Playground

The Knight of Bone

All the little master studies I did January-March. I tried for 30 minutes every day, but only managed to pull through in March. They’re mostly landscape studies, which is weird because that’s not something popping up in my art much. Sometimes I just like painting something different, though, and my main goal was to gain a better feeling for light, colour and atmosphere. This month I’m moving on to portraits including some longer studies that allow me to bring pieces to a finish.

Composition value sketch. Using the tree design in a scene. (book cover format again because that’s what I mostly need to make compositions for) Focus on the tree. Initially the figure was missing, but since the lantern has a rather high light/dark contrast it pulled the eye to much and adding the boy (especially with the dark hair against the tree trunk) help drawing the attention more to the tree. Snow is so good to bring different elements of a comp together, show depths and mark directions. An easy trick maybe, but very useful.

Composition and painting practice. I’m using a story I’m working on to have some fodder for practice work, so I don’t need to come up with new ideas while also getting some visual inspiration for writing (and I’m excited about my practice work, which is always good!) The goal was to create a composition with a strong focus, and the scene I picked required the circular window, nighttime, snow, warm interior and the people inside. One of my biggest issued was to be clear about actually looking down through a window instead of there being a spotlight on two figures sitting in the snow. Possible solutions would have been to add more details to the rim of the window e.g. twigs to signal a size difference, a clear difference in the detail of the rendering, overlapping figures and windowframe. I went with using the snowflakes as a size indicator and having them being affected by the light from the window. Another issue was that the room is supposed to be illuminated completely from all sides (sans window, there’s be cooler moonlight coming from the top, though). I have no real answer to this besides cheating and using this overall lighting only to affect the atmosphere/hue of the scene and adding another, stronger lightsource that allows actual shadows, even if that wouldn't be accurate. People in a glowing cube is simply to very interesting to draw. It also gives no real sense of environment.  I’m also not sure about the distance of the figures to the window. Having them closer would allow for easier overlap and more focus on features, gestures, etc.  I assume I’ll need to go and do this again, but better.

Hollow Queen comps. I did these to play around with compositions (initially I thought of interiors (2nd row on the left was the first sketch), but things got so much easier when I got back into cover mode. I’m having a hard time coming up with more narrative compositions.) and the design for the tree. There are several in there I’d like to create a final of one day ...

Amaria Grimm

Esk

Hollow Queen