Hey Hive!
We're back again with another Art Attack! If you're new to the series, this is where I share my paintings 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 if you didn't catch last week's post, I mentioned that that particular piece was the last one I did in 2019. And I had big plans for the first piece I wanted to do in 2020!
To give some context - Sean and I were officially getting married in 2020; specifically, 2nd Feb 2020 because it was such a nice number. A numerical palindrome - 02.02.2020! As you may have guessed from my username (TacoCat) I'm a big fan of palindromes, and since this was a once in a lifetime date, we absolutely could not pass it up, so we booked the date the minute it became available; 3 months in advance!
And in celebration of our upcoming nuptials, I decided to paint a huge art piece; the biggest I've ever done!
The paper I got was A1 size (59.4 x 84.1 cm) and I had a month to get it done, since I wanted to bring it to our venue on 02/02, so I had to get cracking right away!
Basically my plan for this was to make a combined Stardew Valley-themed portrait for the both of us, with our names underneath and a background.
If you're unfamiliar with the game, Stardew Valley is a charming indie farming simulator RPG, where you take the role of a character who, to get away from the hustle of an office job, takes over their deceased grandfather's dilapidated farm in a place known as Stardew Valley.
Source: IRecommend.ru
In the game, you can talk to the other residents living in the town attached to the farm (called Pelican Town), and when you do, the dialogue box looks like this:
Oh yea spoilers you can also marry them
Source: reddit
So my plan was to draw a similar style portrait for Sean and I. I saw a couple people in The Stardew Valley subreddit also had similar ideas because I saw posts like this:
And this:
Btw both these artists also accept commissions so if you're interested you can PM them on reddit!
They looked so amazing and I wanted mine to look just as good. But of course mine was going to be physical art not digital, and in watercolour, to be specific.
This was my first draft on a smaller A4 size paper. I know it looks like crap, but it was just a rough one to get the positions right. I also drew this without a reference so...yea.
So as a reference I took an actual photo of the 2 of us in the pose that I was going to be drawing us in.
This was the original photo but I flipped it because I thought having Player 1 on the left would be more intuitive, you know, reading left to right and all.
And this was my second draft, after referencing the photo:
I thought it looked pretty good, other than a few changes that had to be made (hence the little notes in pencil). And Sean approved so it was time to get sketchin' on the actual paper!
After a lot of measuring and adjusting, this was my final sketch! Sorry the angle isn't very good, but the paper was so huge I could barely fit it on my side of the table.
After outlining:
Yea I kinda screwed up Sean's elbow line, idky I didn't notice that was weird when sketching.
The next step was pretty much painting, but I had some trouble thinking of which colours to use for our shirts since I didn't want it to be just black like it is irl.
Since I'm also a fan of ombre style colours this was my initial idea.
I did this on my phone and sent to Sean to see what he thought.
In the meantime, I painted what I could first, which was basically the name scroll.
Then it time to paint our shirts! I finally decided on a blue ombre and an orange ombre (our favourite colours respectively) but both going from bottom up so it would look consistent.
Then came the hardest part imo. Painting our skin. Well for me it was not much of a problem, but Sean's skin tone is pretty hard to replicate with physical paint so I spent a lot of time mixing up the gouache paints I had to get the right shade for him. I think I might've gone a tad too dark for him unfortunately.
Next was the background!
I wanted it to be simple so I went with something similar to the Stardew Valley title screen.
And for the final touch, I had the date shaped as clouds in the sky:
This was the final piece after outlining once more!
Btw our necklaces are symbols from The Dragon Prince on Netflix! Moon for me, Ocean for Sean.
I bought the biggest frame that I could carry from IKEA and this was what it looked like in the frame:
Okay so it wasn't exactly A1 since I had to cut off a strip or 2 so it would fit in the frame, but it was still the biggest piece I've ever done to this day.
I actually really like this piece a lot, and I'm pretty proud of it! Especially since I wasn't using any fancy art tools or paper. It was just standard A1 watercolour paper (that only cost about a dollar) and I mainly used IKEA's MÅLA watercolour set. I did use a bit of gouache for Sean's skin tone but it was the cheapest gouache set I could find at my local art supplies store (Art Friend).
I might've made Sean a little too dark, sadly. And I think the mountains could've been done better now that I look back at it, but it's still got a certain charm to it I think.
And this was us on our wedding day!
Well technically it wasn't much of a wedding in the traditional sense. It was just the ceremony and the signing of the marriage certificate but that's pretty much all we're gonna do anyway.
This me with my latest masterpiece. I'm sure you can tell I really like ombre colours a lot. 😅
All in all this piece took me about 8 sessions, each of which took from 2-4 hours.
These were my notes from the sessions:
- 3 jan: measurements + draft 1
- 7 jan: final draft + outline
- 9 jan: sketch on big paper
- 14 jan: outline on big paper, paint label, shirts, bears
- 16 jan: marker highlights for words, outline numbers, paint skin, hair, front mountains
- 19 jan: correct Sean's skin tone, hair shine, rest of mountains
- 22 jan: paint sky, outline, add dimples, lettering
- 24 jan: paint over Sean's dimples, thicker lettering
I'm so glad I managed to complete this with time to spare, and that it came out pretty much how I thought it would be. I was so tired by the end of it but so excited to debut it when 02/02 came. And now I'm so glad I'm finally sharing the behind-the-scenes! Now I can't wait for the day when it can finally be put up in our new living room.
I'm sorry this post ran on for so long! I was initially contemplating on splitting this into 2 posts but it didn't really make sense since it's not a compilation like last time.
Regardless, I hope you enjoyed this very personal art piece, and thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
