Seafoam (yes, another Love in Deepspace fanart lol)

hey guys! been having fun just doing something in a totally different vibe lately.

It's Rafayel from Love and Deepspace!

Please leave a comment with what you've been playing/reading/watching lately!! I'm very curious. I want to revisit the Thief games again soon. 

I've had some artblock the past several weeks and usually I need to do something else for a bit to get back into a groove. 

Probably back to the prescribed horror/vampirey stuff soon, I can feel it in me bones. I've been busy busy with projects I can't really share which has been exciting but it's been tiring me out haha ;;

I wanted to try a different technique for this piece. I usually abuse the airbrush until I start carving things out with rougher brushstrokes/adding in textures/etc but usually very little of it remains in the end. I tend to go wild with detailing everything in sight, so I really challenged myself to pick a focus and make the rest of the piece fuzzier. I used a lot of portrait photography as inspiration- I blocked in a lot of the piece and used gaussian blur to force out anything too detailed.

I get sooooo jealous of painters who can just nail that impression of background elements without painting much detail, so I am trying to be more mindful of the technique lately.

I didn't want the softer parts to be textureless, though, so I tried to pass some brushstrokes and speckle some sparkles over those areas again to bring back some painterlyness to it. 

Final Fantasy cutscenes were some of the most inspirational things to me artistically when I was a kid (FFXIII is so beautiful ;A;) and I have been enjoying kind of getting to run wild with the boys from this game since that sort of atmosphere suits them. 

I really tend to shy away from brighter lit pieces because I get nervous about all of the lit space and end up overdetailing to hell, so this whole challenge was partly an attempt to force myself out of it. It's really true that things look better when you pick either the light part of the piece or the dark part to detail, and leave the other as simple as possible. 

I hope you all are doing well. ♥

*Just a reminder, but please don't repost the Patreon exclusive pieces anywhere. They are for you to use for personal use however you'd wish, but I've seen some people posting the high res versions on Pinterest and stuff, so please don't do that.