awawa

After I had finished playin the new deltarune chapters, I knew I really wanted to do some kind of piece with Ralsei. Basically I was just looking for any excuse to paint him cuddlin with some dolls lol I didn't even really do any sketching beforehand, just kinda made a quick doodle of the general pose in my mind, tacked it next to my scrap board and went for it. (For all my previous paintings, I've usually done all the planning and sketching out in photoshop before I then print it out and transfer it onto an already cut piece of board.) In the time lapse you can see how I just add thin opaque paint layers over my sketch so I can draw back over and make corrections as I go.

Once I felt the sketch was about where I wanted it, I quickly made some washes to define a loose idea of the lighting I wanted. Then I cut and prepped the final shape out of the sheet of plywood, before I got to the actual painting. (You can see I quickly played with some colored pencils on top of the washes I put over the sketch. I was originally thinking of doing a more mixed media approach, but I wasn't really feeling it and just went straight into my paints lol)

I decided to focus on the quilt that is laying over Ralsei first, and blocked in a loose cloud and star pattern. I then took my airbrush to it to get some soft glowing effects. I've been wanting to use my airbrush a lot more lately to get those nice shades and gradients that I like to put in my digital work. It's a bit of learning curve (and a pain to clean lol) but I think I managed to get some good practice in. Since I didn't want to ruin the quilt with any extra washes or paint, I masked it off so I could then focus on just Ralsei. Even though I usually do a color study before I get too deep into a painting, for this one I had a pretty good idea in my head for the lighting. I really just wanted the effect of Ralsei just being softly lit by his window, surrounded in shades of blue and green. You can see in the video I started out on his lower half with a more bright palette, but quickly put a darker wash of green/blue on top, kinda letting the resulting colors influence the rest of his form. From there it was just getting paint where it needed to be, going back and refining the forms till I could say "yeah that works". I also went back and added some more shading with my airbrush next to the areas of the quilt before I ripped the tape off, just to give it a little more depth. After that it was just a matter of cleanin lil details up, and adding a quick border. Overall I'm quite happy with this one, especially since I didn't really have much of any plan or expectations to begin with lol. It's quite a bit different in that aspect, and I like how dark I let the values get. The brushstrokes ended up being more visible in this piece too, especially in his fur, my dagger brush did a lot of the heavy lifting with this one. hey did you know? You can just hold a physical painting at weird fuckin angles for your own entertainment? woagh

Also! You may have noticed (like I did lol) that the glare is pretty significant in the later half of this vid. Well, wouldn't you know it I managed to fix this problem AFTER I finished the painting ¬_¬ lol at least itll be better for the next time lapse I shoot