AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHhh!!!!!

thanks for listening to my rant about art!

So... I hope you liked the process as much as I did, apologies, for not being able to show any WIPs >w<
Either way here's the finished drawing!!

...

or not....

oh good lord, sometimes I wish I didn't have as much to say about my art as I do....
>>jealous glances at the people that say two sentences and then slap the pic in there<<
but hey! Here we go.... I sadly won't be able to write all that much, and I do have a lot of chapters in progress, school just absolutely is killing me at the moment and I'm boarding again, so there ain't a lot of free time folks! Am also writing this between classes, so I have like... 40 minutes for this, before I gotta go, but this drawing has been finished for 4 days now and the deadline is slowly approaching ^-^"

Either way, this time I participated in a challenge organised by MicaAppatossis where one person draws a lineart and a second person get's to colour it. You then have a piece created by two artists, and then the teams participate agains each other.

So my partner was the UNBELIEVABLY talented trademark37 .... holy guacamoly....
We sat down together and thought about a topic or general theme for the drawing and we both decided on a male person and... uh... then they went ahead and sketched something, sent it over via mail, I fell in love, so they lined it, and I then sat in front of this beauty:

SUPER HELLA FREAKING AWESOME, RIGHT?!

My first instinct was to go with a lot of browns, greens, golds and make that necklace the main focal point, maybe bullshitting a forest in the background or something... I had the character and horse coloured in, until I decided to start working on the background.... and holy guacamoly....

I went ham, and ended up throwing my original idea out of the window, since the background and cloak just gave me the perfect vibe to do something inspired by those Dragon Age tarot cards.... so I had fun and ended up having these flats:

I then went ahead and added some textures, overlays and gradients on top, to see if I can get the tones to harmonize in the end, making the "actual" flats look like this:

Turning off the gradients and so on, I started by shading the hair (a pain honestly, since my shading style is super dependant on my sketch beneath... and as you can see in the flats, I had to go ahead and add some sort of guides for me to know what's where).
I then went on to the skin, aiming for a rather dead, mystical look, being very much inspired by a skintone experiment I made sometime last year over a drawing of Bronadan:

Sadly the shading, overlays and everything took that creepy vibe away ad we ended up withsomething, that does indeed look rather natural >w<

I then went to the cloak, adding some patterns, gradients, and only minimal shading, because.... reasons... it just looked prettier that way, okay?

And then I did the metal, nothing all too special, just did it as I always doo, together with the belt, trousers and at the end that shirt.
After finishing up the clothing, it all looked a bit very empty, so I created a luminosity layer and put some fancy extra details on there, to just give the thing some more glowy, ethereal details.

And with that, the character was done :D

I then continued to the dreaded horse.... gosh, I didn't draw or colour a horse in years, so I was pretty darn afraid, even though it turned out a lot easier than anticipated (probably because the lineart was so good... without those lines I would've died about five times, tbh).

Goal was to make the horse look nearly hauted, so I made the eye glow, as well as some parts of it's fur, also including some fancy, abstract circles, that tied in with the background.

Not all too much left to say for me over here, especially liked rendering the metal and leather on this one as well, because it's so many small details >w<

>>slaps final in the chapter<<

OOF.... that was a speedrun of a chapter... but then again, I only had to talk a bit about the colouring process, and don't have one of my OCs in the image, for me to ramble on for years about their history and so on...

Hope you don't mind the length, I have like... 6 chapters (actually 7 but the 7th can only be uploaded sometime later) in process and am constantly doodling more stuff (boarding school means sketchbook time, folks >>fingerguns<<), so be prepared for a storm on updates as soon as the holidays come along next week.

So farewell my friends, I gotta go read up on bio again before out lesson starts and maybe even shove some german in that small timeframe ^-^

>>cuddles you, shows you where blankets, cookies and tea are stored, before running off to study<<