Digital Painting - Artist Statement

 

 Artist Statement for NZCC102

Title of Work: Welcome to the World Dungeon and Dragons

At the beginning of this paper I had no idea, now at the end I only have a rough idea. I used this paper for more an experimental works as I quite enjoy digital drawings but there was a bridge between pencil drawings and digital, and I despised that gap. My pencil drawing were more for realistic, creepy and disturbing drawings and my digital drawings were for more cartoon like drawings. Yet, during this trail of getting my realistic creepy drawing to the digital world, I didn't really like the process, it never looked right and I didn't really enjoy drawing them. So I tried another way, I tried making my cartoon like drawings more realistic. In my other papers, I was doing a DnD (Dungeon and Dragons) theme and I was already doing some DnD digital drawings for other papers, so I just continue that into NZCC102 Digital Painting.

My artist inspiration, JoCat (you can find him on twitter and YouTube), his expertise drawings are around DnD, and I quite like his style. Its a simple but effective art style of line art and basic colours (no shading), also these fictional characters he makes them look like they could come from this world. 

So I started doing my paper, if you look at the my portfolio, it goes in order of completion, first still life, then landscape/environment, next portrait and finally creature. The first creation I was quite happy with, the line art is clean and ranges in thickness (but mostly thin line art) to get texture. The colours are basic colours no shading, just different tones on the sides of the items to give a depth. The background is a neutral colours, for a soft backdrop, and lastly the text, I just added for flavor for story when people are looking at it.

Originally the landscape/environment was going to be creature themed, but then later I couldn't think of a landscape/environment (also I don't really like drawing landscapes), so I made another creature drawing later on. So I used the same theory of drawing from the still life but, I tried adding shading and colour with a lower opacity (for the patterns of the tabby cat and the burn marks on the DM screen). After completing this piece I agreed to probably don't use that technique again as it seems messy but it works with this piece though. My final thoughts with this artwork is that I quite like it, it ticks the box of fiction in the real world.

The portrait part I wanted to do a drawing of all the players and the characters (and DM, whose is in the middle), but I thought that the full body drawing of each player and character would take too much time. So I thought of doing half body shots and have the player and the character side by side, so if it was presented the audience can tell whos who and compare the player and character. This was an interesting experience as I was drawing the characters, as I was using a photo of the players as a refence to get the basic proportions, I just added extra features to make them the certain race they are and it worked really really well, to the point where I'll actually continue this for my cartoon/anime drawings. What I am going to continue is use realistic faces and other features when drawing fictional characters/creatures. Contradiction to that though is I didn't like how the players came out as.

The final piece, the piece which I am so happy with. This creature is a NPC (Non-Playable character) in the campaign, the group favourite, and I wanted to redesign him for awhile now, and I'm super happy with him.  I used all the experience from previous drawings and combine them into this (to me) beautiful piece. So I used the line art, basic colours in closed areas, basic background, realistic facial features and I added shading. I know before I said I wasn't going to use shading but I wanted to add a little to his armor to make it shine a little bit, and I continued with it through the whole creature. To make it final I used the creature template from the Monster Manual (one of the many books for the DM behind the screen) to show his abilities to the audience, also so for me to have in the player journal to keep an eye on him as he is my NPC.