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!
Time for yet another Stardew Valley piece! I guess I was on a real Stardew kick at the time since it was at the start of quarantine. I was also quite unsatisfied with the last piece I did since it didn't come out quite like how I had imagined/hoped. So I decided to try again but with a different style.
Just in case you missed last week's post, here's the backstory.
A few weeks after quarantine started, my friends and I started this crazy 6 player farm in Stardew Valley. Now normally the multiplayer in Stardew only allows up to 4 players but we managed to find and install a mod that allows more than 4 players on the farm! And we were really surprised at how well it worked! Granted it was kinda laggy for some of us since we were all in different countries. 2 of us were located in Singapore, 2 in Malaysia and 2 in Finland. So it did get kinda laggy for our Finland friends but it still worked pretty well regardless.
And needless to say, a lot of shenanigans happened.
Like me getting one of the rarest drops from fishing in Summer Year 1, you know, nbd. 😎
But anyway, it was a ton of fun and I wanted to immortalise those memories with a painting of the 6 of us, which culminated into the painting I shared last week.
It didn't turn out as well as I had hoped so I wanted to do another simpler one with a cutesey style instead of trying to make us look like actual people. And then I came across saw this cute fanart of Animal Crossing New Horizons!
Source: pinterest
I thought the style was so cute and the girl's hair is actually pretty similar to mine in length and style so I thought it would be cool to emulate it for my new piece.
But first, I had to come up with a scene first. Instead of the farm, this time I wanted to paint us fishing together in the ocean. Since we spent a hecc of a lot of time fishing (it's the easiest way to earn money quickly early game), it seemed only fitting.
I initially wanted to draw us fishing at the big rock in the ocean which is a hotspot for quick fish to catch, but figured it wouldn't look good on paper since the rock would be in the way. So I decided to draw us sitting at the end of the dock fishing. Sorta like this I suppose.
Source: Alarmy
But then the next problem was the perspective. It was practically impossible to find any picture online for a view of the dock from the ocean since all the pictures I could find was from the dock to the ocean, like this:
Source: pinterest
But I needed it to be the opposite way which was impossible. I tried my best to draw it from my imagination of what it would look like but I couldn't get the proportions right. Thankfully, I managed to find this super helpful video that was exactly what I needed:
Mr Mayberry was so helpful with his step-by-step instructions. I just followed his tutorial to a T and it actually turned out great! I then drew the 4 of us (the OG crew) sitting on the dock, but then it looked like I drew the dock too small. So unfortunately I had to redo the whole thing.
I later drafted out on a piece of rough paper first before actually drawing it in my sketchbook, just to make sure the lengths were okay. It took quite a lot of measuring, erasing and drawing lines but after a while, I got the right size I needed. Ah the woes of physical art. If this was digital I would've saved a lot of time by just re-scaling it. Ah well.
Finally, this was my final sketch. I went with my own outfits this time just to make them different especially since I wanted them to wear different colours.
Time to get outlining! I only wanted us and the dock to have bold lines and the rest to just be only watercolour so it would look more scenic.
Time to get colouring! Since I used a thin marker that was prone to smudging if I put too much water near it I knew I had to be very careful using watercolours. So I used markers for as much as I could, especially for our clothes.
I didn't have the right marker for our skin though so I carefully painted that in along with our hair with my watercolour set.
Once that was done, I drew in our faces and started painting the background. Unfortunately I only had 2 types of brown and since I was using the lighter brown for the sand, I had no choice but to use the dark brown for the dock, which was the same colour as our hair. I thought it would clash so I lightened our hair as much as I could. I think it wasn't too bad.
I tried my best to use watercolour techniques to create an ombre look for the ocean but my cheap watercolours might have compromised it a bit. I think it still looked alright though.
Next was painting in the palm trees in the background. I was kinda unsure of the style but I wanted it to be simple since those are in the background.
Then I realise the sky blended in too well with the sand so I added some red and pink to make it look more like a sunset. But I think I might've used too much water and the paper was getting flaky.
I tried my best to fix that weird patch and eventually I settled for this.
Overall, I really like this piece! Definitely a lot more than the previous one. It's simple, it's cute, it's colourful, and was actually pretty easy to draw and paint, despite a few hiccups here and there. After the overly complicated previous piece this was definitely a sweet relief. And it came out even better than I thought it would be. And I'm glad the guys liked it too.
I thought our characters looked really cute as well! This is definitely a style I wouldn't mind doing again.
Sorry for the Stardew art spam these past couple of weeks. Next week; something totally different, I promise!
Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
