Fanart Friday (#4): The Star-Touched Queen + Watercolor and Digital Edit

Hey guys! Today I’ll talk a little about my process with this particular piece of work. I guess it’s basically to highlight how you never know where one can go when painting, or drawing, or creating anything in general. I made a lot of mistakes while doing this one, and learned a bunch of lessons throughout it all. 😀 So in the end, I thought I’d share a bit with you guys.

I absolutely adored The Star-Touched Queen by Roshani Chokshi, and you can see my review here. (I highly urge you to check it out on Goodreads too!) The beautiful imagery in the book immediately gave me a lot of ideas. The first picture I sketched and started a watercolor of was a memory tree. That was scrapped, but I might return to it digitally (more ideas are popping up as I type this). Instead, I turned to a starry sky. So a sketch was made with both Amar and Maya, as I always have to have my main ship in the picture.

*Scroll on top of the pictures to see additional comments!

Sketch until it looks semi-decent. I was watching Stardust while doing this lol.

Light colors first to fill out! Too bad they didn’t turn out that well in the scan…

COLORING THE GALAXY AKA VERY FUN PART

Watercolor is very based on layers, so this was the first.

If I had Copic markers, I would draw in the facial features and more details for the skin and clothes of the characters. Alas, I never find the time to get those. So I decided to make the edits digitally instead, which turned out pretty swell in the end too.

I bolded some of the shadows for the characters while waiting for the first layer to dry.

Last layer of the sky – woo hoo! I love space colors. They’re my fave.

Creating stars via white paint splatters! Also one of my fave things to do at the end.

That’s it for the watercolors!

After doing all I can with the watercolor, I scanned it on my computer to make edits – a lot of them – on some paint programs using a Wacom Splash tablet.

The only time I used Photoshop was to fix some contrast and exposure levels. And edited some curves? I’m not even sure at this point. I just play around a bit in there.

So then I head to the program I actually draw in, Paint Tool Sai. And fill in colors.

Looking good so far. Except that odd yellow stuff ugh.

Amar is love; Amar is life. ❤

Oddly enough, when I scanned the picture the lighter portions I painted came out a really sick yellow. And I didn’t realize it was there until I switched to my new PC, because the old one (which had Photoshop) has just weird lighting. So yeah, I worked with that stuff for the majority of the session. New tip I learned: to prevent wrinkles, tape the edges of the paper on a flat surface when watercoloring. That’ll probably be better for scanning too.

Cleaning up a bit. I didn’t like the watercolor background that was originally made, so I erased all that junk.

Adding text! I thought this quote, out of all the beautiful lines in the book, fit the best for this particular scene.

This was partly to cover up the awkward blur of the colors at the bottom, and partly because I didn’t want to put the title and author on the top.

In which I am never satisfied by my signature/initials so I put them in the stars. 😛

After coloring in the characters real quick, I switched to my new PC because the old one was making weird noises. I outlined a bit of the lineart, added text, made some finishing touches, and voila, finished product is finished.

Thanks for staying for the ride! The Star-Touched Queen comes out April 26 – less than a month away. 😀