Market Street

Market Street

presentation sheet

There was an art challenge contest (THU 2018 Golden Ticket Challenge) going on, on ArtStation during most of the month of June, where artists had to create a painting of a parallel magical world of Malta.
I wanted to test myself, to see how much I could grow while participating in this challenge, and to see how I would paint a fantasy piece.

During the research and thumbnail phase, I had several ideas of what I wanted for the composition. Ideas ranged from knight statues guarding gates, rivers leading into the city, multiple bridges and towers. The latter idea eventually spawned into the current piece as I really liked how I could add a lot of range in the environment.

research notes and thumbs

sketch on top of phone rough sketch

From there, I knew I wanted a warm color palette, something to add to the fun of the piece. 

flat colors

shadow and some lighting

building and building

I kept building and building the mini world I had created.
Eventually, after having hit a wall on what else I needed to work on, oh the down side of working on a piece for a while!, I asked in various social media artist groups for their opinions and received good critiques from a number of people.

(Before)  ---  Oh perspective fixes.--- (After) 

Hard edges and wonky perspective were the two main things I definitely found myself working on and correcting throughout the piece.

Punched up the values, added in the lighter values I was missing

Pushed back background to bring out foreground

I also got little bits of feedback that really helped me push the piece, such as missing the last 15-30% of lighter values in focal area, and pushing back the background to bring the foreground more into focus.

There were a ton more progress shots but for the sake of the people scrolling , I kept the images down to a minimum. Or at least I hope so!

All in all, I really improved in my painting skills and got to add another genre experience onto my belt.Now I just need to bring the knowledge in earlier into a piece, and try to cut down my finish time.
I had to take break the whole process into a lot of 3 hours sessions to keep my hand muscles from overwork/overuse, and to keep my laptop from heating up due to high temperatures while I was in Taiwan during the process.