WIP process: Sunflower auction artwork

[mific]

Another WIP process, for a work I've been planning since mid-June. This one was for the Sunflower auction for Ukraine, and my recipient had some specific wishes. They wanted a Harry Potter artwork, and suggested several prompts within this fandom. I chose the following one and we discussed the details in a series of emails. My recipient didn’t want movie canon characters, and also preferred them to be older, in mid-life, so I researched the wikis and we conferred about appearance details from book canon. This summary was the result:

Draco Malfoy and Theodore Knott as friends, aged about 40, in a manor house room, dark atmosphere (I made this Malfoy Manor). Theo has fairly recently been released from Azkaban. Theo has dark blue eyes and fairly short (but not prison short) "mouse-brown" hair, and he looks "rabbity" (a slight overbite, I guessed). Draco has longer pale blond hair, grey eyes and a "triangular face". They're wearing interesting wizarding robes.

I went through my usual process in building up the pic, with an additional final digital process as the art was to be provided digitally, as a jpg file and an AO3 post.

First, I used a bunch of references to make a rough collage. It’s very rough in places, with scribbled drawing to fill in some bits. The robes were partly from refs and partly painted in. I also used another layer to draw their body stance outlines under the robes to check proportions, but I deleted that layer. Collage stage:


Then I used a layer on top of the (lowered transparency) collage to draw the lineart:


I put that in a Word doc, and printed it on Arches 185gsm A4 paper which is thin enough that my Canon printer can handle it. The Canon is just an inkjet but it prints a drawing that’s waterproof, which is handy. Then I used the printed drawing to do the watercolour painting:


Once that was done, I scanned the watercolour pic and then finessed it in the last, digital stage. In this part, I adjusted some selective colour balances in Photoshop then did the rest in Procreate. There, I copy-pasted the foreground as a separate layer (the figures, chair, desk, book stack, candle and kneazle – the cat-thing) so as to darken the background, added translucent white and green glass layers to the wine bottle and glasses, finessed details like their faces, and added the candlelight effects. So the final version is here - click through for the AO3 post.

Overall, I guess it took about 5 days from the collage stage, until posting to AO3.

Comments

[mific]

Thanks so much!