Original artwork step by step- my first custom footer for Steemit!

Dear fellow Steemians,

Back to you with some classic Shiny Forest postcard. This time it's a custom footer for my blog. I was inspired by some pro Steemians to start with my own series of blog pictures, that will (hopefully) make my posts more nice to the eye :)

Pen and ink on paper, 42 x 29,7 cm

It isn't a very big nor elaborate drawing, I rather wanted it to be a sample of my drawing style, a kind of artistic preview, especially for more textual posts in which I won't include many pictures. My blog could use some more illustrations like that, so I'm planning on creating a header, a banner, a thank you message and some other custom pics.

PROGRESS STEP BY STEP

Here we have an initial, delicate pencil sketch (warning: it may not be easily visible on some devices, depending on your screen settings). I always start with composition first. I decide about the sizes and shapes of the objects. This stage tends to take a while.

In this case, my intital concept had to be literally extended. I planned my footer to have a size of about 1000x300 pixels. I set myself some guidelines on paper to maintain that proportion, however! The drawing developed in its own mysterious ways to something that wasn't fitting these parameters at all. I realized that it needs some more objects on the right to have the right shape. I redrew my art with pen and started to wonder what objects could I add.

I decided to go for some plants and a star. I didn't extend my art much, the final size is 1000x367 pixels and I'm quite happy with it. We'll se how it will work out as a footer :)

Next thing, I went on with shading and texture. I aimed for high-contrast, so it wouldn't end up greyish and bland, hence the black plants and fluffy seeds.

My GIF contains much more stages of shading than I include in this tutorial, because it might be difficult to come up with some interesting comment at each small change to the drawing. The most important conclusion I think is that I tend to orchestrate my shading efforts, gradually stippling and texturing my whole art rather than deal with one object at a time. This way I gain more control over the overall direction in which my art will turn, I think.

I add more and more dots and fine details here and there, and constantly assess the results. Haha :) I like to add this small thin shadow under some of the plants and wood, because it looks a bit realistic on one hand, and on the other, it gives an impression to be cut out of paper and placed on the background.

I think that in the future I might want to use a ruler more to create the speech bubbles. For now my footer has a hand-drawn style message :)

Traditionally, I post a GIF showing the progress of my work. It includes more stages than the tutorial above, because I like my GIFs to be longer and more detailed.

I hope that you enjoyed my little tutorial and footer, guys! And you know...

Lots of Love and Light!

Klaudia