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!
If you didn't catch the last couple of posts, I've recently been sharing my first couple attempt at digital art! Last week, I wrote about my inspiration and process behind my first official digital art piece - this cute little camper poster!
Since this piece, I was determined to get better at digital art and try out different apps. This time, I tried using Clip Studio Paint! I'd seen many advertisements for it on Youtube and I knew one of my favourite youtubers also uses it so I figured it was worth a shot.
Clip Studio is definitely miles apart from the free Adobe apps I used previously, and the UI is actually quite overwhelming so it took some time to get used to. So to get myself acquainted with it, I decided to work on another simple landscape piece. This time from one of my favourite games - Stardew Valley!
Source: iiNet Blog
If you're unfamiliar, Stardew Valley is an indie farming simulator game that was developed by a single talented guy; ConcernedApe! I love everything about Stardew Valley. The visuals are so adorable and well done, the art is beautiful, the gameplay is solid, and the music is phenomenal!
Anyway in the game, there are actual paintings that you can put up in your farmhouse! They're really quite beautiful and I think many people tend to overlook them unfortunately. But I did actually recreate one irl with watercolours quite some time ago!
Since it had been a while and I needed the practise, I thought I'd try to recreate another painting! This time, I chose a piece called Calico Falls that looks like this in-game:
Source: Stardew Valley Wiki
It seemed simple enough, but the main problem of recreating these paintings is translating the pixel graphics into something smooth.
Unfortunately I didn't take a screenshot of my sketch but you can see most of it here:
A definitely improvement over physical art is the dropper tool! It makes colour sourcing so easy and I never have to worry about not having the right shade ever again!
At first I tried to copy the graphic in-game as close as I could, just as an initial reference.
But when it came to the cave portion, I thought having some shadow and lighting effects would give it more definition, and I actually really like how it turned out!
Next I tried to give the water some dimension by blending in that blue-ish green that was also in the game's painting.
Then I tried blending the sand highlights to make it less obvious and more smooth.
It was a little tough getting the blending right though. But it was good practise so I could used to using layers and blending them together.
Lastly, I thought the sky was a little too bright so I dulled it a little bit.
I think the biggest challenges I had with this piece was definitely the blending and the waterfall. I had a hard time trying to make the waterfall not look so flat. I think I should've made the left sand dune longer to give it the depth so that you could see the flow of water from the back. Because even now it looks too flat. If I had drawn it longer it would've given the waterfall some perspective.
The blending was also a little shoddy, but I was still really new to blending so I think I get a pass on that one.
It might also be the app, but I think I can do a much better job now on Procreate. Maybe next time I'll redo this piece on that app and we'll see how it looks compared to this.
I posted this piece on reddit and got a ton of helpful comments from fellow artists in the Stardew subreddit! It's also such a joy to post my art there because the community is so wholesome (just like the game)!
I did like Clip Studio a lot though, because there wasn't really a limit on the number of layers you could have which is awesome! Definitely gonna be using it more for future pieces!
Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!