Emily eyes diary

As of November 25, 2022

• Borrowing from artworks I saw on Pixiv

• Spontaneous drawing

• Underwater lighting

• Glowing eyes like literal gemstones

• Transparent and prism-like

• Eyes are focal point

• Focus on technique and aesthetic

• Meaningless is not a bad thing

• Message/meaning takes the back seat

• Art style

• Exaggerated, non representational colors

• Maintain art style that balances anime and cartoon

• She looks so anime here. How can I find balance?

• Add more cartoony elements

• Exaggerated eyelashes

• Nose is main indicator of anime or cartoon style

• I feel like the nose has to be anime-style for the lighting trick to work. Is there a workaround???

• I love the huge eyes. I don’t care that they’re “out of style”

• Details

• Delicate details on face

• Thick outer contours like a protective casing with finer linework inside

• Remember attention to detail in my old artworks

• Details are casual and sketchy. It doesn’t have to be meticulously precise

• Remember the Big Picture!

• Inspirations

• Cartoony playful artworks for color inspiration

• Art nouveau for the flower

• Recent Pixiv art I saved

• Things to fix or consider

• Should be obvious she is wearing a hood

• Fine tune the flower

• Shadows of leaves on face?

As of November 27, 2022

• Loving the eyes so far

• There was some struggle but now I have an idea for the streamlined process

• The outer ring is blurry and saturated

• The inner ring is a black outline, creating a contrasting border between the iris and the sclera

• Next time (not here) I will set the eyes to Multiply so it retains the transparency of a cut gemstone

• Face

• Too anime. Needs more cartoon qualities to the art style

• Reinforce the outlines of the eyes

• Lips are too red. Make them closer to skin tone but more saturated

• Make the freckles more obvious. It is one of her charm points

• Hair

• The hair should fade to a lighter color in less important areas

• Add specks of light to her hair

• Glowing individual strands

• Hood

• The hood should have a softer texture

• It should be more obvious that Emily is wearing a hood

• Add sharpening contours: two parallel lines consisting of a very dark value, and a very light one- to bring out the desired shapes

• The hair ornament should have a hint of color that stands out but doesn’t compete for attention

• Background

• Background is too light compared to character’s face

• How will I combine the background painting with the character?

• Add hints of green and yellow

• Foliage

• The flowers should be more defined. They just look like flower-shaped blobs. They’re supposed to be hydrangeas

• Doesn’t need to be meticulously rendered, but just enough to be recognizable

• Add stronger saturations in important areas

• Add extra lighting to the leaves and flowers

• Add light lines to the leaves (Insp: Wakaba-chan)

• Viewing the artwork with fresh eyes

• Grayscale

• Upside down

• Backwards

• From very, very far away

• Get outside feedback

• Any combination of these

• Observe what you notice first

• What will you remember when you picture this image in the mind?

As of December 1, 2022

• I had fun at first but now it’s getting overworked

• Spinning my wheels. I’m mentally spent

• Forgetting about the big picture

• Hoping to call it a day next time I work on it

• What if I traced over the picture and colored it all over again? But I want to be done with this. I’m torn.

• There is a disconnect in the colors

• The colors got too washed out

• The hydrangeas don’t pop

• Not a fan of the leaves

• Make lips darker again

• Too much emphasis on the hood

• Hood should be less intense luminosity

• Shift emphasis to frame the face

• Reduce high contrast of hood and shadow

• Other stuff

• Crystal coloring should be fuzzier

• Remember the hair piece

• Later that day, I opened the image in Procreate and kept tinkering with the colors until I was happy. I will use it as a guide for the next time I work on Emily. 

• The lighting is noticeably darker, making for a more dramatic picture. 

• I want to add a grain and chromatic aberration effect at the end.

• It would be cool to add a light ray effect.

Declared complete on December 3, 2022

• Color key

• Blue = Goals for next time

• Purple = Things I like

• Red = Things I regret

• I generally like how it came out, but there is still room for improvement

• If there was nothing to change, art would not be very fun. It is all about experimentation.

• Always looking forward to the next iteration and how I can make things better.

• Remember to look at the big picture

• Struggles

• I struggled to get the atmosphere to my liking, and a result, the image got deep-fried.

• I like her hair but after the post processing, much of that detail has been lost.

• Effects

• Chromatic aberration is overdone in some places, especially the hair

• I like the subtle noise effect

• Noise and chromatic aberration can work well when used SPARINGLY

• Backdrop

• The background is overworked

• It looks too busy 

• Used tricks to get overlapping to work

• This obsessive attitude is not helpful when I’m in art mode

• Some exploration is okay but I kept going until I mentally wore myself out

• Creating and analyzing are different processes and should be kept separate

• I did for the most part but kept going after I should have stopped. I ended up spinning my wheels

• Art style

• Art style is too anime and “realistic” in terms of color and shading.

• I want it to look more like a cartoon

• Symbolic representation

• Get bold with elements of design

• Gemstone eyes are a good step in that direction

• Colors and shading

• Underwater lighting was borrowed from Pixiv

• Aim for more stylized and non-representational colors

• Be more limited and deliberate in color choice and shading

• The drawing itself

• Wide variation in line weight. like stained glass

• Thick outer contours case delicate lines within

• Contributes to the cartoon effect

• Rely more heavily on shapes and molding features to fit them