Artist Statement:
This year, my personal goal as an artist is to develop my background skills and diversify my general skill set. For this piece, I wanted to tackle a background that I initially thought was quite difficult—it had been 2 years since I’d drawn the interior of an aquarium. To begin, I gathered a multitude of references from Pinterest and combined them to create the final vision. There was a lot of thought put into the setup. Initially, this piece was supposed to have a horizontal composition, but I chose a vertical composition to save time. I also created a sense of contrast with the yellow glowing orbs and the blues of the aquarium and deliberately chose poses for the characters so that they would fit in the environment well. I wanted this piece to tell a story and illustrate the sense of wonder that comes with seeing a beautiful environment for the first time. Ultimately, my primary goal was to create an immersive environment that the viewer could appreciate aesthetically.
Once I started illustrating, I found that the characters were a lot more difficult to bring to life compared to the environment itself. Surprisingly, the shoes proved to be a challenge—in order to draw them correctly in their respective angles, I had to find the 3D models of the shoes and angle them to the ideal positions to create an appropriate reference. What was even more challenging, however, was making sure that the characters’ rendering fit well with the background. I learned a lot during the character rendering process. I went with a stylized art style on purpose instead of the usual semi-realism, as the background I had rendered wasn’t realistic and would look abnormal next to semi-realistic characters. I had a lot of trouble with lighting the characters (due to the many aspects to consider: glowing orbs, aquarium, etc.), so I asked many other artists for feedback and assistance. After figuring the lighting out, I had some trouble with rendering as well—it was difficult to maintain the same values while adding more saturated colors and stylizing in my own unique way. I took a lot of inspiration from various artists for this rendering style, combining different shapes and textures. Finally, I adjusted the colors to create more saturation and contrast and added some glow to the yellow orbs. I made sure to use complementary & neighboring colors to make sure that the overall look wasn’t too much but was still pleasing to the eye.
I expected that this piece would be a lot more time-consuming and challenging, but I ended up really enjoying the art process behind it. I ran into some problems and difficulties along the way, but what was most fun was figuring out the solutions to them & applying new techniques to my art. Though I don’t personally like the end result (as there are many things to be improved on), I learned a lot from this experience and will continue to do my best to challenge myself & create better illustrations in the future.
