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Prey — Description
This is another pic which was done a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. (As in, a week ago. It's been up on my website for that long.)

Special credit to who extracted Momentaru's lineart for me! Without her, I might not of finished this picture, which is in fact began as 2 sketches spliced together, then became two characters with a background painted underneath. I drew Mo first, inked him and then ~sindos extracted his lines. Then, once he was fully coloured, I realized I wanted to finish his picture the way I had originally intended - that is, by adding his horse Shivra. However, Shiv's sketch hadn't been inked, so her lines were drawn digitally. If you look closely, you can probably even tell the difference between her lines and his. (HINT: Mo's lines have a grainy texture to them because they were drawn with real ink, on real paper, traditionally.)

I had a bit of trouble figuring out the scale of this pair, mainly because I'm sick to tears of getting my horse-to-human/drakoon scales wrong in my drawings. Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who gave advice on this dilemma, particularly who dug up an extremely handy scale chart for me. Thank you!

So, onto notes about the picture itself:

When I originally sketched this, I had the idea of doing a winter background, mainly because of Mo's manner of dress. However, when it comes down to it, Mo's a drakoon and is utterly oblivious to temperature - he wears fur, because it's easier to acquire than fabric in the early Rimarian human society he lives in and it goes with the category of his job. With the clothes Mo wears, he tries to blend in with human society, but he doesn't always succeed. This guy would be still wearing this furry getup in the dead of summer and would still be under the vague conclusion that his camofluage is working.

In any case, both Mo's and Shiv's gear are supposed to look mostly homemade, since the early humans of Rimer would not have much in the way of resources.

After I finished Mo & Shivra, I started thinking about the background and sketched it. For this picture, I wanted to put out something more than the usual generic crap I somehow end up with. First, I decided to pick a colour scheme, so in going with Mo's gold eye colour, I went with a sunset deal, having not done one in a while. I started out with a base gradient layer of a dark orange and a lighter one, then on top made a layer of simple blue fading into nothing. I finished it off with yet another layer of gradient, this one to lighten the corner of the picture to better represent the setting of a sun.

After that, the background was mainly a test of lighting. I used orange highlights for absolutely everything and used dark red sharp cell shading for the characters, with a transparent overlay layer of orange on each to make them appear to be more like they were part of the background.

Besides the attempt at making a better background (I really don't think I made much progress at getting better personally) I also had to of course make the picture tell a little story. I simply can NOT STAND pictures which don't tell some sort of tale! If you're crafty, you can probably figure out at least hint of what's going on in all my full scenes. This is concept art for the next book, Born of Fire in my series, so I can't tell you what's happening, but if you use your eyes, you might get at least a taste of the tale in this image.

And now I'm going to bed, because I haven't had a proper sleep in about a week. I'm looking forwards to my little week of solitude!

P.S. I apologize for the wad of typos in this artist comment. I'm tired.

P.P.S. If you're thinking of drawing Mo or Shivra, I wouldn't use this picture as a reference. If you've been paying any attention at all you'll know the actual colours of the characters are hidden under a layer of transparent orange.

Again, special thanks to everyone who gave me tips on horse to human scale, in particular and to who extracted Momentaru's lineart. You guys are awesome~!!!

(c) Rosanna P. Brost. All rights reserved. Do NOT copy, trace, alter, reuse or redistribute!