One Piece From a Small Series

I’m not particularly sure why bats have been on my mind lately. Maybe it’s because of the initial COVID outbreak and their reputation as carriers of various human illnesses, or perhaps it’s simply the fact that some bats are as large as my dog and fly around as though it isn’t strange at all. Either way, I recently decided to do a mini series of digital pieces about bats and thought I would post a little bit about the process along with the result!

Earlier this year I saved up to buy an iPad, and using the Procreate app has easily been the most intuitive digital art experience I’ve had thus far (sorry Illustrator, but you are certainly NOT the most intuitive). The sheer variation of texture and stroke, along with the uncannily realistic sensation of drawing are what make this app so wonderful…it just works so well. So without further ado, here’s some information about my process.

As most pieces begin, I just started with a sketch of two trees, with the intention of of creating knots that looked similar to eyes.

I found a stippling brush to shade the first layer of texture because I’m far too lazy to stipple one dot at a time.

I drew in a second set of trees, along with a little baby bat while using a grid to make sure that it was lined up. I also used a sort of halftone mask over the distant trees to create something of a textural collage which is a direction I followed with the rest of the piece.

Added some foliage, not sure what I was going for with this color palette. Mostly experimenting.

And viola! I changed the scale of the moon, went with a more traditional moonlit color palette, added more halftone to the foreground trees, roughened up the foliage at the bottom and added a grain texture to give the pice a more worn feel.

One neat feature of the app is that it allows you to screen-capture an entire video of your process, so I will link a video to the entire recording here.

Featured image is from another piece I’m working on. Thanks for looking!