Deviation Actions
Description
It had been too long since my last picture featuring my fursona. Backgrounds are often said to be the best parts of my art, so I picked a Rocky Mountains scene. Using a few reference pictures and my own imagination, I created this picture without painting over any photos, which had been my approach in last year's “Rocky Moutain Splendor.”
I set out to draw this picture with the aim of making a better painting than any of my previous works. I tend to think of views, favorites, and especially comments as a general barometer for the quality of my art, and I couldn't help but dwell over how my most-commented and most-faved picture “Silvia's Winter” is from 2012. I think I've measurably improved my techniques since then, and I wanted to take on the challenge of drawing my fursona in a pose that I didn't have a similar reference image for. In addition to testing my command of anatomy in this painting, I wanted to work on depth and foreground/background contrast. You can see my guide lines and vanishing point briefly in the video draw, as well as simplified trees used to establish the scaling with distance. I certainly wanted to avoid the flaws of some of my recent (Fall 2013- Jan 2014) work. “Autumn Trails” seems to show each part of the picture as if it were viewed from a different perspective, and the ground almost serves as a wall in “Discover.”
Most likely, I'll be taking time to work on my story outline and manuscript in the next few months. I've found that I write several hundred words per hour of story as a typical pace, so the time involved in creating this could have been used to add thousands to my word count. In any case, I'm glad that I spent so much time on this picture. I like the feeling of having a new “personal best picture” that I've painted.Time taken: 20 hours of drawing (3/12-3/19), followed 3-5 hours of editing recordings and compiling the video draw (3/20-3/22). Programs Used: Adobe's Photoshop, Premiere, and After Effects CS4; Camtasia Recorder and Camtasia Studio 6. Resolutions: 5700 x 3900 original canvas; 1280 x 720 (720p HD) video draw; 2850 x 1950 download available. The brushed aluminum overlay texture is sourced from cgtextures, and I used the Fall and Winter tree brush pack by just-nate, found here: just-nate.deviantart.com/art/F… . Artwork “Alpine Vulpine” and my fursona © foxstory 2014.
Comments are appreciated, as always. I like receiving constructive critcism and finding out what viewers liked best. I often think of what previous comments pointed out when working on successive pictures, and I hope to improve my art skills further with future works.