Good day, Hive!

I had so much fun playing with hard lighting in my Haunted Spider painting that I couldn't help but do it again. Like with any skill, you've got to practice it over and over to refine it and commit it to habit. So that's what I did with this painting. It's more refined than the Haunted Spider, though with different lighting (artificial instead of natural).

A DRINK

Like I mentioned before, my portfolio needs more science fiction pieces. And this one was a sketch I'd made about... years and years ago but never got around to painting. Well, I took the dive and pulled it up now because it was perfect for playing with hard light in an artificial lighting setting.

And also, hot alien babe. Because why not, right?

If you're wondering where I learned this specific lighting technique from, it's from Marc Brunet's Art School. Seriously, worth checking out. I didn't quite do it his way but I learned new things and adapted them into my style.

» SKETCHY

I was going for something cyberpunk-ish, far future but not too farfetched. Thus the hover barstools and drinks dispensers. Well, and the Twi'lek-inspired tentacle alien as well. That probably set the theme the most. The sketch this time is a little more cleaned up but not fully, and that's because I wanted a little more detailing in the definitions of the body, to bring out a more semi-realistic feel to how it will look.

» COLOUR

Argh, the colouring for this piece nearly had me tearing out my hair in fist-sized clumps. I spent hours being frustrated with working out a balanced colour palette that fit the genre of cyberpunk. The scene is in a bar, with neon lighting. And neon colours are... a bitch.

But I finally found a palette that worked and still had a good balance of warm and cool colours. My main problem before was not going with simple neutral colours (black, white, & grey).

» THE MOOD

Okay, the initial colour palette wasn't as balanced between warm and cool as I thought so I made the lighting brighter to add more warm colour to the painting. Aside from the balance, it fit the scene. This is a neon-lit bar in some cyberistic future, after all. I went with a standard top-down lighting, with the main lights being somewhere above the two females.

Because I wanted the focus almost solely on the woman and the alien, I didn't add much detailing to the background, leaving it vague, then blurring it and making it slightly darker to bring out the crispness of the girls and create the illusion of depth. And I almost forgot to add neon lighting! The heresy.

» GIFNESS

» ART INSIGHT FOR THE WEEK

Practice. Draw and draw, and paint and paint. Just keep doing it over and over and over and again. Because that is how your skills and your understanding of your skills improve. It's not enough to just learn the theory and trying it out once. It takes 2-6 weeks for a habit to settle in the brain. That's 2-6 weeks of constant practice of a skill until it becomes ingrained and your don't forget it.

Sure, you don't have to practice new skills every hour of every day. You also don't have to do a complete painting each day. But working on the new skill once a day will increase how quickly your brain makes the skill stick, even if it's just by doodling or quick sketches or speedpaintings.

Just keep practising.

Thanks for stopping by and reading and supporting!

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A Drink [Digital Painting]