HollowKnight inspired painting

So to start off this painting is so heavily inspired by HollowKnight it should probably count as fan-art, though I'm not 100% sure...I need to look into the definitions a bit more. The background is inspired by the City of Tears and the Forgotten Crossroads, though I will say that at no point was the girl meant to be Hornet, she just ended up very fabric-y due to the Art Nouveau influences.

I actually did this sketch some time last summer, only getting round to using it now. Design wise I love it, I really like the Art Nouveau framing and the layers of perspective. I've always enjoyed comics, even did a little OU course on graphic novels, and once thing I really love is having something break past it or interact with the panel's edge: like how she holds onto the pillar. Maybe a little bit of my love for M.C. Escher as well in there.

Colours were also inspired by HollowKnight, specifically the Radiance infected Forgotten Crossroads. I truly adore the colour scheme. For my take on it I used: Cerulean blue, Indigo, Payne's grey, Permanent mauve and Chrome orange. Normally I'm not a fan of Chrome orange but I feel it works in this, perhaps because I also decided to play with mixing white gauche in with the buildings in the background: it makes the opacity of the Chrome orange stand out less.

My original sketch didn't really pay much attention to straight lines so when I scanned it it I made a digital template of the surrounding frame/pillars and the vertical lines of the buildings: this let me make sure all the vertical lines were parallel and also copy paste to keep the symmetrical-ness.

I've always flipped back and forth between digital and traditional, scaling up a sketch on a laptop to trace a larger version back onto paper or using a physical ruler for measuring 3D models...perhaps not the most professional techniques but if it works and is faster than the standard method I'll use it.

For the line art I used a mix of black, red and purple micron pens, leaving the background in pencil.

The glow of the windows was an important difficulty. One that I did end up messing up multiple times. The actual windows are a pale Chrome orange with a tint of Permanent mauve around the edges. The problem was more fighting with the glow around the windows.

I was using a new masking fluid this time, Schmincke, which is brilliant in that it doesn't stain but I ended up getting distracted, wandered off for a few days too many, with it left on the paper and by the time I came back to peel it off the masking fluid was near solid...it was a nightmare to remove and has roughed up the paper a little which I'll have to work around and try to smooth over....it's still the best masking fluid I've worked with.

My mum convinced me to lighten her dress (poncho?) from my original quick colour sketch to make her stand out a little more. I originally went with Permanent mauve to Cerulean blue as a way to raise her saturation and make her stand out but in the end it was too effective and the subtly of the background was washed out. I replaced the Cerulean with Indigo.

I'm nearly done now, the shells might take a while but the ones on the far right are close to the finished result. I wasn't originally going to make the shells so decorated but it's been fun and sort of works, might need to knock them back a bit so they're not too eye catching.