This is one of those times I notice what people are talking about when they say things look different on different monitors. There is a significant difference between my PC monitor and my iPad when it comes to the darkness of the shadows in the cave. The shadows are significantly darker on the iPad (even at max brightness), so when I first posted I didn't realize how light they looked on my monitor. Darkened it up more, left the first image for comparison.
Reminiscing a bit about Digimon with some friends, it got me thinking about how neat the Armor Digi-volutions were as an expansion of the "digital evolution" concept of the show. And then I thought it'd be really funny to come up with armor evolutions of some of my own OCs. To be honest, I don't really have that many "creature" designs, as monsters haven't been a big focus of my creativity for a long while.
To keep it simple, I went with Poppy, since she's become one of my go-to doodle characters. Mogie might have been a better, and more classic, example, but his overly simple design kinda made it hard to figure out how to add sufficient details while keeping him looking like Mogie.
Digimon, as opposed to Pokemon, often had what felt like a fairly ramshackle evolutionary tree, with the creatures various stages as often not even resembling their base forms except by a barest stretch of theme. Gatomon: starts as a blob (as most do), then becomes a puppy, then a bipedal cat, then a humanoid angel, then a heavenly dragon. Auguman's forms at least looked like variations of the same orange dinosaur.
Anyway, for the Armor Evolutions, I wanted to maintain a theme of "armor" wherein the resulting evolution is clearly the original creature, modified in various ways by the Digi-Egg attributes. There aren't actually that many examples of the Armors in the show, or on expanded media. There's one chart that shows possible variations that I think were used on expanded media, and from there, I tried to spot cohesive visual themes to base Poppy's forms on. For example, I noticed the "Hope" evolutions were all horned creatures as their common trait, so I give Poppy some Jackalope horns. A few forms, though, I just based them more directly on the armor style of the Digimon from the show, for lack of a better idea.
Anyway, this was a fun little experiment! Almost makes me want to rip off the idea and do a whole art series of stuff like this! Almost. :B
Oh, I also realized it's October, so I guess this can also serve as this years Halloween piece! Spoopymon!
Watercolor is a very unforgiving medium, to be fair. With acrylic and oils, you can ultimately still paint over mistakes if you really have to, especially in darker spots, but watercolor, like ink, is a "once it's down, you're committed", so you really need to know ahead of time what you're trying to do. This is not a "fuck around and figure it out" type of medium. You also need to be patient with this medium, not just manipulating the flow of the water, but also knowing when and at what point to let the paint dry before continuing to work on it.
Which I knew going in, of course, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating. I suppose it certainly doesn't help that I never actually learned how to paint well in the first place. Plus, even after getting paper specifically designed for watercolor, I was not expecting so much "grit" to keep getting built up as I painted, and I wasn't even brushing hard on the surface.
Obviously, it's one of those things I just need a lot of practice at, but to be honest, much like using the dip pen, I don't particularly care enough about mastering analogue art in this way to dedicate myself to it steadily. Frankly, my initial attempts were outright infuriating, and while I've cooled off some, my continued toe-dipping into analogue is honestly just making me appreciate digital that much more.
A Rat Mage is a magician with mystical powers related to rats. Shrimple as that!
I intend to color and shade this later, maybe add a but more detail. I'll post those here when I do.
As I was taking pics with my iPad, I decided to go ahead and do a digital version, too, because I figured it would make an interesting comparison. Certainly, you can see where I was able to make some adjustments to fix the "art typos" I had to commit to in analogue. (I am constantly making the head disproportionate to the body in my drawings, and I don't know why. It's just one of those visual misreads I can't seem to shake.)
Decided to buy some watercolor markers on whim today. Watercolor is a style I've gotten a little enchanted with, but I haven't gotten around to committing to yet. I figure these markers wouldn't really be the same thing, but close enough to try out some analogue coloring. As with ink, its a lot less forgiving than digital! Even more so with markers and actual watercolor paints, you basically can't erase or cover up mistakes at all. There wasn't a "flesh tone" color in the pack, so I had to compromise just not filling out the pale skin, and using pink for shading. Inking was done with a micron pen.
