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If anyone remembers I mentioned recently the last bit of this month was shaping up to be really busy for me, here's part of why!

This is my entry in ChrissaBug 's #ElfMyself Challenge (which you can read the details of here ), and I really meant to have it finished sooner but I had some other things going on when it first popped up in my notifications and I didn't pay close enough attention to my time management after that. But! It's here now, and that's what really matters!

Chrissa mentioned she approached the challenge as "an #OutfitOfTheDay but with a twist," and I very much liked that idea as a couple of months ago I finally obtained this dress after one heck of a search that originally started with me wanting a casual blue dress to express my inner Alice-in-Wonderland. That's a whole lengthy story by itself I won't bore you with the details of here.

The point is the dress is absolutely gorgeous and was definitely word the long, winding path I had to take to end up owning it. I was so thrilled to have it in my hands I did in fact put drawing it in some form on my list of art ideas to tackle at some point. Of course, this isn't exactly what I had in mind, but this photo of me in the dress is one of very few photos I have of me that's anywhere close to "full-body," and really the only one that felt like I could make it work for this event. (For the record: I did think about adding the photo into the final piece the way Chrissa did for her example, but I decided not to because I couldn't think of a way to do it that would compliment the rest of the art.) And it's sort of poetic to me how some of the details of the drawing ended up coming together largely because of the dress, as the story of its creation will likely reveal.

Originally, I had more humble plans than the final result you see here. In fact, I already had not just the sketch but the inking done too before I started to feel like the vision I had for the final product was...lacking.

I'll be frank; I'm fairly comfortable drawing myself. It's not something I do all the time, but it happens often enough that by now I have something of a..."formula" I guess for how I go about it. This combined with the fact I was partially working off of an actual photo of me means I really flew through sketching in a way I normally just...can't. Even moreso, a lot of what I had in mind for this drawing specifically makes it not that different from how I drew myself for another piece that I haven't properly posted yet: The piece I put for July on last year's Art Summary . (And a little secret: That drawing has me in a unicorn-printed dress, which I drew before I had even started the dress hunt for the one I now own )

So right out the gate, I had a pretty solid plan. The major changes I made between the drawing and the picture were mostly to make it more elvish: Add pointy ears, change the tiara to a diadem (not that elves aren't allowed to wear tiaras; the diadem look just fits better with the aesthetic I had in mind), add some extra jewelry, bring the dress sleeves off the shoulder and give them little extra poof, begrudgingly decide an elf would probably not have unicorns actually printed on the dress*, add shoes (sandals because I own a far less dramatic pair that inspired these and I did not feel like drawing full-on boots) and a corset (for visual interest, and it just felt like a must in this case...and also I wanted something I could match a little more easily to the shoes, which felt like they needed to be a darker, maybe earthy color), and change the hand that I was using to hold my phone in the photo into one just held to my chest.

Hopefully it's obvious why I made that last change, as funny as an elven maiden holding a phone in front of her face for a picture might've been...

I already knew I wanted to ink & color the drawing traditionally with alcohol markers, too. I've just really been enjoying using them lately and since I should be seeing something of an upgrade in that department soon (which I will tell you all about when it happens!) I figure it certainly doesn't hurt to keep polishing my skills with them. I even had plans for a background, which is kinda rare for me. I wanted to do a heavily simplified scene a lot like the background for To Imagine , in more of the style I used for Ziggy Crossing . (Just, y'know, with alcohol markers instead of watercolor.)

As I said, I got all the way through inking (including a test run to warm up my hand a bit) when I started questioning, "Yeah, this is pretty alright, but is it going to be contest-worthy in the end?" And when I thought about it, other people might have looked at the product I had planned and thought yes, but my answer was no. It's not that I thought anything about it was bad, it just felt like it needed more, y'know? It was missing that "wow" factor.

The thing was, at that point my time to pivot and figure out how to get said "wow factor" was getting pretty short. After all, I did still have to finish the drawing one way or another and have time to get it ready to post before the June 25th deadline.

Truthfully, the latter half of this month turning out as busy as it has kinda messed up my timetable for a few other things...And therein I sort of found my solution to my "wow factor problem."

Some of you may remember when I posted Rockin' Horse I mentioned there how I'd still like to get one more, more typical, unicorn drawing out before the end of the month. I've also mentioned before how I've had lingering plans to make another piece like One in Billions (and those are still on the table for the future), and in general, I've wanted to do more with the constellation art concept I fell in love with after I made Light in the Darkness last year.

