AURORA - what happened to the heart? final and process (Patreon)

Hi patrons!!

Shockingly, I’ve finished my Aurora drawing. I don’t know why, but I went incredibly hard with the realism here. I don’t know why truly its sort of shocking and I sort of hope that doesn’t become typical of me… took a lot out of me.

BUT— I am very happy with it, and I still think it is clearly,, a stylized drawing.

I was inspired to draw Aurora, first and foremost by the release of her new album (which is VERY GOOD!!! I love everything Aurora has ever done) as well as the mere idea of another artist friend drawing her. As you may or may not know, Aurora is one of my favorite people to draw ever. And also, it was nice to draw a dang woman (change of scenery) and her beautiful long straight hair. So fun to draw..

THE PROCESS: (I’m gonna talk more about the thought process than the technical process)

In my small process slide I have included, as you can see, I started with a sketch on a blueish background. Her album has a lovely blue and I wanted that to be the background of this as well. When I first started putting colors down, I thought it would be cool to make her eyes the same blue as the background! Sorta like you can see right through her… It would tie her -mostly warm orangey-toned..everything- into the background. Besides this, the initial process was just loosely putting colors down where they were in the reference!

As I rendered more, her face was quite..minimal! I wasn’t paying the closest attention to the details. If you zoom in, the creases in her eyes and mostly all of the shading on her face is very painterly and loose, but the reference sort of was too. For the rest of the drawing, I used the canvas brush, a quite large, more opaque but heavily textured painting brush AS WELL AS a very textured, semi-transparent pencil brush. This choice I believe is what skewed this to be a more refined drawing than normal. It was really good for adding texture to the entire drawing, allowed me to be more precise with my placement of color, and was super good for HAIR. I think I did use a sort of tandem brush moment like this for my stranger things kids drawings which, if you recall, were quite meticulously rendered too.

About halfway through the drawing, when the face, top half of the hair and hands were pretty much fully rendered, I started to not like the silhouette of the drawing. I thought there was too much flat, repetitive surface (her bare arms and similar-hue top). I temporarily made her a floating head drawing, cut off at the bottom of her hair with floating hands and wrists, but decided to finish rendering the hair first and seeing how I felt. As I was rendering the hair, a mere hour or so ago, I simply kept going. I ended up pretty much rendering her whole body and I discovered that I like it!!! I even rendered her jewelry which I usually find quite ugly and difficult to not overdo.

I made two versions of the final drawing, one which is a bit more silly, with text around her that (illegibly) says “what happened to the heart” and a little “aurora” box. Because thats my styleee… But also kept the very subdued version which perhaps makes more sense for her and the album. But some songs on there are crazy so my version works too!

That is all I have for now… ta ta!