The Soul in Art
just beeing with turtles
We are already halfway through January. It boggles my mind how fast time flies. I hope everything’s being going well with everyone! I, for one, haven’t been enjoying my year all that much. I’ve been sleep-deprived and suffering from gastritis because of how hectic it’s been at my full-time job. It’s one reason why I wasn’t able to finish my first artwork of the year as quickly as I’d hoped.
Before we jump into that, I’d like to first talk about my last artwork of 2022.
This piece was, of course, created as part of my personal art challenge, for prompt #3 with ‘environment’. It was inspired by the art style of _N0MA_. I aimed for a whimsical look to this piece and I wanted to challenge myself by painting everything from scratch. So no using premade vegetation brushes for this one. It was very therapeutic, to say the least.
But while I like how this turned out, enough to even think of creating a premade book cover with it (still a work-in-progress), a part of me had to step back when I put this alongside my other works on my website. I’ve since removed it, because it didn’t look like something I created. Does that make sense? It’s like my soul isn’t part of this piece for some reason. Perhaps I’ve gotten too much inspiration from someone else that there’s a lack of me in there. This was a humbling lesson I learnt at the end of last year.
Moving on to prompt #4. Predator. Again, I thought of ocean life because when I created the prompts for Chillcember, it was with them in mind. I naturally got reminded of sharks. They scream predator, right? But I decided to go with another animal instead, and so here we have A Feast of Jellyfish.
Here’s the colour scheme I wanted to go with before, but decided to let nature take its course.
I struggled a lot with the turtle’s scales. I already knew it would be a daunting task, but managed to reassure myself because I’ve painted pangolin scales before. How difficult would a turtle’s scales be? I was so wrong. But! I did it. The next difficult thing was painting the tentacles on those jellyfishes. I have to admit I got a little lazy at the end. This piece was dragging on longer than I would like and I was getting bored of it. I personally think it might have been nicer to have another jellyfish in the mix, but I just couldn’t bring myself to paint another one, so here we have the end product!
The turtle I painted looks tons better than what I managed to do in 2020. For comparison, here is the artwork in question.
We’re almost halfway through this challenge! I’m looking forward to the next one. :) Here’s a reference again.
Nightmare ✔️
Scales ✔️
Environment ✔️
Predator ✔️
Crystal
Frost
Sword
Kingdom
Drink
Algae
My heart to yours,
Elaine