Hey Hive!
We're back again with another Art Attack! If you're new to the series, this is where I share my drawings and the process behind them. A behind-the-scenes look at my artwork, if you will. This is not to say that I'm very good at art, or that I'm a professional in any way. In fact this is the opposite, and serves as a reminder to how I first started, and lets me track my progress too!
One thing I like to do as an artist is to draw special personalised artworks for friends as gifts! Both because I'm a bad gift giver but also because I find personalised art a better gift than anything I could buy especially in this day and age. But here's the first one I did for one of my mods that I think is one of the better ones to this day:
It's birthday period again for my mods on my Twitch channel since there's a lot of birthdays in my community from June to August apparently. So for my mod who goes by Fallen_Rival on Twitch, I actually wanted to do a simpler piece this time since I had a lot on my plate.
For reference this was the piece I did for him the previous year:
Tbh it didn't seem like he appreciated it all that much at the time since he barely responded when I sent it to him. And after all that work I felt like it was a bit of a waste if he didn't even really like it. Of course I would learn later that he was actually struggling to find the words to show just how much he appreciated it, but hindsight is 20-20 as they say.
Here I was thinking he didn't appreciate my art so I wanted to take some shortcuts and have AI make something for him with my direction. I had an idea to draw Magikarps kind of giving him a salute or him commanding an army of Magikarp in some way. We'd been playing PokeMMO on stream and Magikarps are kinda Rival's favourite Pokemon now for the memes. He actually spent hours fishing and has boxes full of them in-game. He also likes cursed art like buff Pokemon which we had a laugh about on stream some time ago:
Source: mustsharenews
So my idea was to have a shiny buff Magikarp in the middle holding up a cake flanked by 2 aisles made of normal Magikarp "soldiers", if that makes sense. I tried to use AI to get some idea on how I would go about drawing this, but unfortunately it seems AI is not really there yet and can't even get Magikarp to look right.
It was still a really cool style nonetheless but definitely not what I was going for, in fact it wasn't even close.
So I guess I just had to take matters into my own hands and do it myself. For the fish soldier I found one from the game Castle Crashers which I actually played and really enjoyed! I thought it looked perfect if I just recoloured it to look like a Magikarp instead. Here are the references I used:
For the buff Pokemon I referenced these pins I saw online which you can actually buy which I thought was really cursed but hilarious.
Source: kickstarter
I thought the Pikachu in the Pokeball would be perfect since he had a pose that could hold up a cake. So this was the initial sketch:
But then I realised it took a bit too much space and wouldn't look good with all the soldiers around him so I tried to change to a standing position instead.
I thought he looked a lot better this way, and once that was done I outlined and coloured them. I was so sick of drawing cakes and since Rival likes takoyaki I decided to draw that in place of a cake. I thought it was more apt especially since it's also made of fish.
The colours and shading looked pretty perfect and once I was sure I replicated the soldiers and positioned them like how I imagined.
For the background I was thinking of drawing them in the ocean since they're fish, but then I thought it'd be cool to have them in a glass Pokeball kinda like a snowglobe of sorts.
When I started colouring in the sand and the ocean background, I realised it would be quite difficult to make it look like a Pokeball and still have the Magikarps at this scale. So I just settled for making them look like they're in a snow globe instead since I wanted them to be the focal point.
I added some coral, seaweed and rocks in the background to give it more of an oceanic feel. The front still felt a little empty though so I added more rocks in front and I thought it looked more complete.
To finish it off, I added some sparkles to the shiny Magikarp to make him look even shinier, and also added a white outline, translucent layer and shine to make it seem like they're in a dome. And I think it came out pretty perfect!
I wouldn't know how you would describe this to an AI but I feel like human artists are still ahead of the curve since AI can't dream this kind of art up just yet. Granted I had some help in references but this was all concocted in my brain still.
When I showed this to Rival I could tell he was blown away. And I felt pretty proud of this too! I guess I'll just think of funny, cursed art for my mods from now on so they'll appreciate it more.
Here's the 30 second timelapse:
If you're interested, I do draw on stream sometimes and you can even claim free artwork if you get enough channel points! We also play lots of interactive games so come hang out with us on my Twitch channel!
Thanks for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
Check out my previous post in this series!
