Large Scale Images - July

Eyyy~ finally something to talk about for this month :b

So the sunset image I'd already mentioned a few things about on the public upload, like the fact it was meant to become a mouse pad. I have no idea whether it's actually been printed by now, but assuming it has, I'm hoping it turned out good.

Drawing on my experience from back in the print store days, I created two versions with varying brightness levels, because prints have a tendency to turn out darker than you expect them to, regardless of how much you factor in the brightness of the screen. The next thing you have to look out for is the mudding of th darker colors, even if you have gone up in brightness.

I said I had to make a conscious effort to not put in detail nobody would see and that turned out to be a bit of a hit-or-miss deal. I used some old props to do the grass on the front hill, which works just fine, but I had a hard time properly rendering the forest in the mid-field.

The other thing was properly rendering the family, without overloading them in relation to the background. I would have wanted to put in plenty more fur rendering, but as much as they're supposed to be a center piece in the picture, given the scale of the image, putting in much more than I did would have invoked an uncanny look.

Part of that issue was due to the lighting, which I have no real experience with and referenced off multiple images to achieve what we see here. Looking at it now a little further down the line, I'm seeing things I overlooked/would probably wanna fix, but as I've said many times before by now, if I was to work every image to the perfection I personally want, I'd never get anything done.

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I am told both Kal and Aleu loved the surprise art, so regardless of the constant artistic nagging in the back of my head, I do rate this a success. I very deliberately didn't upload this on Kal's birthday, since that's kinda personal information. Outside of that though, this one fought me plenty along the way, even though I had a blast working on it whenever I did have a moment.

The greyscales were difficult to work with for some reason. I'm not 100%, but I'm guessing it might be the brightness of the scene, since I'm not used to work with lighted, sunny days like the one I was trying to portray, so from an artistic standpoint, I had no shadows to hide things in the way I usually do X3 Not entirely happy with the hill in the background either, or rather, I had a different vision for how it was supposed to look, but it serves it's purpose as far as the composition goes.

The things I am happy with though is the poses and the coloful feel of a warm summer day. Most of the issues I have with the image in retrospect are things that don't sting the eye enough to be noticeable and that's a win in it's own right.

As for the content of the image; I know Kal and myself share a liking of naturist tropes and lifestyle, so I took the opportunity to get to draw some naked people being casual about it. The mate doesn't enjoy those same tropes so she got to wear clothes for this one :b

I saw plenty of comments about bug bites on the public upload and in pm's with friends, though I feel there's so many issues we never address as furries, that one's actually negligible in most respects - also, it allows an excuse to check eachother for ticks later, so what's there to complain about?