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Thursday, July 23, 2020

Close To You (Happy Birthday Toothlesslove!)

Happy Birthday Toothlesslove! Wow, already this time of year again... time both flies and crawls. Anyway, I wanted to make you a gift... and I was on a very strict schedule so I wasn't able to put in as many hours as I had hoped I could. Still... I hope you like it! I'll post a Bday message free version down bellow as well as talk a little bit about my thought process while doing this art piece.




So the piece is called "Close To You". I really wanted to not cop out and do another "Sky" or "Background free" piece. Doing that in digital painting can cut down on my time and effort quite a lot. So can using a line art as an outline to make coloring less difficult. However, I didn't want to cut corners on this one. Unfortunately that also made it very hard to finish in time! And I will say... I think Hiccup's color/shading feels a little off. I am pretty happy with Toothless, though! I love how, as he's a big black dragon, his scales can kinda naturally absorb whatever light I'm going for. So in this piece we get purple Toothless!

I also wanted to do an HTTYD1 painting. I did HTTYD3 last year, and though I love the sequel, it felt really sweet to go back to the roots of the story. I wanted to capture the sweet closeness of the boy and his dragon, kind crystalize that in time even though their stories move on. And I know for a fact that Toothlesslove absolutely adores the first film, with the sequels being a little bit less loved. So, I wanted to try and focus on what she liked. I strongly debated doing a very dramatic image of Toothless standing out on rocks in a trubid sea, lighting flashing behind him as he roars up to the sky with a brilliant purple maw... but I decided to do something sweet and calm instead. This year has been rough... so sitting back and remembering the good times, the good friends, and the many wonderful experiences we've all had as members of this fandom felt fitting. I hope you like the painting, Toothlesslove, and I hope you have a wonderful next year. I certainly look forward to another year of being friends :)

... And who knows maybe I'll do that epic Toothless painting next!

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