Hey Hive!
We're back again with another Art Attack! If you're new to the series, this is where I share my drawings and the process behind them. A behind-the-scenes look at my artwork, if you will. This is not to say that I'm very good at art, or that I'm a professional in any way. In fact this is the opposite, and serves as a reminder to how I first started, and lets me track my progress too!
So back in September 2020, I started working on a special art piece for one of my good bros, Dean! His birthday was coming up on 8 October so I started working on it a month prior since I had some pretty big ideas.
Source: Playstation Store
The basic premise for this piece was that it was Stardew Valley-related. If you're unfamiliar, Stardew Valley is an indie farming simulator that is so beautiful and wholesome. You take over your grandfather's farm in a place called Stardew Valley and build a life there with the residents of Pelican Town, where you can farm, mine, fish, and more! And it's one of my all-time favourite games!
We'd been having fun playing Stardew Valley multiplayer for quite some time during the lockdown and it was a ton of fun playing together as a group (all 5 of us)! Dean's always gunning to catch the legendary fish just for the achievement. He also lamented that we couldn't store the legendary fish in fish tanks in the farmhouse, which gave me an idea!
And I think you can see where I'm going with these reference images from Animal Crossing New Horizons and Neko Atsume:
Source: The Verge
Source: Wallpapercave
But basically the idea was to draw Dean and his girlfriend, Sharh, inside the farmhouse looking at the fish tank full of legendary fish!
So I started with the background of the farmhouse first. This was based on actual wallpaper, flooring and decorations available in the game!
I wanted to make the farmhouse have a nautical theme, since Dean is obviously really into fishing, and I was inspired after seeing a reddit screenshot of a nautical themed room as well.
And after blending and sketching out Dean and Sharh:
Outlining and cleaning up:
Colouring time! This is always one of my favourite parts of digital art! I tried to draw them like their characters but also like how they actually look irl, and I think it came out pretty well. They both seemed to like it at least!
Then came time to draw the fish tank! I went with some basic decorations but added a little pumpkin since his birthday month is in October!
To give the illusion of water, I just used colour fill and adjusted the transparency, kinda like the neko atsume wallpaper.
Then it was time to draw the actual fish! This one was tough since I pretty much only had the in-game screenshots and pixel art from the wiki to work off of, so I had to convert the pixel art into digital art.
The legendary fish are the 5 on white tables at the top.
So after quite a while of sketching, I got this!
And next was colouring them! From left to right, their names are Legend, Crimsonfish, Glacierfish, Angler and Mutant Carp.
The Mutant Carp and Glacierfish were definitely the most challenging to colour because of their scales.
But after a while, I finally got this!
And after a couple of final touches, this was the final piece!
I even hid a little secret somewhere in there! Can you spot it?
Overall, I really like how this piece turned out! It was definitely what I envisioned it to be and I'm glad Dean liked it too! The hands did give me some trouble, but I thought I drew Dean and Sharh pretty well regardless. I did end up with quite many layers, but they were crucial to this piece for sure. Man, the wonders of digital art still amaze me to this day! I definitely wouldn't be able to create something like this using watercolours that's for sure.
Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
