Last Flight of the Year

Final Painting

Happy holidays, everyone!

I finished this painting, though I am not fully happy with the result. I took a little break from painting it last week (Christmas week). However, the year is ending, so I worked on it today.

What I learned while painting this piece:

• Using circle brushes is good for laying down base colors; while using rectangular brush seems to be better suited for shading.
• I can suggest lost edges by masking the lineart.
• I still struggle to keep the final image when facing the canvas. (This is probably why I am not happy with the result. I image that I had in the beginning was different, but I did not know how to paint to get to that image.)
• I prefer painting on a new layer while keeping the previous image I commit to as a base layer. I could feel reluctance to change when I had many layers.

Next time, I think I should focus on committing to a value composition before shading.

Drawing Last Flight of the Year

"Last Flight of the Year" inked drawing

I worked on painting Tetris Attack back cover this month and the painting gave me problems. Problems that I did not yet solve. And so, while looking through old drawings pile, I found this pencil drawing and decided to work on it. Hopefully I would have some solutions for the Tetris Attack back cover when it is done.

Rough pencil drawing

I drew this in late 2022 as a part of a series of paintings leading up to the new year. It was overly ambitious and I only finished painting "Greeting Mrs Moon" in December 2023. I remembered drawing the cloud vortex on the right side after seeing wing tip vortex images. (Search for "wing tip vortex" images; it looks beautiful and serene.) Looking at it 2 years later, though, lessened the impact dramatically.

Instead, my new idea is to draw wind lines. In my mind, I could strive for 70/30 balance of textured/untextured area with the wind lines being the texture. Whether or not I will succeed is still unclear. We will find out next month!

Back Cover for Tetris Attack Music Album

I am currently working on images for a Tetris Attack album project. With the front cover finished (read about my process for it here), next was the back cover.

Inked back cover

Image for the back cover should be something that can be covered by track list. With Tetris Attack in mind, I thought of the game world (B1) or in-game background tiles (B2).

First round of thumbnails

Xaleph, the project director, chose B1. He suggested adding musical bars for the front cover, so I added musical bar to the back cover as well.

Pencil sketch

This image came together rather quickly. It is simple with few elements. It gave me second thoughts. Is this too simple? Am I being lazy?

Inked back cover?

Just to see if there was something better, I embarked on another idea: a group shot of all the pal characters in the game.

Pals thumbnail

Before drawing this thumbnail, I needed to get familiar with all 8 pal characters. I did so by copying their in-game portraits. That was when I discovered even more characters: Froggy has crab friends, Poochie (the dog) has the monkey, Rapahel (the raven) and Gargantua Blarg (the head with fangs) has shy guys, Lakitu (the turtle on cloud) has the birds...

I sketched symmetric composition and asymmetric composition. I liked the symmetric one better, so I used it for the above thumbnail. For drama, I added a giant Bowser scowling in the background.

Pals pencil

When I showed this to Xaleph, his reaction was basically "Holy shit! Two cakes back covers!" And so I drew the pencil sketch. This time, the image was not simple. Each character is simple, but I got to be disciplined to get the placement, size, and posing good enough. Once I was happy with the pencil, inking was faster.

Next post, I hope I have something to show for the painting process. See you then!