“I rule this land. A land that streches so far that it leaks into the sky. There’s no one around, and that is why I rule.”  
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A draw this again, based on this piece: www.deviantart.com/laps-sp/art…
 
It’s that time of the year again, time to re-draw and check in my progress.  
I really enjoy doing this. I often forget that I am making progress and I just feel stagnated, but with these pieces I can see how much I have actually improved, specially when I compare to the first ineration.
 
This year in regards to the composition, I made something to the original, unlike any of the previous years, and got something much closer to what I originally had intended.  
I’ve been struggling a bit with finishing painted pieces and I think I discovered why. I belive that one of my weaknesses is my lack of textures. All objects seem to have the exact same texture, hair, fur, glass, fabric, walls, skin. All the same. Plus if it was a large enough piece, I’d get bored halfway throgh and star to butcher everything, to rush a lot of things.  
I want my art to me textured. My fabourite art pieces feel like colages of randomly assorted textures and colors that just work in a organized chaos that I love. My art until August was very controled, color didn’t go outside the lines ever; I always did a “second sketch layer” that was basically line art, would spend ages on flat colors, somethjng I VERY rarely enjoyed doing, would then render until it was incledibly smooth, I eould worry when i lost the original color of something when I painted over it and would be paranoid about using the color picker /eyedropper tool.  
I started trying to change with this painting here: www.deviantart.com/laps-sp/art…  
And here: www.deviantart.com/laps-sp/art… (this one is actually one of my favourite paintings ever, specially in regards to the technique not only because of the subject portraid)  
I would only need to make one sketch, loosely put down the color, not caring about staying within the lines, same for the cell shading. I would be much more free in the rendering, and I started to not obcess so much with the colors, starte dto play around with choosing my colors without the absolute need of the color picker and overall learned anout color theory, values, composition, and used A LOT less layers.
 
In regards to this piece, I made the decision to change the brush I was using to match more with the texture I wanted, who’d think you can do that???  
I used a different brush for the shed, the sky, the ground and the pony, and I van say this actually looks like a painting. Something i can be really proud of. The final file has 5 layers. The thumbnail sketch, the correctly proportioned sketch, the rendering layer and the layer with my signature, and aside from a couple extra multply layers that were later merged, I mostly workied in tone layer. I can see how some might think that is “bad”, but personnally, working in a single layer has been a absolute great choice. It forces me to work from the background to foreground, makes me focus on things that would bore me first and then get to more interesting stuff; makes my drawing MUCH more fluid and lively because they are not super constricted in lines, becaus ethere are no lines, only the sketch kayer that i (mostly) covered up. I’ve done SO much progress with my backgrounds this year. Just you wait until.I can show you what I’ve been working on, I’m sure you’ll like it :)
 
I wonder what I’ll do next year.
 
Thanks for reading,  
Have a nice day!