Hey Steemit!
We're back again with another Art Attack! If you're new to the series, this is where I share my drawings and the process behind them. A behind-the-scenes look at my artwork, if you will. This is not to say that I'm very good at art, or that I'm a professional in any way. In fact this is the opposite, and serves as a reminder to how I first started, and lets me track my progress too!
One thing I like to do as an artist is to draw special personalised artworks for friends as gifts! Both because I'm a bad gift giver but also because I find personalised art a better gift than anything I could buy especially in this day and age and since most of my friends are international it just makes more sense to send gifts virtually nowadays. Here's the first one I did for one of my mods that I think is one of the better ones to this day:
It's birthday period again for my mods on my Twitch channel since there's a lot of birthdays in my community from June to September apparently. The last birthday piece I worked on this year was for the most wholesome person in my community who goes by mel_on_cake on Twitch! She's been a near constant on my streams for a while and I felt bad since I missed her birthday last year so I wanted to do something special for her this time.
Tbh I didn't really have any concrete ideas in mind, other than drawing her a cake. Then I thought of her username being mel_on_cake I thought I should just draw her on the cake! And to top it off, make her into a melon! So I thought of drawing her in a melon outfit kinda like this mascot called Melon-kuma from Yubari City in Hokkaido, Japan.
Source: manichi.jp
He's actually kinda terrifying irl but the plushie versions of him are cute so I thought of those instead. Mel said he favourite cake is Opera cake, which is a french cakee with almond sponge, potent coffee syrup, French buttercream, and chocolate ganache.
So these were the references I used:
I was going to draw Mel in a melon onesie sitting on the cake but then I found that drawing of a girl in a watermelon dress that I thought looked so cute! So I went with that instead, especially since the other versions I had in mind were a little cursed. Since this was Mel's first birthday art piece I thought I'd do something nice.
The dress version of Mel was actually pretty cute, and I thought she looked perfect as a cake-topper. Before I found out her favourite was opera cake I thought I'd just have a placeholder cake and just adjust the colours after.
I drew three versions of Mel before I drew the cake which in hindsight was a mistake. Since opera cake is mostly rectangular and I wanted to show the layers it would be too plain if I drew it from the side. So I decided to try drawing it from top-down perspective instead, which I've never done before. This also meant that I had to redraw Mel herself from a different angle.
It actually wasn't as tough as I thought, thankfully. I also changed her expression which matches better with Mel since her profile pic has her eyes closed as well.
Once I got the rough sketch down it was time to outline Mel! I didn't want bold outlines on the cake so she would stand out more.
She looked pretty alright so far other than the hands which I gave up on. Next it was time to colour the cake itself! I used those two pics as reference and it actually turned out pretty well aside from the shadow of the frosting which I wasn't too sure on. I probably should've exaggerated it a little more but it still looked a little off to me.
After the cake was done I just had to colour Mel which was pretty simple. I gave her a melon dress of course and she looked perfect on top of the cake! There was a nice colour contrast too which I liked.
For the background I just went with something simple so she could stand out and chose an indigo background with some bokeh light effects.
I had some trouble with the colour of the plate since I didn't want it to blend into the cake too much and ultimately decided on this one with chocolate sauce on the bottom.
And that was it! I actually had to rush this in time for her birthday because I didn't know it was coming up until a week before. But I'm glad I got to finish this and that Mel loved it! She was going through a tough time during her birthday too so I hoped this cheered her up at least a little.
Here's the timelapse:
https://youtube.com/shorts/1Zz7hb9TLoo
If you're interested, I do draw on stream sometimes and you can even claim free artwork if you get enough channel points! We also play lots of interactive games so come hang out with us on my Twitch channel!
Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
