Halloween Weirdo Sketcho

 

Poppymon

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!

Catty

 

Priestess

 

 

 

 

More Sketches

 

Girl with Sword

 

Actual Watercolor

 
After trying out the markers, I opted to go ahead and just get an actual watercolor kit. Aaaand... I kinda hate it. Watercolor is an enchanting medium when done right, but this is one of those cases where I am so far behind on the fundamentals, I can't even begin to get anything to come out halfway right.

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.