PenUp Challeng Oct 26 #1

The PenUp Challenge this time was to draw an egg.  Sounds simple enough, but for what I want to be able to draw, and draw well enough that I can be confident in my own art skills, I needed to draw a lot more than an egg.

So with my desire to be able to draw anime style art, and my current need to get better at drawing characters, scenes with characters and shading and lighting, I needed to expand on the idea of just an egg.

Thinking about eggs for a minute, what are they?

Animals hatch from eggs, and an egg is the earliest stage of an animal's life.  So I could just draw an animal or creature hatching from an egg, but I also want to have a person in the picture, in an anime style, and for there to be a reason for them to be there.

My resulting head canon on the idea was that an adventuring witch has either found a dragon hatching from it's egg, or caused the egg to hatch.  Either way, the witch wants to have the dragon and keep it as a pet.  All of this is happening in the dragon's cave lit by a floating light source.

Here's the picture.

This time I managed to get it done by the deadline, and I'm fairly happy with the result.

This picture took about the same amount of time as the last challenge picture, or maybe a bit longer.  Some parts of the process went a bit quicker than the last one, others had more time spent on them.  Overall I know I still have more to learn and that I need to do more practice, but I think I'm starting to get used to the different stages of making these types of pictures.

For my own analysis and review, I think the shading and lighting, for the most part came out ok.  I think the colours work pretty well, I think there is enough contrast between the different elements, and the reds of the hair and the dragon draw the eye against the blues, purples and pinks.  The scale of the egg and character came out ok, and I think the character's body proportions are a lot better than last time.  The only major issue that breaks the piece is the face.  I haven't quite got the perspective right, or possibly the scale, or both.  To me the face feels flat, or otherwise wrong.  My only other issue with it is the shadows on the skin.  The blurred first shadow, to soften it, makes the skin too blue grey.  Equally the cast shadows also have this problem.  This could be because the shadow colour I used had too much blue saturation, or it could mean that I need to use a warmer colour, more red or pink, to draw the shadows for the skin.

If I was to rate my picture out of 10, this week I would give it 7 out of 10.  For comparison, my picture for the last challenge would only get 4 out of 10, and the more recent 1hr challenge I set myself would get a 6.

Feel free to rate it yourself and let me know if you think I'm on the right track.

Thanks for reading!