rowyn

I finished my last art card for the 30 in 30 project. Yay! Here are some of my favorites that I haven't posted yet:

This one is based on a photograph that

verminius_rex took of me at ConQuesT a few years back, I think. Not that it actually looks anything like me, of course. I'm pretty happy with the way the dress came out, though.

This one is based on one of the photos I took at Powell Gardens several years ago, when I went there with Lut and my parents.

This is roughly the point where it occured to me to look for public-domain-image sites for references, instead of searching on "public domain portrait" images and hoping that the items returned were actually in the public domain. Not that this is really a huge worry since it's not like my pictures tended to look very much like subjects anyway. I like the composition on this picture, though; I think the sparse leaves in the background work pretty nicely. Entirely by chance, since I was just putting in elements from the original photo.

For this one, I didn't use any image references. Instead, I dug up everything anyone's ever told me about composition and actually tried to compose the picture, instead of "This subject looks interesting, I'll draw it" followed by "I need to put something in the background. What would be there?" 9.9 The main rules I was trying to follow here were some advice from

tuftears ('Whatever the figures are looking at, make sure there's something to redirect the eye from that back to your picture and not off the page' 'You can put in a slice of background instead of filling up the whole background'), some from

cerulean ('use different values for the colors in the foreground vs the background') and the rule of thirds, which

alinsa told me about (divide the picture with two horizontal and two vertical lines at equal distances, and try to put interesting things at some of the intersection points). Anyway, I was pretty happy with the way it worked. I didn't realize until I scanned it how crooked the landscape-window is, though. Ooops.

There were some more that I liked, but I'll link to those later.