Art Mad-Lib Project
"I am going to create 3 digitally drawn works of design/art using Clip Studio Paint on my Laptop."
PROJECT ONE: FAST AND FISHIOUS
"One piece is going to have racing fish using cars at the beach."
To begin the piece, I laid out a very rough composition using the Hatching Pencil brush I downloaded from the Clip Studio Paint asset store. I used two pictures of cars to very simply lay out the perspective I was going for with the cars, though the cars ended up being convertibles to show off the fish.
Next, I used the poly-lasso tool to lay out the color scheme. I filled in the hills, roads, and clouds with my Cel-Shading Brush downloaded from the Clip Studio Paint asset store. Unless specified, I used this brush for all my fills throughout these three pieces. And to do the road marks, I used a downloaded Dashed Lines brush, and erased some parts of the lines to better fit them in perspective.
Once more using the lasso tool, I created some palm trees to fill in the composition and added a sunset gradient to both the sun and the full piece. The gradient was from the Sky Colors gradient set downloaded from the Clip Studio Paint asset store. And to add texture from the piece, I took a royalty free texture titled "Pastel Overlay" from Max Ulichney's Paper Max Pack and converted it into a brush for this project. Laying it over the piece, I set the layer to linear light so it gave a nice grain to the piece.
To add in shadows for the trees, I copied and pasted the trees, set them to a multiply layer, and rotated them across the road. Furthermore, I turned up the sunset gradient and added simple foreground to transparent gradients to the hills for more proper lighting. And next I added in the background car. For the most part I used the lasso tool and the Cel-Shading brush, but for some of the finer details, I went in with the Hatching Pencil brush I mentioned previously. Afterwards, I used the Cel-Shading brush to fill in a simple shadow below the background car.
The most difficult part of this piece was the front car. I'm not very well versed in drawing cars as is, and since these cars weren't intended to be very realistic, it was hard to dig up good references. In the end, I took most of my car references from the game "Crazy Taxi" since I thought the car matched the shape I was going for and the gameplay matched the fun, reckless style of the piece. All that was added from the last picture to this one was a rough sketch of the front car with some of the colors filled in, mostly using the lasso tool. I removed the left tree's shadow too since it was going to eventually go on the hood of the car.
And here's the finished piece! I obviously changed a lot of the shapes in the front car, making it more boxy so it fit the perspective of the road and matched more of the Crazy Taxi references. Along with that, I added in headlights on the front and back cars using an Overlay layer and the poly-lasso tool to make the drawing seem as if it was taking place at night. Then I fixed the shadow of the tree to actually work with the lighting and the car. And to finish the piece off, I needed to add in the fish driving the cars but didn't want to stray too far from the orange-pink color scheme. So what better fish than blobfish? I was initially going to add more fish tagging along, but I honestly just got tired and needed to move on to the next two pieces, so I left it as is with the two fish racing one another. But I genuinely am really proud of how this piece turned out! It's very fun and I loved every minute of working on it.
PROJECT TWO: TEA AND QUACKERS
"While another is going to have ducks wearing costumes in the spring."
I got inspired to do this piece by some images I saw floating around of ducks wearing fancy clothes at the Sydney Duck Fashion Show. So I wanted to draw some fancy ducks having teatime! Laying out the composition in desaturated purple, I used a brush I downloaded from the Clip Studio Paint asset store that I just have labelled "Paint." I wanted it to be somewhat symmetrical to seem fancy, but I didn't want to use the symmetry tool because I personally believe too much symmetry can make a piece look boring.
I got a lot of progress in in a day since I worked a long time on it the day I started it, so I unfortunately don't have as many progress pictures to share, but I still wanted to talk through my progress. Using the poly-lasso tool and selecting colors from a reference image of a duck at the fashion show, I filled in a basic costume design matching my sketch. Filling in the shapes in the background, I used the Cel-Shading brush for the clouds and grass, but for the bushes, I used a gouache brush from a set I downloaded from the Clip Studio Paint asset store to give it a more textured feel. I then used the same brush set to transparent to erase stray lines and make the bushes feel more trimmed. I added in some foreground to transparent gradients too to emphasize the coolness of the greens. For the sky, I used another gradient from the Sky Colors set mentioned previously. To make the setting feel like spring, I wanted to add in some simple flowers. So color picking from the bushes, I used the Hatching Pencil to add in the lines and a nice shade of pink with a downloaded airbrush to give the flowers a soft feel. I used the same Hatching Pencil for the single table line. And lastly I used the same Pastel Overlay brush as before with a linear light layer to give it more texture.
