Welcome to my first blog post, everyone! For those who have been following me on instagram for a while might recognize the title "Mini Review". If not, let me explain:
Back in 2020, I shared a few instagram stories reviewing my own art; summarizing my experience throughout the process. Even though these mini reviews didn't last too long on instagram, the whole point of them was to showcase a realistic point of view of the creative process. Despite what it may look like on social media, art takes time to create and it's not always going to be rainbows and butterflies from start to finish. There will be moments where you run into issues, or get absolutely frustrated for not being able to get that pose or expression just right. But despite the trials you go through, that's all a part of the experience of creating art! And your work won't grow unless you find ways to learn from those hard moments.
That being said, I've decided to resurrect my mini review series and start it back up on my blog, this time with more depth! These reviews are meant to showcase the real side of my experience from start to end, showcasing the good and bad parts and appreciating every moment of it. For the most part people only see the finished outcome of a piece but they don't realize how many ups and downs an artist can go through during the process; I feel like being able to showcase that side of the process helps us appreciate the piece even more! With all that being said, I'll be re-sharing my experience of making my fan art illustration of Promare:
Promare Fan Art (2020)
Slow and steady was the key to finishing this piece! I started off sketching Aina for fun, then ended up adding more and more until I couldn't add anything else! It took a total of six months to finish since I didn't force myself to work on it when I didn't feel inspired. I try to go gentle on myself when creating fully rendered and complete illustrations because it's a lot of work, and I'm someone who gets easily burnt out when hyper focusing on a project too much. The geometric fire was a tedious challenge to say the least; I wanted to make sure I recreated it as best as I could, but I probably could've added more details and effects to it. At that point I was struggling with the anticipation of just getting the project DONE, but if I had given myself a few more breathers I would've taken time to gather more references to make an even more accurate recreation of the iconic fire from that movie. Another challenge was Aina's motorcycle -- I for one an admit that I can definitely benefit from studying vehicle anatomy more because drawing motorcycles are not easy. I went through multiple sketches before finding one I decided was good enough to move forward with. With that being said, forcing myself to go out of my comfort zone ended up helping me a lot, and while I still don't consider myself an expert I have a much better understanding of how to draw a motorcycle for next time. When it comes to the characters, I'm very proud with how I drew them out! I feel like I was able to emulate a good combination of my style with the original designs from the movie. I could've pushed the lighting on the characters more than I did, but I'm glad I was able to find a good balance between them and the background. Overall, this piece was extremely fun to draw but also a major challenge, technically speaking and also when dealing with time management. I'm so glad I pushed myself and went out of my comfort zone -- even though it took a while to complete, it was worth it at the end! Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed this mini review of my piece, and be on the lookout for more blog posts in the future! This is all very new to me so I'm not sure how often I'll be posting here, but so far I'm like having a place to talk more in depth about my art and experiences, and I hope you'll enjoy reading it! Until next time ♡