Kerv and Saphi and Clip Studio Pain

This is more of a ramble post ^^ I hope you enjoy!

In December, I was hoping to produce work faster and lower my prices. I thought I could take a "simple Background" price for this picture, which came out to 400 Eur for two characters in a fairly complex pose, chosen from an offering of 3 initial sketches + several more refined drawings, at a fairly unusual angle PLUS a fully painted close-up, with the bed-background added in as an afterthought. So I tried to create an interesting and unusual composition out of something as trope-y as a bed. I chose a tudor style bed, simplified in appearance, because I recalled seeing the Bed of Ware in person. I did not permit myself many major studies for the fear of wasting precious time, and headed straight into perspective ruler chaos with three vanishing points that were all so far from the canvas that I had trouble checking if they were aligned right (of course they also got deleted at one point for no apparent reason, forcing me to redo them.) To help plan out the distribution of light and dark, I planned ahead with a greyscale thumbnail and even created an "underpainting" that at first seemed to work very well for me, until I realized far too late how garish it was making all the colours look. I repainted the wings three times each, lost a large chunk of progress to a CSP crash just a short while after a severely painful event in my private life, repainted the fur a couple more times, commenced with a complete redraw of the blue dragon's head and both tools midway through, realized the colours were off again, and so forth. I also completely painted in the close-up shot until I was no longer happy with it, and started again from scratch. My own experiment backfired, in short. I don't think I could list out all the issues I had with it without making people uncomfortable xD To think that in my actual business plan, this picture would have had to have been started and finished within a week or two. Oh hell no.

But of course I'm happy it seems to have turned out decent! Very happy to hear Kerv and Saphi like it too. With paintings, I have realized that I only like doing them when the end result shows good quality. I want to give myself more time to study when creating them, which is why I increased their price by a solid bit after all.