I had a rough idea on how I wanted my final piece to look, and because the forest version of my insect is meant to be the original species it only makes sense for it to be set in a forest. However, because this species is used in warfare, I want it to have a desolate setting, so I plan to make it foggy to some degree, as well as possibly add in one of the subspecies.
My experience of background and landscape design is very minimal so I just started off by drawing the shapes for the trees. I wanted to have a rock in the image so that I could position the main insect on it and to make that point stand out from the rest of the image. I split the image roughly in half and filled one half brown whilst the top half is a light blue, although this will be changed later on for a white or grey so it looks more like fog.
I created about five separate layers for the trees, each layer holding a line of them at different distances, so that I can add a layer of depth to the image. To further enhance this, I plan to add make the front set of trees more detailed whilst also retaining their black outline, whilst the trees further behind will lose the black outlines, whilst also becoming more and more blurred as well as having a white or grey gradient placed over the top of them to match the foggy theme, which will give off a desolate or abandoned feel to the image.
I slowly started to texture the trees, which I simply started painting lines in both slightly light and dark colours then the trees themselves. As my art style is quite cartoony, I looked at the television show Steven Universe for some references as to how they textures their trees.
I planned to have some light moss scattered on some of the trees so I experimented with various brushes to see what would work best. However, in the end this was never used.
I changed the background colour to a light grey to give off a better foggy effect, and then began adding a slightly grey coat to each layer containing trees, changing the layer opacity slightly for each one to give a better sense of depth. I also shaded the rock by painting black areas onto a separate layer and then lower the opacity of the layer to 30%. I also added a few more lines to the inside of it to give it more shape.
I decided to weaken the opacity of some of the further away tree layers as I thought this would look a lot better. I also added some more leaves to the ground and began adding grass in as well using a brush that resembled grass. I shaded the trees in exactly the same way that I did with the rock, except I changed the strength of the opacity to make it look better on the further away trees.
I added a small gradient towards the top of the ground so that it gave a better suggestion of fog, which I felt has been portrayed well because of this. At this point the image was pretty much done now, so I began drawing in my insect. I wanted it to look innocent and curious about it's surroundings, so I made it appear as if it was peering over the edge of the rock. However, I felt that having one of my insect in the image would not be enough because of it's size, so I decided to draw another one just climbing over the edge of the rock, whilst the severed head of one lay in front of the rock in order to continue hinting towards a desolate feel to the image.
The only thing left to do after this was to shade the insects and shade the rock a little more so that they looked more like they were on the rock.
Just above this is the final artwork I created for my insect in their habitat. As mentioned previously I wanted a desolate feeling to the image due to the warfare, and I feel that the fog captures this well. The small amount of my insects being there portrays this further due to how big the landscape is in comparison to how small they are. Having looked into lighting and compositions recently, I tried to use at least on of each of those effects in my piece. When it comes to the composition, I went for the 'L' composition by trying to have the tree line and the closest tree on the right create the L border around the rock, where I wanted the most attention because that is where my insects are.
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