The Goddess Next Door

Neighbours

Last week I started the Arrivals comic series. Right from the beginning I had some comic ideas in my mind (and I still have). The initial ideas often sounded funnier in my head than the actual carrying out.

Not only that I had to find different words for „neighbours“, „friend“, „fellows“ etc., originally the comic lacked a real final punch line. There even wasn’t Lil’Scor raspberrying on the table in this point of time and Eusthy just would say something like „Perhaps I should crawl back into the sea“.

Then the picture of the extra panel popped up in my mind. Because Eusthy’s mood didn’t get damped until panel 4, I had to draw a panel different to the one originally intended to get him crawl back into the sea.

Enter Eusthwo:

If you look close, you also will see that I now added the names of my animal protagonists and as for the sea creatures … all but for the guy in the right bottom corner were in my mind right from the beginning. Initially I thought of some kind of big jellyfish, but I wanted to have something typical devonian.

Therefore, I roamed paintings of the devonian seas. Since I already draw a fish, I didn’t want to draw another one like an early shark, but finally, I found those … devonian sea things with those petal like arms and included it into the comic.

Heartbroken Goddess: Love

As explained above, this year I got inspired by a weekly Inktober challenge. This year it’s Kalisamiii’s Heartbroken Goddess prompt list.

So far I did the „basis“ painting with this week’s prompt „Love“. I plan to add the other prompts in the course of the next week, so the painting will change step by step.

As usual, I drew the inktober painting with „inky“ brushes and in inky colours. This time, I started with a blue tone. After „finishing“ the heart, I did the outlines of the hands but then switched to the body (body, head + hair) of the goddess herself.

Because I only had a vague image of her in my mind, I started with my usual non-inky brushes to get the lines right. Only when those seemed right, I started the inky brush on a new layer. Initially, I imagined her pose / the perspective a little bit different but the good thing with something this new, I can adjust it as I go along and this way I liked it even better.

I drew the heart with a hatching and as I now started „colouring“ the body and the head, I wanted to do likewise, but processing showed that the hatching would be too rough. However, I noticed two things. About the first one I will tell you in a few weeks (it has something to do with one of the other prompts), the second thing was the colour of the hair. Originally, I planned her to be dark haired but then I noticed how well the white hair suits her.

Finally, as I went to render her, I switched from the initial blue to a bluish black tone. Furthermore, I changed the center of the heart to black, indicating the broken and therefore darkened heart.

Before I could colour in the hands, I had to draw their lines anew. I resized them to better fit to the body and I mirrored the right hand before drawing the body to get be able to adjust it correctly. Now I had to fix this so they would look naturally.

Regarding the arms, I admittedly cheated a little bit. Since I planned to get them hidden in the shadows, I went lazy and didn’t do them at all. Apropos shadows, the stars in them were another last-minute idea and even more to put some of them into the foreground with a more intense blur than the ones in the rest of the shadows.