diana penumbra hellebore
process writeup

(originally posted to Patreon on Nov 14 2021)

today i'm discussing this piece!

i wanted to draw something ultra-self-indulgent, since i'd been feeling very little motivation for drawing recently... and diana's birthday was 11/18, so i had plenty of time to work on something until then...

strange thing about that. i think one of the big reasons why i struggle to work with other people is that i completely crumble under deadlines and other people's expectations. but if i set a deadline that is literally only meaningful to myself, then i'm fine. so that's a weird loophole i've found, and one i plan to exploit more.

anyway, i had been sifting through my references folder for inspiration, and wasn't really coming up with many ideas. i had to dig pretty deep in there for something that really caught my eye, something that i would keep looking at over and over, thinking "man... i really love how that looks."

there was a dress - okay, it's technically a "caftan", which is like a loose robe kind of garment. but it was very beautiful, and i fell in love with the flowing design, studded with a sky of stars.

there were a couple of options i was pondering - and i found myself asking a kind of dangerous question. which was, "sure, i like this one, but... would... other people like it? should i pick something else?"

which is a question that is poison for my brain, because then i end up spiraling into wondering what other people find appealing, and then feeling disconnected because the things i'm drawn towards don't seem to overlap much with that, etc. so i decided FUCK that question, actually, i'm going to do whatever i want.

next i needed a good pose reference. i have been slowly accumulating cool poses with swords, so that was pretty easy. colors though... hmm, i'd been in kind of a rut with colors. i default a lot to warm rosy neutral shades, which there's nothing wrong with that, but maybe i shouldn't go on autopilot this time.

i get a lot of inspiration out of makeup color schemes, especially eyeshadow palettes - this time i was heavily inspired by the Pat McGrath Decadence palette, which is a luxury makeup brand that puts together very beautiful collections, imo. Decadence features a lot of rich jewel tones, like deep blues and red, accented by muted metallic shades.

alright, all set to do some sketches and thumbnailing. here's what my references .clip file looked like in the end. (the jewelry is from pondsizedocean, btw, who does some very cool vampire-themed collections, among other things.)

time to do lines! that should be easy, right?

...right?

yyyyeah okay so. i ended up trying to work on lineart for 4 days straight and would literally make myself burst into tears every single time. it's very frustrating and humiliating, because it feels so painfully simple. but truth be told, i'm actually very bad at picturing things in my head and mentally "filling in the blanks" when references aren't enough.

i'm not being self-deprecating when i say that, it's just true. this is why my reference sheets often consist of a dozen photos while i'm working on something, because if one photo doesn't contain the clear visual information i need, then i will go find one that does, because i need to have something to work with. there's nothing wrong with using references, obviously, but i must stress that being so literal and unable to fill in the blanks for myself really slows down my work process. it's very frustrating.

i kept looking at this over and over. it looked stiff and wonky no matter how many times i redrew it. "come on, it's not even that complicated," i kept thinking. but trying to get the hands and arms to look natural while lining up with how i wanted the sword to be positioned in back... i really cannot convey just how agonizingly difficult this was. and it feels SO. DAMN. SIMPLE. and yet it felt like i was trying to envision something in 5 dimensions.

"my god, why is it that i can put down colors so effortlessly, but drawing with a pencil is driving me to tears????"

and then the realization hit me.

why the fuck wasn't i just going straight in with blocks of color like i do for my sketches and smaller drawings.

anyway as soon as i did that, i was able to make up all of my progress in like, two hours. without crying, even!!

by the way, if you're curious at all about the background, i actually ended up doing that in inkscape. my other attempts at trying to do clean art nouveau-ish backgrounds in clip studio were really tedious, so i figured i'd dust off my vector knowledge and give it a shot.

i learned some pretty interesting tricks about maintaining symmetry, in addition to remembering how bezier curves worked, so that was neat. ...but i'm still really glad i didn't pursue graphic design as my major in college. i just like digital painting too much. :v

a couple other details i wanted to point out: the constellations in the sky are Scorpius and Libra, which are the signs that represent their "rebirthday" (aka when they picked their current name, Diana, November 18th) and their actual birthday, which is... sometime in September. canonically, they do not actually know what day they were born on, but it's estimated to be sometime around then.

the flowers in the background are hellebore flowers, the namesake of their last name. hellebores are poisonous flowers that can come in striking black or deep purple tones. back when i named them, i wanted to maintain the flower/plant naming that i had for all my other characters (and myself!), and i liked the idea that they would pick a very angsty, goth flower name for themselves. heh.

i think that's most of what i had to say about this piece. i genuinely enjoy putting this amount of thought into pieces, i just wish that i went through less pain with this drawing. i'm still proud of how it came out, though. if anything, it's a lesson for me to keep in mind going forward