Suilad my darlings!

Soo.... yeah. I'm back with another drawing for a contest! (Yayy!).
So this time around the challenge was set by Aquamariin_J, and we should draw our zodiac as... well whatever we want.

And since my predictable arse is... well, predictable I thought: well let's go and dig out this "old" drawing I made in September and hand that in. (Ha! Didn't see that coming, eh?!)

So yeah. I just revisited the Zodiac-Series by Looji (amazing artist... and super nice and friendly too... dang I love them) and felt inspired to go and try it out for myself. And because I'm an egocentric bastard I started with my own Zodiac: Capricorn.

Good so far? Good.
Well, I started with a nice little scribbly-doodly-sketch-thing that I use to be able to say: "HA! That's were the nose is gonna go! Now there's no escape anymore!"

OMG, would one look at the thing. That balance. That composition. It is so original, that you never could've seen anything similar created by either me or some other artist...

...

I gotta find myself more poses and compositions for my portraits.....

Anyways! So I then went ahead and did my lineart-sketch-thing. Goal was, to portray the personality and overall values more, rather than the actual animal/symbol, just to give myself a small challenge. And I'm sick of that simple trope, so I wanted to make the zodiacs more subtle. So I went ham on the cliché of Cappy being this serious, grown up, wise and determined dude.... and since I decided to not give him horns I had to give him a goatee... because... capricorn... and water-goat... and... yeah...

And then I got bored, so I drew the background first. I wanted to make this eteral, galaxy-ish thing that also looked a bit painterly and... dunno. I basically just had fun xDD

Great! So now we had the lines and the background. What's missing? The complicated and long part... the coloration and shading.

Plan was, to make the characters more connected to the zodiac through the colour schemes. In the case of Cappy here, I wanted to use cold and warm earthy tones, with olive greens and gold.

(sry I didn't export any better picture of the flats before this got really exciting >w<")

So I started with the idea of just drawing these normal dudes in front of galaxy backgrounds and did the flats for that, until I thought:

MAKE THEM GODS

MAKE THEM GALAXY GODS

... so I thought to myself: YASS BABY

... and now he's a creepy looking etheral fantasy being with dark eyes that stare into your soul and a galaxy in his skin.

I then continued to define the galaxy skin, before thinking... wellllllllllllll.... Cappy and... fancy earth shit... and....

so now he has more or an earthy-emerald-galaxy-gold thing going on there, which I also like a ton.
So whilst I had a bunch of fun with the skin-thing, I realised how making the area around his eyes really dark, looked hella cool. And since the eyes seemed to drown in there, I made them this golden-bronze tone, to push the idea of them not being human a bit more...

Oh! And he got fancy, glowy face-tatts :D

... and I guess I coloured his hair finally. With the hair I wanted to lean more into the wise-goat thing, so I wanted to make it grey with some nice green and bronze streaks in there and I also wanted to add stars and fancy effects and... well I basically wanted to make the hair extra-fancy.

Welp. Now we had a nice base to work with and I could start with the shading. I did two layers of my usual style, until I remembered this drawing (yes... I still do traditional stuff... I haven't abandoned my inks and watercolours just yet):

And then I thought about how I tried a new shading technique and I wanted to try it in my digital works too. So I essentially just had a ton of fun defining features and chiseling out the glory of the Capricorn-galaxy-god-thing I was creating here:

Okay... I have another WIP exported after that one, but not all that mutch changed from that one to the final, so Ima just explain what I did to wrap the thing up.

Essentially I just added more shading on top, especially highlights, since they really pushed the unnatural feel of the painting and added in a lot of contrast, especially around the eyes, that I did indeed change again right at the end.

I also then did the hair, trying to make it look nearly glowy and metallic, whilst adding stars like beeds into singular strands and adding flyaways.

THen I went ahead and added more stars in the background, made the tattoos, as well as the actual star formation glow a bit more and sized our dude up a bit, since he felt a bit small composition-wise.

Yeah.

Here he is, my beautiful Cappy:

So yeah.

First time trying something like this and it was indeed hella fun too xDD

Since I planned on makinig this a series I do indeed plan on making more of these. And I probably will also turn them into OC's and throw them into my timeline. So maybe there will be full bodies and character sheets coming sometime in the future!

Overall it was hella fun to draw, even though the picture took me ages and I was really just wishing for it to be over at some point. I'm most certainly gonna use that shading technique more often from now on and I may even try to personify other things/objects/topics/etc.

Otherwise, I hope you like the drawing Aquamarin and don't mind that it's an older one of mine >w<"

And until we see each other again, make yourselves comfortable with some cookies and tea!
>>gives them to you, and also gives you a blanket<<