hello there my little crystals!!

guess who had some fun with an art contest on wattpad here again ^-^"
so, if you came from my old artbook, you probably remember the 1+1 contest that micaappatossis is running.... but just in case you're new or as forgetful as i am: here's the concept again :)

essentially it's a collaborative contest. you have a general topic and then get to apply for either doing the lineart or the colouring. then you get put in a team with a person who applied for the other part of the drawing process and together you create something for said contest....

the whole thing is INCREDIBLY fun, and honestly.... some of my best work was birthed in things that contest threw at me >w<

now, judging by the title, you're probably thinking that i applied for the lineart... to which i say:

this time around the contest was structured a bit more different than usual. "topic" was a silhouette of scribbles, that mica gave us... this set of scribbles to be precise with you:

and we should now go ahead and create a lineart out of... whatever we can see in that silhouette. And well... since i instantly saw some epic inspiration in there, i just... couldn't not... you know?

anyways. so we get to create a lineart. and then later on you can seperately (after all the lines are made) apply for colouration! which i find great because you're allowed to do both, as long as it's not on the same piece ^-^

now.... the scribble was indeed interesting..... i saw quite a lot of things. a humanoid god emerging out of the water, a burning angel falling into the sky, a snake-like parasite latching onto it's victim, an android in the middle of construction, a nobleman/mage with elegant robes made of silk with floating jewellery and a large cape, and so on....

in the end though, i decided to take a different approach... i decided to go with the concept of "person trying to break out of the top of the water surface, but being held back through vines of some sort"  .... honestly in retrospect the mage idea would've been both more fun and cooler to create, but hey... we live and learn >w<"

so yeah... i lowered the opacity of the base and started to sketch something out:

now... i did sorta like it, but it didn't quite convey the exact things i wanted to portray here, so i scrapped the sketch and came up with an alternate way of showing the concept...

in the end the two did look pretty similar, even though i think the second one was more clear in describing the action i had in mind... sadly i didn't export the second sketch though, so you've gotta just trust me on that one >w<

after the sketch was done, i decided to start with the lineart. generally i am pretty happy with the result, but i think i just lost the flow at some point... whilst i was working on this piece i also was working on some other drawings, one of which being a larger illustration for a competition, taking up most of my headspace and time...

so i do indeed need to admit that this isn't quite what it could have been... nonetheless i finally figured out how to draw heads from below without making them look hella weird, so... at least that achievement was unlocked ^-^"

since some areas were underwater, i thought that colouring the lineart would be the best way to convey this. usually i use erase layers, highlights and overlays on top of the lineart in later stages of the piece to show these sorts of things, but since this was just a lineart and i wouldn't be the one colouring it.... i got a bit creative >w<

i could have probably done a better job on that front as well though, but... well.... the new and big genshin impact update combined with some other large pieces i was working on simultaneously lead to rather rash decisions...

but i had to set priorities and sadly the chance of winning maybe 500$ stood above a lineart for a fun project for wattpad ^-^"
so yeah... here's the actual lineart without the base in the back >w<

wow...... what an amazing chapter, i totally didn't get distracted a few times, and absolutely knew what to say about this rather simple drawing :D

yeah... as you probably got by now, is that i'm not quite satisfied with the end result. now, don't get me wrong... i don't think it's bad or incredibly ugly or anything. i just think that it doesn't quite match the potential that i originally saw in the base-shape :/
and composition, tangents, body language and so on.... yeah... i know i could have done better, if i would've invested more time into this piece.

either way, even though it's just a lineart, i hope you guys like it anyways ^-^"
and with that, this rather messy chapter will come to a close... hopefully we'll see each other again in a future chapter, which probably will be better structured and have a more interesting piece to portray >w<