Hey! Wanted to have these two pieces out earlier this week, but life stuff kept getting in the way lately. Here they are though! I hope you like them. :)
The first piece here is another pretty quick one, revisiting one of the cultists again. Still enjoying her quite a bit. Hopefully you guys are too! It would maybe be fun to do a more elaborate piece with her sometime as well.
The second piece took a little bit longer to complete. I wanted to try doing a painting that didn't take super long, but that still had more environment details than the recent quick pieces have had. Sort of aiming for a middleground here between a quick painting and the ones I spend too much time on.I felt inspired to paint an elf cooling off in the heat. I guess I'm pining for the warm summer days over here, although I know those will end up being unpleasant too lol. I don't often try to paint displeased expressions because I avoid them when painting sexual scenes, so this piece was a nice opportunity to do something a little bit outside the usual in terms of expressions. Tried to capture that "annoyed by the heat" look.
Check out the rewards for these two paintings in the attachments here if you're interested!
Personally I'm particularly interested in the way the process of the second painting worked out. Once again I'm gonna mention how I like to use limitations as a way to force good habits, I hope you guys aren't tired of that yet. :) I've always used brushes with either opacity or flow controlled by pen pressure. However, this time I did a large part of the process with a brush that had those controls turned off. The brush basically leaves a fully opaque stroke.
It's the brush I would in the past have maybe considered one of the least comfortable to work with because of its lack of ability to blend colors. But it's a limitation that ends up forcing me to consider the color and shape of each mark I place much more carefully than I normally do. This kind of brush that forces me to have to pick a new color for each stroke naturally leads me towards painting surfaces that have more interesting color variety in them, as opposed to the more monochromatic surfaces I might get with brushes that blend easily. I love that about it.
I feel like the limitation of the brush is reframing how I think about the process of painting in a healthy way, and is helping me start to understand mark making techniques I didn't fully understand earlier. If you've been like me and relied a bit too much on brushes that can blend, maybe give it a try! I'm curious to know if you find those same benefits, and maybe other ones too!