Statues of the Midnight Lights

It’s been a while since my last PaintLog. I just didn’t feel motivated enough in the last few week and whenever I tried, other obligations kicked in and well – if something that is supposed to be fun feels like duty … take a break.

This said, I was writing this PaintLog entry for around three weeks now, the artpieces that I’m sharing today are from the end of October. There are even more, but I will share them with you next time.

The main piece that occupied me three weeks of October was the entry to the Arcryla City Midnight Gala that took place some days before Halloween. As usual, our entries were supposed to be revealed during the showcase. It was a Halloween event with costumes and all.

However, I also finished the Inktober piece, keeping up adding prompts to the Heartbroken Goddess. Those were the prompts „Statue“ and „Light“.

Heartbroken Goddess: Statue + Light

With October Kalisamiii’s Inktober challenge came to an end. I already planted the statue part when drawing the goddess in the first place. I only added some cracks and the smaller statue inside the heart, telling the reason why she is heartbroken.

But this isn’t the end, because where’s light there’s hope:

Initilly, the rays weren’t planned but I figured, this way it makes a greater impression, showing what’s going on.

Demons, No Angels

The Arcryla City Midnight Gala again was a great spectacle. There were so many amazing entries.

We got our assignment, our „theme“ beforehand and weren’t supposed to tell anyone which costume our OCs got. To everybody’s surprise it turned out that everyone got the same costume: Demon.

Digital painting, comic style: Crissy (young woman, short purple hair, big round glasses) and Paula (young woman, short turqoise hair in sidecut) dressed as demons, bot seems floating above the ground and there are summoning circles and sparkles beneath their feet (Crissy's purple, Paula's green), where they meet, they complete each other; Crissy: smoke resembling dress, body skin all white with blue mystical letters along body parts, green lipstick, purple skirt and vest, eye-like cutouts at the hips and the nable, an amulett of a black one-eyed demon, she is holding a purple orb with wires connected to the rest of the costume, purple shining eyes, a black hat with one purple shining eye in the center; Paula: Body from toes to fingertips clad in a black and sparkling one-piece and a white jacket with several green shining eys and teeth a the rim, a boob window as additional eye, a green gleaming bow tie with an eye, a white tophat with teeth and one green gleaming eye, a cape formed like two purple wings, a green biforked tail, she's holding a stick with a hand that is grabbing the rim of the tophat, her eyes are colored green with a cat eyes' pupil, purple lipstick; one arm of each is crossed with the other's one, where they meet they together are building another summoning circle built of their respective colors; background: stairs with a red carpet and statues of man with tophat and a rose and a woman playing the lyra; a golden door at the top of the stairs, cogwheel gears; foreground: candles.

There is an additional sheet to my entry with a narrative text and a tiny doodle to explain how Crissy and Paula managed to create all those special effects you can see on the painting. This happens by the technical capabilities of the steampunk world they are living in. In some cases, like the colored contact lenses, I figured that contact lenses would’ve been around although they were made of glass and not that comfortable (but this wouldn’t have stopped them from wearing them). Moreover, the colored version only came into existence after the need for them arised by the movie industry. Still, this won’t stop Crissy and Paula either to ask one of the ingenius opticians of Arcryla City.

Text sheet with the narrative text: The blurred and faded painting with a small sketch of the costume in the right bottom corner, text: ""Our assignments arrived today, Sweetie." Crissy had been a little bit reluctant to RSVP the invitation to the Midnight Gala. She still wasn't keen on attending big social events and last time Paula had talked her into doing so, she didn't show up. Well, Paula hasn't been her girlfriend back then. So, Crissy figured, expectations had been way too high on her side. Now it was different. Now they were a couple, now they were heading into the couples costume stuff. "And I already have a greeeat idea! - Can you do this?" "Well, I'll need one and a half dozen dynamos, small ones, a lot of wires, some pipes, hoses, two orbs, one big, one small, tiny light bulbs, electro-luminescent liquids, oh, and liquid electrolytes, of course, two pairs of those coloured contact lenses, transparent footwear should do the hovering trick ... But it could get expensive." "Don't worry about that - I'll handle it.""

If you look close, you will see several popcultural references from TV shows and video games and of course there are the little statues of the Arcryla City’s Mayor Alexander and Lynette, his assistant.

Last but not least: The Gala also was a drawing contest and guess what? My painting was one of the two winner paintings!!

I was so happy when this was announced!

There even was a price: I could choose one of my OCs to be drawn as an emote for the Discord server (and for any other purpose I’d like to use it for). When I got sent it to me, I will share it here too in my next PaintLog!

The Dragon Flower of Milk and Honey

Heartbroken Goddess: White Flower

Heartbroken Goddess: Dragon Skull

Arrivals:
Milk & Honey

It’s been a while since my last PaintLog. I just didn’t feel motivated enough in the last week and whenever I tried, other obligations kicked in and well – if something that is supposed to be fun feels like duty … take a break.

Tbh, there wasn’t a lot of art so far in October. Not that I was able to share, I mean. The past three weeks I was working on an entry to the Arcryla City Midnight Gala that takes place next Friday evening / Saturday morning. As usual, our entries are supposed to be revealed during the showcase. It’s going to be a Halloween event with costumes and all. So stay tuned!

What I was able to share were the second and third Inktober piece, keeping up adding prompts to the Heartbroken Goddess. As mentioned before, I was working on the Halloween piece and after finishing this, I just wanted to do some low-key just for fun piece. Therefore, I again went back to Eusthy.

However, I will not do an elaborated description and explanations into the drawing process of these pieces this time, but I’ll leave it with short thoughts and comments.

Heartbroken Goddess:
White Flower + Dragon Skull

The continuation of Kalisamiii’s Inktober challenge. As mentioned before, I added the next two prompts.

While the Flower actually was a new-drawn piece, I already prepared the Dragon Skull when creating the basic painting. Admittedly, I was a little bit lazy and it perhaps wasn’t the initial purpose of the prompt, but I still was tempted to try it this way.

Arrivals:
Milk & Honey

This Arrivals comic was actually one of the first I came up with. Originally, I intended to make it the second episode, but somehow, the other attempts to crawl onto land were fitting better into order.

Meet Silvie the silverfish-like apterygota (again). This time, she got a bigger role. Most fun, of course, was to think of the plot twist with the point in the end.

The Goddess Next Door

Digital painting made with an ink brush in dark blueish black and light colours: A young woman holding a heart with a darkened area inside in front of herself; she has white short hair, framing her face, the head is lowered, the eyes are closed, tears can be seen; no visible clothes but the heart and the hand covering her breast and shadows around her covering arms and lower body, tiny gleaming stars in the darkness and in the foreground.

Neighbours – Heartbroken Goddess: Love

October has arrived and with it several Inktober challenges. Ever since I started digital drawing seriously, I participated. Last year I did the Linktober challenge and I thought to take part again this year. However, I was without inspiration, I wasn’t in the mood and I probably won’t have the time to do daily drawings, so I skipped.

Instead I found inspiration in another (a weekly challenge) that I will present you below.

Before doing this, you also will find episode 2 of my primeval fish comic, this time dealing with its neighbours – and some old friends.

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.