- First Snowfall - Art Process -

Instructions

Aha I haven’t posted here for a while XD I’ll give you a bit of content to hold you over for a little while :D Anyway, hello! Ava here :D This is a piece that I’m really proud of and I wanted to share, so I’ll walk you through the process in just a moment. But, I want to explain the meaning behind the piece. So, I’m sure a lot of you know that I have a current WIP story called The Lover’s Tail. But, what many of you don’t know is that there is going to be a prequel to that story called Док Богини Демонов, which Romanized (that means in the alphabet we use) is titled Doch Bogini Demonov. This story explains the backstory behind the main antagonist, Seraphina (the girl on the left). The boy on the right is named Kazimir, who is an important figure in the story. Now, while The Lover’s Tail takes place in a fictional town along the Jersey Shore, this story takes place in places in Siberia, a region in Russia, just to give you an idea ^^ Anyway, let’s begin! 1. Sketch. I usually sketch out scenes traditionally in a sketchbook, but I decided that I’d sketch digitally for once. As you can tell, Sera’s sketch was a bit messy so I had to clean it up a bit. 2. Line art. 3. Flat colors. 4. Shading. I hid the flats to make this a bit easier ^^ I like to do layered shading to give it a bit more depth since I like to cell shade. (Also it’s better to make your shadows colored, like a purple/brown/blue to give the image a bit of realism; shadows are never pure black IRL) 5. I hid the characters to work on the background. Since it’s snowing, I used the watercolor brush to create snow and then blurred it out. 6. Background again. I used the watercolor brush again to create a little evergreen tree, adding highlights and all. 7. I uncovered the layers to give of visual reference. But we’re not done yet! 8. Some snow effects! Obviously snow’s everywhere when it’s actually snowing outside, so we gotta add some effects :P 9. Highlights! 10. I decided to add a blue filter to give a nice, nighttime effects :) 11. The finishing touch, extra lighting effects. Rather than use a pure white, I opted to add a nice, soft yellow color with the watercolor brush on the lighting layer setting :) The warm lighting with the cool shadows is kinda nice to look at :D