Hey guys, how’s it going?

Sooo today I wanna share a piece I made a while ago for a contest. I actually finished it a long time ago, but I never posted it hmmm because, idk, I had a bunch of stuff going on and just kinda forgot. 😅 You’ve probably seen the other pieces I did for the same contest, and this one was the final one hmmm yesss the closer.

(This piece was a NFt at Salvor, 1/1 was sold and then sold again on the secondary market.)

This one means a lot to me, not just because of how it turned out, but because it was honestly a huge challenge. Like, it’s not the kind of thing I usually do, not even close. So it pushed me waaay outta my comfort zone. NGL, it was super hard for me to work on. Not just technically, but also emotionally, ‘cause the theme behind it hit pretty deep. So yeah, this one's kinda special.

The contest had this rule where you could only use two colors Black and another (Blue for me). They did allow white or grey too, just to help a little . That part was tricky, but also kinda fun because it made me think differently.

I didn’t save a full step by step in images, because when I started working on it, I just jumped right in. Also had some tech issues and lost a few parts of the recording 😩 but I managed to save most of the video. Took some screenshots from that, so I’ll share those instead. Not perfect, but it works lol.

I did the drawing in Photoshop, just some loose lines and a really rough sketch but nothing too detailed. I didn’t care about it looking pretty, just needed something to work with. Later I lowered the opacity of the sketch and started drawing the clean lineart on top. That part took me forever... like seriously, NGL I think it took longer than coloring 😅 I’m not used to doing clean lineart, so it was kinda painful lol. But I kept going, tweaking details and adding more and more stuff until it started looking better.

Once the lines were done, I moved on to the fills. I used a lot of black since it was the main color. And then blue but I could only use it in one specific spot, otherwise it’d break the contest rules. So I picked this one character she’s like a ghost girl, or more like a memory, not really there and used the blue just on her. Tried to give her this translucent, fading vibe, like she’s slowly disappearing. That’s kinda the whole idea of the piece.

The main girl is all in black and white, and the other one hmmm the ghosty one has the blue details. I added some butterflies coming out of her and a music box, just to give her that mysterious, dreamy feel. Those little touches really pulled the whole thing together, and yeah, that was my color palette, all set.i