Spitfire

I should really get working on getting my fanart collective page up and running huh?

This is finally a post of another recent piece, except this one isn't even a month old at the time of me writing this! Maybe it'll be a month old by the time I post it... I keep a backlog of posts at the moment, so every week or so, even if I don't feel like writing, I can get something up on the blog.

For this work I mainly experimented with how to draw fire and lighting from multiple sources. I didn't really focus on the rocky texture all that much...

My more primitive method of drawing fire

Some stuff that I haven't posted elsewhere though except to friends, some screenshots of me working on the piece. At first I was actually just going to draw fire the way I usually do, but ended up wanting to improve in that area, so I started to look up guides to drawing realistic fire.

Early stages of drawing fire

I learnt to start with a layer of the darkest parts of the fire, and slowly work up in brightness with more layers in Color Dodge. I don't know what color dodge actually does, but it looks a lot better than what I would have made without it. Another useful tip I picked up, was to make the pointy parts of the flames blurry, it better sells the illusion of movement.

Working out shading

The lineart is still there in the final work by the way, all I did in the end was blend it with the rest of the art. I like having my lineart remain in my works, (since I usually work without color,) since I feel like it really keeps me tethered to having one thing be consistent about my art, when everything else changes all the time.

Almost every part of the fire was drawn separately from each other, the arms and hands were separated groups, the body and wings are separated groups. Though this new method of fire cost me a lot of storage space, with the file easily going over 2GB with 108 layers. The drawing itself was also too big of a file to send on Discord without being compressed...

I'm glad to try improving my art, learning more specifically how to draw more realistic textures at the moment... I'm not sure if I favor this piece or the Jawbreaker piece, I don't feel like either are good enough to be honest.