these silly bois give me a lot of joy

The painting in progress, adding more detail into the painting. Placing in photo texture for the background as base, wrestling with how much I wanted the landscape to make sense.

I had an idea of making the glowy critters bird shaped, but I felt little bunny-looking things felt cosier.

Figuring out the details of the character and objects. (Initially I thought about a cable that maybe leads to an off-camera spaceship, but it might have come across as too robot?) I was inspired by the flowing fibres of the skintight space suit which is apparently is being worked on in real life, and I wanted a flowing organic look to the shapes. I wanted everything to feel still practical in some way despite this being complete fantasy, and thought was given to how things might join together based on my own memories of traditional art equipment.

Blocking out of the silhouette and different grounds. I was interested in conveying some kind of motion through this static shot of static objects. The rocks are tilted at an angle, and the pose leans opposite to the right-left energy, symbolic of braving a challenge.

Following a basic idea of doing plein air landscape painting on an alien planet, I made a 3D base since my vision of the lighting was complex and this piece was intended to be a challenge for me to draw more environments. 

A blank mannequin was posed in Gravity Sketch since it felt more intuituve for me, and it was imported to Blender for lighting and some quick textures. The plan was that I will flesh out the design of everything as I paint it, by instinct and intuition. In a way, I was also chasing a "flow" of creative artmaking by making this artwork about "flow".

I started work on the idea on a busy schedule but I had a quick deep think about the theme itself. The theme can be interpreted as personal oasis removed from the world's many problems, but can one construct a true oasis that is removed from the world's problems...by thinking about the world's problems? It became clear to me that my aim should be to capture a mood instead of constructing a world, as I didn't feel confident in presenting 'solutions' to any big real issue as a singluar artist or do them justice in a short amount of time.

My oasis has always been art itself, and I thought I should follow just that simple feeling.