To Paint a Protagonist

Happy May, y’all! What better way to kick off the month than with a painting? Preferably with a perfect, professional, planned painting, but to my eternal shame I admit that I didn’t plan any of this. At all. I even jumped in without a sketch or reference, which, let me go ahead and tell you, is a really bad idea. It’s like trying to write a book with no idea of what you want to write. So lesson learned: plan before you paint.

With that out of the way, let’s jump in to my spontaneous adventures in art!

Though I didn’t have a plan for this painting, I did have a vague notion of who I wanted the subjects to be: The protagonist of my WIP, Jovie Lorenson, and another goblin character who shows up later in the series. We‘ll call him Mr. X. I began with two lovely green blobs and their base clothing colors

It looks like Mr. X punching himself in the jaw, but I wanted to put a sword in his hand at some point like he was swinging it back at some unseen foe. I’ve added base hair colors and the beginnings of hands

(p.s. also I still haven’t cleaned my art desk. Shameful, I know)

Since I wasn’t doing line art, everything would have to be defined with shading. So I mixed some darker gray into Jovie’s dress and deepened the shadows on Mr. X’s shirt.

I worked in Jovie‘s hair a bit, but it’s super hard to tell the difference. Let’s skip on to the fun parts!

Jovie upgraded to getting fingers, and in a classic move of an artist with no plan, I started working on the background waaaaay too late. Still, I wasn’t going to give up, so I kept going with the dark outline and splashes of orange

Fire is a big theme in my WIP novel, so I wanted to give both Jovie and Mr. X some flames around the border. I picked different but similar colors to set them apart

Things are looking creepy 😭. The shading is beginning to bring out Mr. X’s nose, while Jovie is getting more detailed. I also gave her a leather wrap thing around her waist to make her dress more interesting.

Mr. X has gained a mask because I had no idea how to draw his face. I regret nothing. Jovie is looking surprisingly good, and I used a thin brush to make wisps of hair flying away from her face.

Things are getting funky in the background department. I was attempting to make flames but had no idea how. On the plus side, Jovie now has a chain to keep her watch attached to her neck. Cool!

And here! We! Are! Wow, it went through a ton of changes from start to finish. The black almost completely disappeared, and while *I* think Mr. X’s swinging sword looks quite dynamic, my sister told me it looked like he was dramatically smacking himself in the face. Oh well, it was the attempt that counts 😂

So what did we learn from this? Well, always go in with a plan, for one thing. But also persistence pays off! Many times in writing and art we feel like we could have begun better and our mission will go nowhere. But as creators, we have to keep going and trying and tweaking until something beautiful happens. Never give up on your art, even when it’s messy. We can’t change the past of how we started, but the future of how it ends? Well, that’s up for us to decide.

Until next time! Happy writing, y’all!

-Serena Stellington