The Lynx
Brush (Tool) up on Lighting
The Lynx
My first piece based on the Harry Potter series. As a massive fan, I had been waiting for this moment for a good while. This piece is heavily inspired by an event in the Deathly Hallows. If you didn't know, the being in the piece is called a Patronus. To avoid a full on nerdy explanation, this piece is my take on the Lynx' journey to tell Harry and the gang some very troubling news. It led to one of my favorite and most intense lines in the book: "The Ministry has fallen. Scrimgeour is dead. They are coming.".
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This was a simple piece in essence as it didn't require too many assets. But it taught me loads about lighting techniques which is what I'm most proud of in the piece. The original picture is a forest during sunset with bright sunlight pouring through from the sky. The Lynx was also just a regular animal which I took and made into a being of light. And the glow I made for the Patronus on its surroundings and trees is something I personally could gaze at for a while. Lighting is what I struggle with most in my digital art so this piece was a great step in teaching me how to do it and needless to say that I'm very proud of the final result.
Ideation
The concept was simple. Show a Lynx running through a forest. Those were the two main assets used and the rest of the piece was mainly the lighting effects. As pictures of Lynx' running are not as common as that of animals like dogs or tigers or etc., I decided to find the picture of the Lynx first then find a background that matched. I then needed the following for the piece:
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Find a full body picture of a Lynx running without any parts of the animal being obscured (Mainly the paws as ground and snow would cover some parts of it)
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Find a forest background, preferably night, with a long road in the middle. Angle of the road must match closely with the Lynx
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Add some smoke effects/trails
Assets Used
Sketches
Drafts
Draft 1: Good first attempt. Managed to make the Lynx look like decent looking Patronus. But why does it look so awkward?? The Lynx looks surprised and a bit derp faced. Need to fix that. A lot of the face details are simplified to shapes to the point where the original Lynx is mostly lost beneath the Patronus effect. Need a way to blend the original image as well as the Patronus to fix whatever is going on with that face right now. Need to do my own experimenting at this point.
Draft 2: Miles better than the previous. Fixed the "derpyness" of the previous Lynx. Also added the floating words around as well as a trail behind the Patronus. This would be the final piece except I need to add lighting now. The thing I've been dreading most since I'm so poor at it. Got to take it slow and be patient.
It all makes sense now. (mostly)
As they say, practice makes perfect. And this piece definitely gave me some really valuable practice in lighting techniques. Since there was only one light source and the image took place at night, this was the perfect piece for me to start learning how to paint in light and where to paint it. For example, the trees beside the Patronus would be light up quite q bit. But keeping in mind that trees are circular, the middle of the tree would be brighter than its sides as the middle would protrude out more. It was small stuff like that that gave me a lot of insight into lighting, and when it worked, it all sort of clicked together and made sense. And I acknowledge its not perfect, but the end result is still something that's realistic and lit pretty well if I do say so myself. I'm just proud and happy with myself and I finally got to do a Harry Potter inspired piece which was just fantastic to me. Being such a big fan, it takes effort for me not to make every piece I do be something related to the franchise so working on this was a real treat and made the process really really fun. Here's to continual improvement in my journey as an artist and to a franchise I can't wait to do more work on.