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!
So a few weeks ago I shared a few textured landscapes I drew with the help of a Youtube tutorial by Art with Flo! I really like her videos since I can turn off my brain and not have to think about what to draw or how to do it and just follow along with her. She also gives some very good tips and a refresher for different techniques on Procreate!
Anyway, I wanted to make a series of these kinds of drawings since I really loved this style. I had already done two and needed an idea for a third and initially I thought of making it a merch design I could put in my online store and make it TacoCat themed. But since I was following along with a video I wasn't sure if it would be allowed. The idea I had was to draw the cat bus from Totoro but make it a Taco truck instead. I thought it was still a cute design so I decided to just do it anyway.
I haven't seen too many Ghibli movies but I did watch Totoro a few years ago and I absolutely loved it! It's such a sweet movie and the cat bus really grabbed my attention. I always wanted to draw it so this was a good opportunity.
This was the sketch I came up with, and the idea was to have some smaller cats chasing the TacoCat truck similar to when we get a raid on my Twitch channel.
I started with the background first since that was arguably easier as I'd done it before. Sorry for the quality but I changed the colours after that and had to screenshot the timelapse.
I was debating whether I wanted to outline the TacoCat truck since the video and my previous pieces didn't have a bold black outline. I decided to do the outline and see if it works.
After I did the outline and coloured it I thought it looked okay.
But when I put the background back it definitely felt like something was off. I think the outline was too bold for the more tranquil-looking background and it looked like I pasted in the TacoCat truck; it stood out too much.
So I removed the outline and just worked with colours to fill in the TacoCat truck and I think it looked better! I had to leave the lines for the facial features of course but they were thin enough that it looked okay. This one makes it look like he's part of the whole picture now and not like some sticker.
I also changed the background colours a little bit so it matched with the Ghibli colours better instead of the very saturated blues that Flo gave. Overall I think this looks a lot better now and I'm very happy with this piece, it turned out even better than I envisioned.
Here's the timelapse for this piece:
And I think that's all for this series as well! I hope you enjoyed this little trilogy of landscapes because I sure did. If you use Procreate as well, definitely check out Art with Flo! She has plenty of Draw with Me videos that are so nice and simple to follow.
Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
