What with the new Cintiq at work, I’ve suddenly felt much more inspired to draw things. The latest result (click for huge):

I enjoyed drawing this and trying to think about how it would actually look, with lighting and plants and so on. It was cool to see shapes of things emerge as I filled in the lighting on them, going from an ugly scribble to something more three-dimensional, and I enjoyed watching the way the virtual “paint” overlaid to make the shading. I felt like a regular Bob Ross at times!

First I did sort of an impressionistic sketch of color and shape of more or less what was in my head.

Then I used that layer as a base to “pencil in” more defined shapes on top of it and turned off the first layer.

Next I did the sky coloring, since that was easiest and gave me a reference for generally where the lighting was coming from.

Oooh, you know, I could do a gif for this, so you can see it build up:

Some Myst-style references: