hey kids! i got busy with school again, lol. i've been sewing a fair amount lately so i haven't drawn anything in forever. but here are the prizes for the 1st and 2nd place winners from my art+song contest! these belong to @pandadd2 (koi boy w/ and w/out bg) and @olivegreensky (colorful headshot) alone. i hope you like them!! i tried to blend my style with the reference images (mostly because i can't help it, i'm really bad at converting things to my constantly shifting style ahah) so they're pretty different so far as style goes. i also drew them a few weeks apart from each other. plus i used different brushes. lots of factors. i also included two different versions of koi boy because i'm not the best at backgrounds so i like the one without it better but the important thing is i tried :') and it's at least relatively better than the last watery background i tried so that's something. i do like the pose. originally it was going to be one of those floating poses y'know but it looked like he was stepping on rocks so i made it happen. i'm normally pretty bad with getting flow in poses unless they're mermaids (happy mermay i've drawn like one smol doodle mermaid and i'm sad!!) so i really like that this one has flow while still fitting comprehensively into a background. i also really like the hand on the right side but the koi partially covers it up (pretty much the biggest reason i made them transparent ahah). as for the headshot for olivegreensky i'm proud of myself for branching out a bit into more cell-like shading, even though i did cave and use some gradients. i normally like blending things to death but i'm learning that hard edges are really important too! i really love the style that olive used in the original image, found here: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/238571215/ i cannot yet manage to get a successful cartoon style out of my hands so this one really impressed me :D it doesn't need any shading to define the form because it already has such solid shapes... legendary tbh, wish i could pull that off but i haven't put enough work into it yet. someday!! just gotta get there slowly but surely, one baby step at a time. for now i'll probably keep on learning how to shade well. anywho have a lovely weekend everyone!!
