Lucy enjoying nature behind the scenes (Patreon)

For this one I got hugely inspired by this promo piece that FoxPOP did for his BlueSky account. :D https://twitter.com/F0XnR0LL/status/1681816591443394561

I had a rough Idea of how I wanted the background and pose of the character to look like, but because I didn't have any good reference of a girl sitting cross legged I did a quick 3D mockup in DAZ 3D. You can actually do real ray-trace renders in DAZ but I usually only care about the proportions of the model so I just take a screenshot in most cases.

After I did the linework of the character and went to do the background I ran into some issues. The resolution of the canvas is almost 10k pixels vertically, which means that with Krita's max brush size of 1k pixels it would be a hassle to lay down all the big shapes. Also working with a 1K brush is usually very resource intensive and slow.
I solved this riddle by taking the proportions of the canvas and scaling it down like you see in the image. So I basically did a block in of shapes on a miniature version of the canvas. :D
I don't have that much nature and cloud reference photos so I took what I could grab and did some color picking for the gradient of the sky (I know color picking bad :S ) and then roughly painted in the clouds, small trees and the landscape.
After that stage I just took all the background layers I painted and scaled them up to full size again. Then I added more details, tufts of grass around the horizon, in the foreground and where Lucy is sitting.

After I finished shading Lucy I scaled her down a bit as well to make the landscape and clouds look more imposing. :>

So yes, this piece was lots of scaling. :S