“Dragon City” practice compositions (2019 background sketchbook)

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Dragon City - 4 composition attempts

“Dragon City.” I’d like to develop one of these into a full-blown painting. Which one is your favorite, 1, 2, 3, or 4?

I drew this after reading some of Betsy Luntao’s tutorials over on DA. Her book How to Draw Backgrounds with Character (by Betsy Luntao, available free on Gumroad: https://gumroad.com/l/tTiRg ) is one of the most helpful background drawing books I’ve ever seen. These were made after following her advice where you start off with a sentence describing what’s going on with the environment you want to draw (in my case, “a dragon flies over some ancient ruins” or something like that. This was from 2019, give me a break!).

Sketchdump from my 2019 background practice book

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A collection of drawings, including cupcake houses and Pixel J Cat ridin' in a car.Back in 2019, I designated a very inexpensive sketchbook from Target to be my “background practice” sketchbook. I draw stuff from life (furniture! My cat’s activity center!) and practice drawing cupcake houses for Moxie Kitten. That scrawl at the bottom reads: “The fast and the furriest!” Some of my later furniture studies in ink and marker have been fun, I’ll post those after I get through this backlog. I feel like this is a great way to boost my skills in a low-pressure setting.

Player Hillie – a bizarre Silent Hill-inspired monster

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A strange monster with a scissor-faced mask gestures with long fingers

Another one of my Hillie monsters, inspired by the original SILENT HILL series (1-3). I used to want to digitally paint this, but now I think its hanging around is a mental block to me uploading my backlog, so up it goes!

(If you really really want to see this digitally painted, please drop me a comment, maybe that’ll motivate me!)

Sleeping Beauty tree technique for artists

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Random shrubberies done in marker (plus a Moxie Kitten cameo!)

I caught this short video on the artist who contributed to the GORGEOUS backgrounds of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty called “Eyvind Earle – The backgrounds from Sleeping Beauty.” In it, he showed a quick technique–laying down a dark shape, then doing the leaf details in brighter colors. I thought I’d try to replicate it in marker (which means I had to reverse it, natch, since light marker doesn’t show up on dark), but even that turned out really good for little effort, I think!