Dive

Materials

Digital (Krita)

Yet another entry to my collection of "It's not perfect, but it'll have to do." Which, if I'm being honest, seems to be all I can draw these days. I must sound repetitive by this point, but I need to keep saying it: Something imperfect is better than nothing, especially when you're doing it for fun.

thinking of fun, this was something of a self challenge/study that I decided to make more entertaining by turning it into fanart. Lighting has always been a weakness for me, as has depth, texture, and perspective. Since I can't fix everything all at once, I decided to focus on trying for a stark, underwater ray of light, and how that singular light source would interact with stuff around it.

Trying to give it that underwater feel was a challenge, and I ended up with about thirty layers? Maybe more, as I struggled to get that stark, murky feel. I also tried to avoid doing much in the way of undersketching--this was made with a pretty bare bones outline, with a big focus on building simple blocks of color into more complex shapes. I worry about how loose and messy this technique can be, but damn, it's fun to do.

Another slightly different thing I tried with this was focusing on using the "multiply" and "lighten" screens in the Krita program, as opposed to my usual technique of picking a color off the wheel and shading by eye. I saw the idea of going from base color-->multiply-->lighten-->details as needed in a Youtube video, and decided to give it a go.

While I think I might've overcomplicated things somewhere in there, overall? I really like it. Making shadows via multiply is really nice. So nice, in fact, I'm pretty sure this was one of those things I really should have picked up or learned a while back.

Because this was more a practice piece and a chance to blow off steam from a different thing I've been working on, I don't have much of a story for this one. I sort of imagine it's a spot of concentrated ectoplasm, a Ghost Zone version of those deep water brine pools that kill everything that swims into them. This is also my excuse for why the enviroment is so boring. I totally didn't just forget that the Ghost Zone is supposed to have floating purple doors, no sir, that's worldbuilding.

In all seriousness, I do regret not including something to make it clear that this isn't just a glowing green ocean. I did try to intigrate some doors into the rock at one point--I thought it would be cool to imply that old, ghostless doors could compress into supernatural limestone, but it didn't work out. I had a similar issue with some giant, beat up doors sticking out of the ground: I was pretty far into my design, and just couldn't find a good spot to put them.

In retrospect, I probably should have switched out those random columns for something Danny Phantom related. A broken statue of Pariah Dark with ruined doors swirling around his head and into the dark maybe, or a weird giant sea creature peering down at Danny as he's diving in.

Ideas for later, I suppose.

As for Danny, don't worry, he's a halfa. A little shower to wash off the concentrated undeath, and he'll be fine. Halfas are sturdy like that.