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 missed the last post, I just finished writing about one of the biggest art pieces/presents I've ever done! It was for my biggest supporter ever - Sean of course! He's very into DDR, neon retro arcades and the vapourwave aesthetic, which gave me an idea to draw this crazy piece for him as a New Years' gift at the end of 2020!
This was after an insane string of art presents, and my Christmas Countdown Challenge so what better way to send off my Clip Studio Paint trial than with a crazy detailed piece for Sean?
But anyway, after that I was pretty exhausted with art and wanted to take a break for a while. But one of my friends had a birthday coming up and she's also one of my close girl friends featured in the Christmas piece I wrote about recently!
Her name is Kai, and she's been telling us during our weekly cooking sessions about how she started keeping a journal to reflect and keep track of things she's learnt and how her mood is every week. It enables her to take stock of her daily life and really focus on the things that matter to her. It's actually pretty inspirational; and takes quite a commitment which I admire since I know how busy she can be everyday.
Anyway, she also told us about how she's been gardening at the farm she runs! We've actually even enjoyed quite a few harvests during our cooking sessions! And then she talked about starting a special garden journal to keep notes on the different plants she's growing, since each plant species has different requirements and such.
So naturally I thought of making one for her as a birthday gift (since her birthday was coming up)! And I had the perfect idea of making a Stardew Valley-themed one for her since both of us love that game!
Source: learningworksforkids
If you've kept up with my blog you'd know that Stardew Valley is one of my favourite games of all time! It's a charming little farming simulator with pixel graphics that are so well done and an amazing soundtrack to boot! It's just a very relaxing game and the time just flies every time I play this game.
Anyway, back to the garden journal. I already had a couple of unopened notebooks lying around, so I thought of making a customised book jacket for Kai! Since I wanted to return to physical art after such a long hiatus doing digital, I thought this project was perfect!
I don't remember the last time I made a book jacket, but it must've been back in elementary school many many years ago or something. So I had to make a test one first to check the dimensions and whatnot. And this was my sketch:
I wanted to model it after the Stardew Valley Guidebook, which i thought had such a beautiful cover! Neither of us actually own this book though, despite having hundreds of hours playtime on Stardew Valley.
Source: Amazon
After I was somewhat confident of the dimensions, I got to work on sketching on the actual book jacket I'd be giving her:
Then outlining:
For the back of the book, I wanted to make it look like those novels with a picture of the author with their bio at the back. So I tried my best to draw Kai in the Stardew Valley portrait style.
To be fair I have done it before, when I decided to paint her for a lockdown care package gift of sorts:
But it had been a while since then and I was pretty rusty after a few months of doing digital art. But I tried my best to draw her the same way again. Then it was time to paint! I used watercolours for this since I don't have any other paints. Also the only paper I had that was big enough was my drawing block which wasn't very paint-friendly, unfortunately. But we work with what we got.
Unfortunately I creased the paper while erasing my sketch lines and I was so disappointed. But I tried my best to fix it and it was futile.. sadly.
But after painting in the background, we get this! Which I thought looked pretty alright. I did end up smudging a little bit of the buildings in the back since I used my thin non-waterproof marker on those though.
After adding in a couple more details, I tried fitting the book jacket around the outside of the notebook, and I cut out the slot for the rubber band. It was a little off though, but I couldn't really do anything about it at that point since there was a pencil line that would was impossible to erase now that I had painted over it.
Either way, I had written up a short bio for her which actually turned out longer than I anticipated. Sorry for my bad handwriting.
But what's done is done I guess! This was what the cover looked like!
And this was the back!
I was planning on gifting it to her on her actual birthday which wouldn't have been for another month, but then I figured I could just give it to her earlier so she could start using it! And I'm so glad she loved it!
She was using an old notebook temporarily and was waiting to get a nice one so this was just perfect!
I was so relieved she loved it and it's always such a delight seeing someone be happy with my art! And it'll actually be useful this time! I did tell her to get the book wrapped up in plastic though so the cover wouldn't get ruined and she agreed. She said she definitely wanted to preserve it.
It had been quite a while since I'd done physical art, and this being the first one after such a long break and my first piece in 2021 was quite a feat. I'm just so glad she liked it, and it definitely gave me more impetus to practise more physical art for sure!
Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
