Contests and competitions are great for motivation and for pushing yourself outside of your usual niche - or so I find.
I have entered several in the past, and entered a new one recently - a ‘Spooky Creatures’ theme hosted by Clip Studio Paint on social media.
It can be easy to get stuck into a bit of a niche (to avoid the word rut…) when working on personal projects - somewhere between familiarity, comfort and obsession I find myself working on similar things over and over. And so the task of illustrating ‘spooky creatures’ was a chance to do something I don’t usually do.
My entry is below alongside some progress shots:
This started out, as you can see, as a pencil sketch in a notebook - the best of a few different options. I then took a photo of this with my phone, put that into Clip Studio Paint and painted over the top. I started out with a few different layers of multiply/soft-light/overlay until I got the rough structure of it down, and then I began rendering away with a few more textural brushes to polish things up.
Overall I’m pretty pleased with how this came out. The theme of the contest pushed me into painting something I usually wouldn’t, a Halloween scene, which itself pushed me into some more garish colours and ideas than I’m used to using.
You can see the entry post I made on Instagram here.
Hope you like it!