Hey, community! how's it going?

I just wanted to drop by and tell you about a piece I made recently. Well, more like a week ago IDK time flies. This artwork came out of a collaboration with a user on X. The idea was super interesting: he shared a physical piece made of wood and invited others to interpret it however they wanted and create something new from it. That’s how this digital drawing was born.

I worked on it in Corel Painter hmmm you already know I love that program. Not a paid promo (I wish 😅), but I’ll hype it up for free because I love how it handles textures. Honestly, it keeps that “traditional media” feel that sometimes gets lost in digital work. Later, I brought it into Photoshop just for some lighting tweaks and that was it. Almost everything was done on a single layer, like I always do. I know, it sounds chaotic, but it helps the process feel more natural to me.

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Here’s the original piece.

Gma5lhBa8AUyjn2 (1).jpg

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As for the concept... I had two ideas in mind, but I went with this one. The key phrase that inspired me was: "I’ll hold you even in the storm." I thought it was symbolically beautiful. I didn’t want to go too literal hmmmm like a person hugging a boat or something. I preferred to keep it subtle, more symbolic, so the viewer has to pause for a moment to really take it in.

This was actually my first time participating in a collab like this, and it was a fun (though slightly frustrating) experience. There were a bunch of power outages (a normal day, you know 🤯), and one of them made me lose the whole file. It was such a bummer because I already had a version I really loved. So yeah, I had to start over and redo everything from scratch. In the end, though, I think it was worth it.

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I don’t have a step by step this time (sorry 😬😬), but I did record a process video and it’s posted on X in case you want to check it out. I even pinned it to my profile to make it easier to find.

But here you can see a screenshot of the quick idea I created of what I had visualized in the piece. I made a lot of crazy lines in the original image itself, so I had a sort of rough sketch to work from. As I mentioned, it's more comfortable for me to work this way in a single layer. Although the idea did change a few times as I progressed with the piece.

Details.

In this piece, I've placed several elements, and here you can see some of the main ones I randomly selected.
Some details in the water, the boat, the face, and so on.
As I mentioned, I didn't want to lose all of the texture of the original piece, so I tried to be as delicate as possible, also using several brushes, which also added a bit of additional texture, which is what I was really trying to achieve.

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This piece is a limited edition NFT 11 copies. It’s listed at 9.99XTZ. It cracks me up that now there are 9 left at 9.99 Just repeating numbers lol.

Anyway, thanks for reading this far. If you’re interested, I’ll drop the direct link to the piece. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed creating it.