Today I worked on getting that style down. A few experiments in using digital watercolor vs. digital gel color vs. digital smeary stuff, which gave rise to a few doodles, which I’ll inflict upon you.

Pierced dude This guy was actually highlighted and halfway done, but Painter has this annoying bug (and has for the past half-dozen incarnations) of randomly quitting whenever you use the watercolor tool. I, of all people, oughta have “Save often” branded to my forebrain, but at least my reminder only came at the cost of half an experimental doodle.
chick Another random thing, this time with more gel washes rather than watercolor. I did eventually get the style I wanted more or less down, by, as I could’ve guessed, combining all three styles and saving every five minutes to keep the Painter Watercolor Demons at bay, but since I was working on a chunk of the painting that I’m doing all these style doodles for, I can’t post it yet–I’ll put a jpg in a few weeks when I’m done with the whole thing, but y’know.

Somewhat related, I did another painting. It started out as a similiar style thing, but I got sidetracked by a happy accident with the oil pastel tool, and the end result, in a similiar vein as the lard beast yesterday, (my cat is a neverending source of inspiration) was this beasty. The accompanying blurb was “Following a short-lived fad for pet dragons in the Year of the Withered Turnip, and the inevitable injuries and attendant property damage, dragon breeders set out to create a docile domestic lap-dragon. Unfortunately, reckless inbreeding for the desireable traits of placid temper and a diet other than raw meat resulted in low fertility, while failing to deliver the dragon-breeder’s Holy Grail of a dwarf lap-dragon. Extensive trapping of wild dragons to improve the strain led to the extinction of wild dragons by the Year of the Gibbering Chipmunk, while domestic dragons grew increasingly fat, sedentary, and omnivorous (although the fertility problem had been fixed entirely too well.) In the end, the dream of lap-dragons was abandoned, and dragons found a new niche as garbage disposals, eating virtually every form of organic trash and converting it to high grade fertilizer. Attempts by the well-meaning to coax the morbidly obese and slothful dragons into a healthier lifestyle revealed that in fact, dragons were perfectly content to sleep twenty-three hours a day and have their food delivered, and had a regrettable tendency to convert anyone attempting to alter their lifestyle into mulch by the most direct route.”

(Yes, yes, I confess, I went out’ve my way to irk the more humorless Dragon People with that description. Mea Culpa. Character flaw. I am weak! Weak!) So far, it’s been interesting, though–opinion seems to be mixed whether it’s a sad prisoner or happy blob, particularly on Yerf, where the description was shortened for space and didn’t include the last line about mulch. The way that people interpret art is always kinda interesting. Well, to me.

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