Whistling Forest - Process

 I've wanted to make a piece of fanart for a streamer I like for a while now. Life gets pretty busy being a father of two so time is precious. Some of that precious time finally got spent on the following piece! The streamer's channel is called Whistling Forest. I know I wanted a forest scene and to possibly incorporate some kind of whistling - just like the name of the channel. Makes sense right? I decided to have the streamer playing video games at dusk in the forest. The trees are making little whistling music notes as they watch and a few little mushroom dudes have also come to watch the exciting game.

Like everything we first start out with a really rough sketch to get the idea into the real world. Get out of my head! Again, I knew I wanted a forest scene with the streamer playing some video games.

I plugged one of those rough sketches into Krita and used it as a base. From there I created some perspective lines and roughed in the general tree locations, leaves, bushes, and the streamer. Once that was taken care of I also added some details like the water bottle, mushroom viewers, tree stump, and computer.

I tried drawing out the title, Whistling Forest, but it didn't look very good. A standard font didn't seem to fit as well so I decided to make the very tedious and time consuming decision to custom design the lettering in Inkscape. That's a program I hadn't used in a long time sooo... I kind of had to relearn it a little bit. That didn't help me finish it any faster, but I was happy with the result. I wanted something with square cornered bottoms and rounded tops.

Reference is key - and drawing some sitting cross legged is a little more challenging that I anticipated. I had to go back and redraw his legs a few times. I was initially inspired by the art piece below title "Journey" by Varguy for the style of my piece. Their colours and linework really appealed to me so I tried to emulate it - I didn't nail it, but it turned out alright.

A forest at dusk.

Journey by Varguy inspired me.

Really happy with the way this turned out and the streamer really liked it as well! Thanks for checking out my process. If anyone ever has any questions for me about my process I'm more than happy to answer as best as I can.