Dark Explorers

UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH

So lemme explain

Back on a fateful December 31, I decided that I needed to do more art. But there wasn't much point forcing it, because I knew I'd fail and get discouraged. So instead, I said that for every day in the first week of January, I would paint exactly 1 thing, and then move on to the next thing the next day regardless of level of completion. (I paint reeeeeeeeeeeally slowly so I had to add that bit.) And it worked! Each of those 7 days I took an idea and painted it up to a point where it represented an imaginary finished product. This was Day 3's work brought to full completion.

That all sounds great, right? But it isn't. I haven't named the year.

January 3rd was in 2013. Yeah. So in the time it took me to finish this (assuming I am finished) I have graduated, been in two jobs and worked on it on three different laptops. Part of it is just me being busy and/or procrastinating; I don't get a whole lot of time to draw that I don't force and I've never learned to do things confidently and quickly. But mostly it's the endless, endless revisions. So many adjustments! So many painful readjustments! Never mind the fact that if it took me a year to get back to doing a particular area, I'd have improved since then and want to rework it.

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All of that said, I didn't want to give up on this. I knew I was onto a winner as soon as I'd laid out the colour palette in relation to the sketch. I broke pretty much all of the unwritten laws of physics while painting, but call it artistic license to aid composition. There's a LOT of compositiony tricks in this. I dare you to try and spot them all! While you're at it, try to spot the three fossils I worked into it a few hours ago. Are there things I should do differently? Probably. But I'm very liable to never finish this at all, so I gotta call it quits eventually.

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Anywho the whole thing is based on a TCG match (or matches) I had with my friend shortly after the Dark Explorers set came out. That was a fun set, I pulled a full art Darkrai from it. So we've got Twist Mountain, Darkrai EX and Blaziken featured. So yeah, Hi Sean! Next time it'll be Accelgor V Blastoise! (no not really.)

progress:
orig00.deviantart.net/28d8/f/2…

for those interested, days 1, 2 and 4 are sta.sh/0xaf1o5gxcn, sta.sh/01b4z96p4kc6 and  dunnyct.deviantart.com/art/Sme…. I don't remember what 7 was, and we don't speak of 5 or 6.