Illustration #78 (Patreon)

Happy new year, everyone! I hope you've all had safe and relaxing holidays. :)

I took some extra time off to spend with family and stuff this December, so the illustration was done a few days later than usual, but here it is! I feel pretty good about the result, and I hope you're happy with it too. It's not often Maya and Luke both appear in the same picture for some reason, so this is sort of a rare one! The bathing theme is maybe a bit less rare, haha. I love it though.

As usual, you'll get a message from me on the 7th containing the download links for the reward pack.

When you get the reward pack you'll notice I took a very different approach with the workflow this time around. It's a workflow I've been wanting to try for a long time where I go a bit more heavily into the 3D tools. And, while a portion of you are probably already 3D experts, I can imagine some of you might not be super into this workflow because those tools are overwhelming, but I think it's still important to learn about its advantages and disadvantages when compared to a purely 2D workflow. So if 3D tools are too technically overwhelming for you like they used to be for me (and sometimes still are), watching me stumble through it instead of diving in yourself can maybe be a less frustrating way to learn a bit about it initially.

I've tried using some 3D modeling in my workflow a little bit in the past too, but this is the first time I've set up the whole picture in 3D before painting on top, and I will likely have to do it at least a few more times before I really get a sense for exactly how much I wanna use that approach in my workflow, but after this first time there are definitely some great things and some not so great things that I wanna try to keep in mind. 

There are very obvious advantages to setting up the scene in 3D, like getting perfect perspective and physically correct lighting. And I can try out different lighting, character poses, camera angles and reposition objects in a way I can't easily do in 2D. I can also very easily reuse assets between projects, which can save a lot of time. On the other hand, I think the most difficult thing about it for me right now, given my relatively low 3D proficiency, is maintaining the stylized form language I like best, especially considering I'm using character models from Daz3D which have a more generic visual style than I'm going for. It can be easy, if I'm not careful, to lose some of the charm I try to have in my form language when I don't fully know how to control it to the same extent that I can when drawing in 2D. That's something I think I'll get better at with time though. And even now I think it still turned out alright.

In future illustrations throughout this year I'll probably try out a few different variations of this workflow. So we'll see how that goes. I'm left with a positive impression of it so far. :)

Have a great start of the new year!