Dancing Star - From start to finish -

it's been a long time since i worked on a piece for so long.

April 3rd i post the sketch on my sketch tumblr.

I really liked the idea behind it so i decided yeah, this can be the second image in a series.
I'm actually not a fan of series cause... well they have rules and i'm bad at sticking to rules... however just drawing and saying this works in that series is much better for me...

anyways i started inking her and my arm decided a reoccurring chronic shoulder injury i have was just gonna flare up... when this happens i lose almost all my grip strength and if i push it i can end up going to physio to get things to a point where i can use my arm again.
so, even though letting a picture sit is dangerous cause if i draw something else i may abandon the previous sketch.
but... in this case i couldn't draw at all so... nothing else got done.
however  a week later and i managed (even though it mean only a few lines a day before taking a break) to finish the line art.

however it wasn't quite looking... special enough... so i added a 'crap' ton of stars.
. . . see when i'm in pain i do stupid things... like make my life much harder then it needs to be.

also on top of that i changed the direction of the fabric flowing out of the star cause i didn't like how it looked going the other way.

so... at this point i'm ealizign what a moron i am cause
a) the the light source beign around the biggest star the light is going to be at a different angle for pretty much every single solitary star which all have a way they are facing and i want to do cast shadows cause normally i get lazy and don't do them but i've already sent so much time on it...

on the first day of colouring i got the flat colour and the stars done.
on the second day i got the drapery coming out of the star

and then the third day i got everything else and the cast shadows done....
and then just now i finished the bg.
i think a rough estimate of how long i spent on this piece including line art an sketch is somewhere around 15 hours.... if not more.
and a good 6-8 of it was in the stars and cloth alone...
but in the end i'm happy with what i got.

i wanted to give it a bit of a painterly fee so i actually spent a large cunk of time with no lines to make sure the forms made sense and the backround i made a custom brush to get that effect and i may not try to use it to colour and entire piece... we'll see (i've been making a lot of brushes lately... it's so nice ot make things that you can't find otherwise.

so yeah i hop you like it and maybe i'll do another pic with estelle... i technically have one thumbnailed.

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