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 continuing on from the last couple of posts when I started writing about my art streams that I've been doing on Twitch, we have another art piece I did on-stream that to be honest took quite a long time because of how detailed my idea was.
For context, I started streaming Genshin Impact in Feb 2021 and have been ever since, but with different games thrown in here and there. If you're unfamiliar with Genshin Impact, it's an action role-playing game developed by miHoYo, and first published in 2020. The game features an anime-style open-world environment and an action-based battle system using elemental magic and character-switching. (Source: Wiki)
Source: gearopen
For a free to play game, it has stunning visuals and a stellar soundtrack so I was hooked instantly. I wasn't too familiar with the gacha mechanics since it's my first gacha game but my chat helped me figure it out. Anyway there was a quest in Genshin that I was stuck on for quite a while because of the vague clues that the game was giving me. Here's what happened:
But TL;DR, I was going around in circles for about 20 minutes finding a dead man's treasure and had to read a book in a broken house to lead me to where I had to go.. My regulars in chat were making fun of me the whole time and sean188888 finally made a deal with me that he would give me a legit hint but I would have to draw Boreas (the wolf boss in Genshin).
I was so done with the quest after 15 minutes of running around so I finally gave in and took his deal, so I had to draw Boreas/Andrius, the intimidating wolf boss who looks like this:
My first time fighting with him as part of the main story line was quite an experience, and of course my chat loved it so much so I decided to immortalise the moment in this art piece since I had to draw him anyway.
Initially I wanted to have Boreas in the foreground and my character, Razor, facing the camera with a scared face, but I couldn't get it to look right and since it was just easier to trace Boreas given his complex model I chose to have him front and center instead. I think this was my progress by the end of the fourth art stream:
The characters in the back are my OG followers, flynn and sean, personified as their favourite Genshin characters. And of course I had the ever sadistic sean have an evil face while flynn who has my back, have a scared face since he was worried for me.
It took quite a bit of referencing to get the arena to look alright too, and I decided on a chibi model for Razor in the end as well. I also added in the Wei, which is a special enemy you can farm for achievements. We used to farm him together everyday at the start of the stream.
The fun part was definitely colouring Boreas; since I didn't have to worry about sketching him, he became a lot easier to draw. The character outfits were actually tougher even though they're small because their models are very detailed in-game. But the toughest challenge was definitely figuring out how I was going to draw the arena, because I had to put some textures in the back wall.
I took a short hiatus from art after I started this piece on-stream, and after a few weeks, I decided to sit down and finally finish this off-stream. I was kinda iffy on the lines in the arena, and I probably should've blurred it a little bit, but I didn't know about the Gaussian blur function back then. The light pen was really good to use on Boreas though, and the fog, shadows and lighting really worked well if I do say so myself!
I really liked how this piece turned out and I'm so glad my followers liked it too! Flynn and Sean both said they loved it, which I was very thankful for! Here's the timelapse:
Thanks so much for reading! My art streams are typically on Tuesdays starting at 10pm (GMT+8) on my Twitch channel! Come by and play some art games with us if you're interested!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