To add some more texture to the piece, I used the hatching pencil to add some quick lines to the grass. I used the previous airbrush to fill in some shadows on the grass too. I then used the hatching pencil to both finish the table and add in some leaves on the bush, which were then copied and pasted across both bushes. To solidify the color scheme more, I changed the duck on the right's color scheme to a more pinkish color and smoothed out some of the lines to make the shapes look better. I then added some more of the airbrush to the top of the duck's head and to the ruffles to make it look softer. I did the same to the duck on the left, but to its wing instead of ruffles.
And here's the finished piece! For the final stretch, I added in the teacups for the ducks, threw in some more airbrush, added in a few color overlays of blue and pink to make the color scheme more solidified again, and for a finishing touch, I gave both of the ducks eyelashes because I wanted to make the ducks girlfriends and nobody can stop me. Once again I loved making this piece, specifically playing around with the soft colors and textures, and I want to do more pieces like this. Maybe Hallmark cards or something. Who knows!
PROJECT THREE: FURRY FRIEND
"My last piece is going to feature a hairy monster carrying a girl by a campsite."
And here's the start of the final piece! Initially I wanted to have bigfoot being seen from afar with the view of a campfire in the midground, but in the end I wanted to do more of a simple perspective, so I left the campsite to the imagination and instead put them in a regular old forest. I'm going to pray that you're fine with this since the piece turned out good.
For my previous pieces I had mostly used the lasso tool and the Cel-Shading brush to do most of my shapes myself, but this time I wanted to use some actual foliage brushes to set the scene. So for the grass I used the Centipede Grass brush I downloaded from a grass set in the Clip Studio Paint asset store in different colors to give it a sense of depth. And for the bush, I used the Tree Foliage brush downloaded from the asset store in three different colors. The green in the background was simply filled in with the fill tool to help set the color scheme.
To fill in the rest of the composition, I decided to add in some trees with some nice dark blues to give the piece some coolness. Using the rectangle selection tool, I filled in the trees with dark blue, and to add some texture, I used a Wood Texture brush downloaded from the Clip Studio Paint asset store. To add in a few shadows and highlights, I used the downloaded airbrush set to multiply and overlay on the bottoms of the trees, the bush, and the grass. And to add some depth once more, I used the airbrush combined with some foreground to transparent gradients to fill in the once solid green background.
Now it's time for Bigfoot! After adding in the Pastel Overlay texture brush on linear light like before, I was ready to draw the beast himself. Using the lasso tool, I filled in his general torso shape, adding in some little circles for his face. Continuing on to the legs, I used the lasso for that too, trimming off bits here and there to make the legs look more flimsy and cute. To make his arm stand out from the rest of his body, I made it a separate layer and put gradients on it so that it was lighter near the top and darker near the bottom. And after adding in the hand and details on the face using the Hatching Pencil tool, I added the finishing touches of fur by making a bunch of tiny selections with the lasso tool and filling them in with the Hatching Pencil.
And here's the finished piece! To add some finishing touched to Bigfoot, I threw in another linear light layer with texture to make him seem more fuzzy and I added in some lasso tool triangles on his fur too. Afterwards, I used a color balance layer to bring out the redness in his fur to contrast with the greens of the piece. Before adding the girl, I threw in some more trees into the background and added poly-lasso branches and leaves on the further away ones to create the illusion of perspective. I added to this with the addition of some further away bushes in light blue. Then it was finally time to add the girl in! I wanted to stick with the general color scheme of the piece, so I made her a redhead and gave her blue clothes to match. It was initially difficult to draw her because I didn't know what proportions to give her, but in the end I settled with a relatively caricatured look, with incredibly thin limbs and a large head to match the feel of Bigfoot. Compared to her relatively simple body though, I made her hair more ratty and gave it some leaves to imply that she was exploring the woods and somehow got lost. I wanted the atmosphere to feel calm and friendly, so I didn't want her to be too hurt, but I wanted to make it feel like Bigfoot was a helpful and friendly fellow. So that's how that turned out. To finish off the piece, I added some more linear light texture to the girl too, threw on a color balance adjustment layer to the whole piece to make the colors pop more, and then I was done! Honestly, although I finished this piece the fastest out of these three, this was definitely the most fun because of the colors I got to work with and the fun brushes I used. It's fun to make my own shapes, but experimenting with those foliage brushes helped me create an environment that turned out really lively.
