daisuga bb 2022

okay. so. this year i finally drew a daichi i’m happy with! some other achievements include a full background, and managing to incorporate the public domain image of a sheet from tutankhamun’s embalming into my second image, bc i am cursed.

a digital painting with cliffs and the ocean in the background, against a bright blue sky. in the foreground, a dead wyvern lies half-crumpled in a clearing. in front of it, suga steps into a circle of stones, helping daichi off the ground. daichi looks up at suga in awe, his sword discarded to one side.
a piece of folded parchment or canvas, with a digital pastel/watercolor sketch on top. daichi and suga sit on chairs by firelight in simple clothing. suga is curled up on his chair, speaking; daichi is leaning forward, listening.

and some progress pics for the first piece:

simple, blocky digital ink lines. the vague shape of a wyvern corpse in the background, with cartoonish but still recognizable daisuga in the foreground. suga reaches out to help daichi up.
quick little doodle from near the start of the bang. i really liked the shape and focus on daisuga in the gesture here, but it didn’t translate well to lineart.

between that sketch and the rest of these progress screenshots, i did the entirety of piece 2. i only came back to this one near the end!

blocky base digital gouache colors laid down for mountain, sky and grass, and a tidy sketch of suga helping daichi up, lined but not colored. the same wyvern corpse is blocked in black and bloody.
same wyvern sketch, just colored. everything else here stayed into the final version, just getting painted over.
the wyvern corpse is still blocked in roughly. daisuga are colored in with flat colors, and the background is halfway to being rendered. trees teem at the edge of the clearing, newly painted.
more painting! me just pointedly avoiding the wyvern.
the shitty wyvern is replaced by a much more detailed wyvern. it's still very awkward in colors and thick, heavy lines. the final version paints over all of this extensively.
aaaand finally looking up what the heck a wyvern is on the witcher wiki.

whew! i knew i’d be challenging myself by picking a fantasy summary which would involve both armor and (likely) either magic or fantasy creatures. the real struggle was the landscape, though! once i looked up how wyverns worked, and with a lot of ostrich references, the wyvern came together.

i did put it off til last, though, so you can tell i was apprehensive about it. i think it looks good!

the original shapes for the mountains in the background are from the pinnacles, a particular rock form at the summit of a hike in the coromandel, new zealand. it’s one of my favorite walks, and from the top you can see land and sea and sky. i pasted two pictures of the pinnacles onto my canvas, slapped some blocky grey shapes over top, and then deleted the picture layer, and went from there. that’s why they’ve got that distinctive shape!

thank you to my writer fruity for being such an inspiration, and our beta lina for wonderful cheerleading and attention to detail. please do check out the fic, guardians of a rare thing (named from a mountain goats song at my suggestion, much to my delight!) here.

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