#artprocessdiary

I recently got a new phone (Galaxy Z Fold 5, ty dad) and I decided that the best way to get me out of my funk would be to just, draw something! Ofc I drew Rosalina I've been her biggest fan since I was like in 4th grade... I even drew her for an art competition at my school (got disqualified cuz we weren't allowed to draw copyrighted characters 🙄)

I started this on 10/22/25 and finished 10/26/25. Ibispaint says it took 14 hours but take that with a grain of salt...

I knew I wanted to do a full body drawing since I've literally only been making headshots until now lol. I used a pose reference from pinterest (I initially traced the hands cuz i could Not be bothered but in the end I just drew them myself cuz they were looking really bad)

One thing I'm proud of is that I didn't color pick from any other fanart or official image. I do that a lot cuz other people usually have much better color choices than me. I obviously played with filters and stuff (the anime filter on ibis is the greatest thing i swear) but I'm really happy with how they came out.

Honestly the rendering went really really really well. There were many times that I felt stuck but I just kept going. I think the trick to feeling better about your rendering is to make your sketch borderline incomprehensible then you'll be forced to make sense of it by blocking in colors. The easiest things to render were somehow the hair, skin, and lower part of the dress?? I don't know how I managed to even accomplish this tbh. It just flowed so naturally and I didn't spend much time on either one.

The longest parts were probably the crown, earrings, jewels, and the sleeves. Oh my goodness the sleeves were so annoying.. I kept staring at my rosalina amiibo for reference too 🥀

This is the finished rendering!! This is where I had to tackle the thing I was dreading the whole time. I really don't like backgrounds. I initially really wanted to add like, a cool swirling magic effect around her? My attempts came out great conceptually, but I wasn't happy with the composition so I scrapped it. I just drew lumas instead. Their shape was really really hard for me to draw right for some reason, like I understand they are just teardrops with lil stub limbs but I was short-circuiting so I just outlined an official render keke.

I rendered the lumas, added some stars, and outlined all the drawings in white. I finished with some subtle blurring, noise, and chromatic aberration.

Overall, I really loved making this! I can't remember the last time I enjoyed making a full body and rendering it, so this was refreshing to do.

Here's the final speedpaint:

hey guys I spent like 40 minutes making an art progress post for my birthday illustration HAHAHA but tumblr just GOT RID of IT HAHAHA!!! Anyway this will be short and sweet and if I care I'll edit it later 😁💕

my sketch was really bad looking at it now ngl but I'm really happy with it,,, I had a habit of only caring that what I envisioned in my head got down onto the canvas, so if I really struggled with drawing the pose from my reference, I would outline the ref and go from there. Which isn't bad for learning purposes? But I wasn't exactly learning from it, it was more of an easy out. I want to start planning every little bit of my art process from now. Trying with the anatomy, posing, gesturing, line art, everything!! That's why I like this illustration because the only thing I outlined was the hand kekeke

The line art is my favorite part of this drawing hehe. I think I did a good job of transforming my sketch. I used a reference for the sweater folds and oh boy it came out nice.

After the line art tho, I had no idea what I wanted to do. It was 10 oclock at night two hours before my birthday was technically over so I was trying so hard to lock in 🙏 I love the look of the filled in grey on a white bg tho it gives off such neat animatic vibes im in love. I added grayscale shading just to see what it would look like and I ended up keeping it hehe

ALSO small rant but OH my gosh one of my favorite webtoons "Our Secret Alliance" does this incredibly cute thing that Im ABSOLUTELY in love with... The author doesn't draw the characters with different eye colors, just single black eyes with a white highlight. But, whenever there's a touching or sweet moment, a small hint of pink or light grey is added to the bottom of the eyes and its like AAAhAHAH I LOVE ITT IT ADDS SUCH CLEAR EMOTION IN SUCH A SIMPLE ADDITION 😭😭😭💕💕

look at this... I eat this up

I played around with a lot of gradients to try to keep it simple, but I did want to add color so I ended up scrapping the left one. The colors on the right are drastically different than the final one btw keke

The hair came out really well compared to how it usually ends up cuz oh my gosh I have had like a 6 year long battle with hair rendering and the war never stops

the skin wasn't too hard. I sometimes struggle with it cuz like it ends up being so simple that I'm like ??? what's goin on,,, all I do is at the blush and lip color then bam

I do wish I rendered the cake a bit more lol it stands out a little now that I'm looking at it.

I love how this came out... it didn't take that long to do in retrospect but it was a slow grueling process to me keke

here's the final speed paint! and the reason the sketch process isn't there is because I accidentally deleted the other canvas it was on after transferring to a new canvas :}