Yoshi with Egg

This one was another gift - this time for a friend of mine who loves Yoshi and loves teal.

Yoshi with Egg

Went a bit heavy-handed on the water for the main sprite - which I'll chalk up to having a few too many drinks during painting. I actually kind of like the effect that came out of that though, and I feel like it works decently well here because of the large areas of single color. I do think I prefer versions of Yoshi that add in a few different shades of green, and I almost ended up with that look here even though there are only two shades (one for him and one for the egg).

I had picked up some different shades of green from an art supply store since my last Yoshi attempt, which made it far easier to get colors I was happy with. It's still proving to be one of the more difficult colors to find the right shade for, however, so I'll have to keep experimenting. 

Still trying to figure out how to get nice gradients in the background without such strong brush strokes. I decided to go for a more of a washed look in general for the background here, and while I do like it, it ended up buckling the paper quite a bit because I used so much water. I'm not sure if that's got more to do with the quality of paper or the technique, or both. Working on this one really reminded me that I would like to spend some time really working on watercolor fundamentals one of these days.

Samus

This one was a gift for my husband's birthday. I played a bit of Metroid on the NES as a kid (and all I really remember is JUSTIN BAILEY for some reason), and love modern day Metroidvania games, but Samus isn't a character I would necessarily think to paint for my own collection. My husband, however, has always been a huge fan of Super Metroid, so when his birthday rolled around, this felt like a no-brainer.

Samus

It actually ended up being a lot of fun, and took me several nights to completed. There were a lot of different colors, and I opted to go for a sharper and more "pixel perfect" sprite, saving the fluid watercolor strokes for the background. I also had to work with much smaller pixels than I had been for most of the previous paintings in order to fit the size of the paper I have. Although it took a lot longer to graph the smaller pixels, I do love the way it turned out. It was the first painting I put in a frame, and I love the finished product. 

There was also an added challenge of the fact that Samus isn't outlined in all black the way a lot of characters are. I usually do black first so that I can get my bearings and have a good feel for the area I'm working in.  After that I work in like colors from light to dark, as that seems to work best for avoiding color mixing and allowing mistakes to be corrected to some degree as the painting progresses. 

I did have a decent outline after beginning, but even getting that initial black layer done took a lot longer than with previous paintings since there were so few continuous lines.

It was also pretty difficult to match the colors very well on this one. I had a couple of different printouts that showed the colors with pretty different shades, and of course neither one really matched exactly what it looked like on screen. And since this isn't a game I've played much of, I didn't have that instinctive visual memory to go off of. In the end though I think it matched pretty closely, and I have to keep reminding myself not to overthink it too much when I'm in the weeds. They always seem to look a little better when finished!