PaperDemon New Years

In this post, I’ll share the main stages of a recent piece I finished, promotional art for the PaperDemon New Years Cross Over event.

Digital Art done in Photoshop.

This art has my original character, Jerle, flying on a Dracostryx named Flurry. This was my first time drawing a Dracostryx.

The jellyfish and stars are meant to be lanterns. Why jellyfish? Because that’s what I like to draw.

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Thumbnail sketches

I start as I usually do, doing a series of thumbnail sketches. My simple dracostryx looks pretty cute.

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Sketches

My process here is not out of the ordinary. I take my chosen thumbnail sketch, scale it to fit the canvas, drop the opacity, and draw on top on a new layer.

I then take that layer, drop opacity, and draw on top of that to do more and more refinement. You can see here the stars look perfect. That’s because I used the shape tool. The final line art is basically me tracing the stars with a pencil brush

Color Comp

Many of these look pretty similar. This is because I had an idea in my head of generally what colors I wanted but needed to experiment a little to narrow it down more. Typically when I do color comps, the options vary a lot more.

Finished piece and details

As you can see I ended up dropping the fireworks and added more layers of clouds. I felt the stars was already making the piece too busy and there were already too many different elements (the dracostryx, the star lanterns, the jellyfish lanterns).

A lot of the glow effects are achieved by using my brush on “screen” mode with a bright color. The rounded edge stars were done with a custom star brush.

Jerle flying on a dracostryx through a pink cloud filled sky with lanterns
Full finished piece
Detail

I really love the way that the subtle color changes turned out on the Dracostryx. That’s it for now. Bye bye o/

One Week Left Of My Internship

Life is good. Work is hard. It’s almost the end of summer and the end of my internship. This has been my first real experience with a real full time job. It feels great to be moving out of the school phase of my life and into the working phase but at the same time I feel a little depressed about it. Not because I’ll miss school. Far from it. I am getting sick of school! But I’ve found that having a full time job that mostly involves sitting on your butt in front of a computer all day can be quite draining. I’m often so tired by the end of the day that what free time I do have, I don’t want to spend on the computer. Which means my personal projects like ZMT and PaperDemon.com don’t get as much attention as they used to.

I still have one last year of school left. I will be working part time during the school year.

I can’t take on anything new. From now on, anyone who approaches me about any sort of project, whether it be a flash project, art request, website design, I will just have to say no. For the first time in my life I’m saying ‘no.’ I have this problem where I get really excited about projects and say ‘yes’ to every opportunity that comes at me, whether or not I have the time for it. Now I don’t even have as much time for the project that matters to me most, PaperDemon.com.

In other news, I’ve finally got my hands on some real music software. I bought Reason. I’m still trying to get the hang of it though. It’s not the most user-friendly program out there. But I’ve signed up for a workshop being held next weekend. So as soon as I get the hang of this program I can start posting more of my music.