Art for +Potya (and how I made it!)

  Heyo, Jammers!  Crazcatlover here, back with a blog post!  Today, I wanted to work on practicing color theory and composition in my art.  I know these sound really complicated, but don't click away from the post!  Their names may sound complicated and intimidating, but color theory and composition are actually rather simple.  This post isn't exactly an art lesson anyways, so I won't go too in-depth about them, but I encourage you to look them up if you're interested!

  Anyways, I've done a lot of experimenting with color theory with designing characters and my non-AJ drawings, but when working with something like Animal Jam avatars, it's not really up to me what colors the character has.  However, what I can do is work with what I have.  And besides, you don't need to only use the exact colors, patterns, or even accessories of the AJ avatars you draw.

  So with that in mind, I went to Google+ to see if anyone wanted their AJ avatars drawn, and +Potya (aka kitten1778) did, so drew her AJ tiger!  Since this whole drawing was kind of an experiment, I decided to put together an 'inspiration board' for the piece so that I could have a basic idea of what to draw before I began.

  I originally intended to draw Potya's hamster along with her tiger, but in the end I didn't include it in the drawing.  After I put together this inspiration board, I started sketching what I had in mind on a piece of printer paper.

   First I came up with this very rough sketch...

  ... and then this.  I went for a more steampunk-style for the wings, and I really like how they turned out!  The rough sketch was a bit too rough, though, so I ended up having to transfer the drawing to another piece of paper for the 'lineart'.

To do so, I did a DIY-carbon-paper technique involving rubbing a pencil on the other side of the paper that the sketch is on, and then tracing over the lines of the drawing.  While I normally draw using a mechanical pencil, I used a regular wooden pencil for this since the lead is thicker and easier to rub onto the paper.

  And viola- the finished lineart!  Once I finished adding in all the little details to the lineart, I scanned it into the computer and made the white areas transparent so that I could color underneath them.

  I made a layer underneath the line-art and colored it in entirely in this blue color; partly so that I could easily select it to keep the color within the lines, and also so that I could have a base color to use to help me make all the colors cohesive.

  I added in the basic colors, and kept color theory in mind while choosing the colors.  Rather than just pick the colors from the image of +Potya's tiger, I adjusted the hue, vibrancy, and saturation of the base color in order to keep everything nice and organized.  (I must admit, at this point, the face kinda reminded me more of a monkey than a tiger... heh)

  I added some really basic shading to a new layer so as to avoid messing up the basic coloring.  I love to add tons of detail and shading to my drawings, but I wanted to keep this piece relatively simple.

  And then, it was time to conquer my greatest fear (er, art fear at least)... the background!  *Dun dun DUNNNN*  I must admit, I find drawing landscapes and other scenery very difficult.  I decided to do a sunset for the background, since red is blue's complementary color, and sunsets are red.  Of course, I found a photo of a sunset to look at, just to make sure I wasn't completely messing the whole thing up.

  And at last, I added some final lighting details, including some light around the eyes for more contrast.  My goal was to bring the focus to the face.  I really like how this drawing turned out; definitely let me know what you think!  I know this post was a bit different from normal, but I hoped you enjoyed it!  I promise next week's post won't be all about complicated art theories, but since I've been learning color theory and whatnot recently, I wanted to share that with you guys :)

  That's all for today, I hope you have a fabulous day full of sunny skies and low humidity (because even a beautiful sunny day is hard to enjoy if the air is wet).  Byeeeeee~