to manually choose my colors and that was fun. I think if I hadn't nailed the color palette at this point this would never have been finished.

After I landed and was able to grab references I began rendering the waves (Ivan Aivazovsky paintings my beloved) and was originally trying and failing to add a boat into the composition (which was still square at this point). The gif shows one boat but there were many in various places. Note to self, don't draw water before you try to put a boat in that water!

Landed on the lighthouse (did the perspective wrong, later fixed that, not understanding my perspective was probably the cause of the boat problems), changed the design of the dragon to be whale inspired, and eventually added the baby looking at the lighthouse keeper so the story of the piece strengthened.

The lighthouse introduced a problem that I may or may not have successfully solved: the bright yellow of the artificial lighting really stands out and draws your eye away from the dragons. I gave the lighthouse keeper a yellow coat to try and counter act this, as well as giving the dragons bright yellow eyes.

Overall I'm very satisfied with the contrast of blues/purples and yellows to really make the subjects pop. The only thing I'd probably change if I could do it again would be to make the crests of the waves lest bright, especially where they were crashing onto the rocks because they're too bright (see greyscale below). Unfortunately when I render water it's more or less all on one layer so fixing that was not possible.

lately i've been challenging myself with rendering full scenes because i've never really been one to finish art like this. im pretty pleased with the contrast in the scene! when i finished my first pass of rendering and changed it to grayscale, the canvas looked like this:

fairly clear, but definitely some room to exaggerate values. squinting i can't really make out the form. so I went in with good old #FFFFFF and #000000 to bring the subject to the foreground:

and after going through with some additional tweaks (dodge and burn layers plus shimmying the contrast and lightness around), the final piece in grayscale looks like this:

certainly not perfect but an improvement to the composition yipeepee

There are two things you need in order to help me:

An image editing program that handles transparent images

A willingness to run the dragon size program locally on your machine

You do not need to understand code, I will explain everything to you. You also do not need to draw or do any advanced image editing, just tweaking the size.