I went for a holiday earlier this month and had some time to get away from work and arts. I had a disconcerting realization that I did not have a real goal for a while now... One of my goals is to table at a convention, so I applied for a table at Doujima 2026. It was time to reflect on my past artworks, evaluating if they are worthy to be prints.
In this post, I will cover "Dream Beadroom" from 2022.
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| How it started... |
I thought this image looked unfinished, thought I could not yet tell what was missing. Perhaps the bedroom portion uses too many similar colors. I began by making the colors more varied. While I was at it, I experimented with darkening the girl's hair.
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| Varying colors on bedroom section | Darkening the girl's hair |
I found varying colors helped, but darkening girl's hair took the attention away from the bedroom. This informed the next iteration: how can I keep viewer's attention to the bedroom area? One way is the add a frame.
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| Adding a frame |
The frame gave the feeling of a manga chapter cover, which I liked. However, the rim light around the girl's hair was now attracting attention. It needed toning down.
I also found the lighting on the flowers look strange, so I removed it.
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| Toning down rim light on girl's hair and removing lighting on flowers |
At this point, I felt the itch to refine the rendering of the bedroom elements. While painting, I thought the girl's face look too different from the bedroom elements. Making her closer to pink should be better.
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| Refined rendering and making the girl more pink |
Finally, the top half of the image looked empty. I could introduce either a title text or graphic elements. I decided to go for the latter. I experimented with different shapes and colors before settling on the final image.
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| The final image |