“The White Tree”
Inspired by the melancholy of games like “Dark Souls” I made this illustration of a knight kneeling at the base of a strange tree deep in the forest.
Watercolor and Ink; March 19th, 2020.
The concept for this piece started with some posing sketches in my sketchbook. I wanted to draw some knights after playing a bunch of "Dark Souls" at the time, and this piece came out of it.
Thumbnail version of the piece, prior to getting anything on the final paper.
Pencils on paper. Drawing trees is a delight.
Inked lines. With this piece I forced myself to use a brush-tip pen to experiment with varying line weight. Looking back, this piece is too busy with lines, and compositionally it lacks focus, but that's the kind of thing an experiment reveals.
Here's the final. Working in digital art I can easily see how the values look across the whole piece, but in physical media like watercolor you have to train your eyes and patience to ensure the color values across the composition endure. I'm surprised that this seems to do that fairly well, although the solid black lines in such density everywhere interfere with that.