I may as well make myself useful and knock in some of the background for this YCH. Normally I like to work from the characters out but I kinda can't do that until the auction's over and I have model sheets in hand. So, I swipe some cloud styles from another piece and start modifying them to fit the overall palette I want. Took me about an hour, including some fucking around. It's really great to be able to swash in a loose line that defines where Illustrator will then do a bunch of fiddly, fluffy bullshit for me!

I've really been *looking* at clouds lately, and thinking about how to properly render them. There's a lot of gorgeous clouds down here in the tropics.

Normally I just have one reference layer, with all the ref arranged off the side of the canvas.

This... this seems to require some different strategies.

hahaha whoops I just realized this dude was supposed to be the servant with the drinks tray, not the Quing/Keen! Oh well, I got his colors set up last night and only blew like 15min doodling in his basic shapes, mistakes happen.

Lesson: double-check this kinda shit I guess? It clearly says "servant" in the little chart I'm making off on the side. Okay I think the lesson is that I should have made this little set of layers BEFORE starting to draw anyone.

Time to get to drawing I guess.

Hmmm! I have let this percolate in the back of my mind while puttering around the Internet, and I came to another realization:

Lesson: If there is a character who is a focal point in a large group like this, consider ensuring that they are there from the start - just use one of my own characters, or a friends', and set a starting bid for it sufficiently high to more than cover the time I spent drawing them in the center of the image.

This ensures that I can follow my general artistic habits of "start with the most important part of the drawing, get that working solidly, then make sure everything else flows properly into or around it".

(You can go the other way if you like, focus on nailing the overall composition first and adding ever-finer details. If you work in traditional media I feel there's strong pressure from physical constraints to do this as you can't just casually resize your art and/or canvas halfway through a piece like I can in Illustrator. Your tools shape your art and your process, to a degree.)

if i hadn't lost my copies of all the "life in hell" books in katrina i am pretty sure there would be a photograph here from "art is hell" of a scruffy cartoon rabbit saying something like "the artist's eternal question: are drugs a recreational purchase, or a business expense?"

*carefully draws a butt*

*carefully wraps it in tight fabric and adds sparkles*

*zooms out*

fuck now I'm horny for this butt and I am sitting in a very public place near a dude talking about how many baptisms he performed this past year, oh if only he knew what demon-haunted idolatry was going on next to him

I spent a while this morning getting a couple more of the figures in here. With the Powerful Butt safely out of view.

Also there is an eleventh figure now :)

maybe I'm gonna need a bigger platter for all these bottles

or an assistant

It sure was hard to get myself going on this again after worrying that I lost some of my work this morning.

But luckily I slipped my own fursona into the background for laughs. Drawing Peganthyrus is pretty much always a free action when it comes to issues of motivation.

Still working on this. If I can get a decent chunk of work out of myself today then I think I can probably have all the figures in there to some degree before bedtime, and that would be pretty nice.

Then I get to do some recomposition that this direly needs, and also some contrast fixes that it also direly needs. And do some clothes. Then I can call it done.

okay yeah that's another half hour in for today and I think one more half hour should see Djane roughed in and that will mean all figures are at first draft.

Recompose, contrast, clothes, some bg I keep putting off.. done.

I am so glad a matched set of genies volunteered to be the furniture here because it lets me do crazy shit like this.

I might replace the canopy they were originally gonna be holding with something else decorative or symbolic. @Doephin, if you have any suggestions for appropriate symbology for your reign, lemme know. :)

At long last I am at the point where I can start fooling with some slight recompositions and general lighting/contrast stuff. This one stayed in a weird place where it kinda looked like a giant mess for a long time, I need to think about how to avoid that state if I do more of these sorts of things.

Or maybe I will just end up lengthening my expectations for how long a piece can spend in that state. Dunno. We'll see how I feel when this is done. Which is probably gonna be pretty soon if I can deal with these battery troubles.

tweaking character colors so they all fall into a midtone between the bright yellow and deep purple I'm using for highlights/shadows, starting to do some clothes, starting to not feel like it's a Giant Mess any more.

More character color tweaking, I think that's mostly done.

Some discussion elsewhere on how good @Phorm looks in yellow/gold made me decide to try changing the colors on her veils and outfit and I think we have a definite winner here.

More clothes, a plate full of bottles, and some general little detail tweaks and I think this will be Done soon!

Closing in on Done. Woo!

If I can get another hour and a half in tonight at Bean Gallery or something then it might be done tonight, and I'd be pretty happy about that.