Greetings travelers, and welcome to a new art piece, and in fact, a brand new series of art pieces to be done by one of our favorite collaborators, Barn-swallow. Many, many moons ago, we had the luck of having another artist friend of ours, Redpear, create a beautiful portrait of sorts for one of our characters who, regrettably, has yet to see the light of day. But when we threw that on a mouse pad recently, we really loved what we saw there. Though Redpear is no longer producing art, we found kinship in wanting to bring this idea to life with Barn-swallow, who has—at the time of this writing—created six more lovely portraits for us. We hope that there are more to follow as well. Adelia’s portrait, called Adelia’s Icy Gaze, is an early view of this project, as the other ones are scheduled much farther out. In any case, you’ll see the process here today, and you’ll be able to see just how incredible Barn-swallow did.
Our artist started us off with a sketch that would show us the character’s features, as well as how she envisioned the ice particles that we envisioned could surround the character. While we’ve been writing Adelia for a while, we haven’t reached her “current age stories”, so we did ask Barn-swallow to age her down from the initial sketch.
You can see here that Adelia has fuller cheeks here, and fewer lines on her face that would show off a life well-lived. Certainly, we expect her to get there, but at this point, Adelia is only about 16 or 17 in the stories we’re writing for her, and I wanted to ensure that was properly conveyed.
With our first splash of color, we were able to see things more clearly than ever. Barn-swallow made Adelia radiant and lively, and captured so many details considering the small workspace she was dealing with. Thus far, we had some lighting that showed the magic of an icy nature that Adelia would have at her employ, but the artist also included some flowing flower petals prior to our addition of the ice particles.
A little more polish and some shading and lighting gives Adelia some extra dimension here. You can better see some of the line work that makes her seem to pop off the screen (or mousepad, poster, etc.), and her eyes are a piercing blue that lends itself to the cold powers that she frequently employs. Even the background becomes a little more dynamic here.
It’s in this final look at Adelia that everything comes together. Barn-swallow has Adelia’s makeup set, her hair done up, and her attire, flowers and all, on point. The icy particles in the back give it a powerful feeling, and help to bring it all to life in a very dynamic way.
This was a tremendous opportunity for us, and it was one that we loved so much we were able to agree on a collaboration like this for a long time, as we committed to at least five more of these. The hope is there, however, to keep going with this, because we’ve done plenty of characters with Barn-swallow in the past, and they’ve all been lovely. My hope is that we have plenty more to do in the future as well, and that the next time we look at one of these portrait projects, I have even better news for you!
Michael DeAngelo
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