I can't really explain how it happened, but all that information sort of coalesced in my mind into what would become the final product here: There's a "star unicorn" with her, coming from the sky behind them.

Now, I didn't have a ton of time to experiment with how I would handle that traditionally, so I defaulted to that part being digital, but I would still go ahead with coloring "me" traditionally with the markers per the original plan. Then I'd scan that part in and go from there.

This also ended up working to my advantage because I did a test run of coloring the dress traditionally and learned it was not the best idea to try and shade it traditionally because I'm horribly unpracticed at shading complex gradients on clothes like this with alcohol markers. Flatly coloring the gradient and adding the shading digitally was a much safer bet. And while I tried to color her corset and shoes with a stippling method to make them a dark teal, that did not work for two reasons:
1. The stippling did not at all end up looking like the "scuffed leather" texture I was hoping for (which I probably should've seen coming)
2. That teal color, especially stipple-shaded, did not work with the dress by the time it was said and done. (Solid teal might've been okay, but there wasn't much I could do to take the texture away after the fact.)

Fortunately, both of those things were remedied by digitally blurring the stippling and using an overlay layer to turn it black, then adding some extra highlight on top. It's still not really any kind of "leather" texture, but it is a different texture from the dress so eh.

Also, I had to fix the hair color digitally. For the life of me, I cannot figure out why sometimes the marker combination I use for my hair scans perfectly fine, and yet others it does as it did here where the darkest color turns too blue and sticks out like a sore thumb while the middle color falls totally flat and winds up too light. Paper doesn't seem to make a difference, and it's the same markers each time...I just don't get it. But then, I guess I should be glad I've dealt with it enough times now that I know roughly what to do to fix it digitally. (A combination of an overlay layer and manually re-coloring the gap between shading and mid-tones in some areas)

Oh, and I used the same method for the jewelry here that I did on Jade's for the Bratz 20th Anniversary piece; Trace it digitally, then add a glitter texture and layer style to make it all look properly silver. I knew when drew in the lines traditionally that it would be a waste to hope a silver gel pen could give me the effect I wanted, so I didn't bother.

Once I had "me" taken care of, it was time for the grand spectacle.

I debated briefly on if I wanted to go for a more "normal" silhouette and/or outlines for the unicorn ( a la One in Billions) or try the more "true constellation" style where I'd break it down into straight lines and add stars at any bends. It's clear what my choice was. The second method takes a lot more time to get right because if you rush through it you can end up losing a lot of the shapes you had and things winding up too cluttered, and I could tell the pose I had in mind for the unicorn probably wouldn't work very well overall. It's sort of the same idea I used with On the Edge where I made the wings more constellation-like, but the girl needs to be smoother if I didn't want her face and hair to look like a tangled mess of random lines and dots.

To that end, I got sort of lucky I was able to find a reference I was happy with at all (this one ) since nearly all the others I found with a pose like this were cropped too close so you couldn't see the horses legs at all...And I still had to "cheat" a little because you can't see the back legs on the reference I picked. But! I did have reigns on the horse though, something I really wanted to show it's not just a figment, the elf is actually interacting with the unicorn!

While I'm here I should also probably disclose that I'm not sure about the placement of the horn. Obviously, the original picture was of a real horse and it wasn't dressed with a faux-horn, so I had to totally guess and this is generally kind of a weird angle for the horn anyhow. So if anyone else looks at this as goes, "that's really not how the horn should look from this angle..." you will get no argument from me.

It's also a little funny I was so concerned about the feet looking weird because I'm not used to drawing semi-realistic hooves like this (basing it off the breed that was pictured) and yet I ended up obscuring most of the detail trying to make him look more ethereal.

Speaking of, I didn't fully realize what I'd need to add as far as the glow is concerned and what I'd need to soften and blend for the lines when I originally put him there. Most of that I handled after I had the background 90% finished.

Particularly eagle-eyed folks may have noticed this background bears a striking resemblance to On the Edge 's. It should. I used an alternate file of it I had lurking around. It's flipped over and the colors are a bit different, plus the...rock/cliff/thing is larger. For this piece, I took the orange out, brightened the pink and bit, and added more dark purple. Then I added the treetops between the "cliff" and the sky to keep it from looking quite so empty. I was hoping for a mountain-top effect...Not sure that's what happened, but close enough!

A few extra stars were also a must. (Including one in each of the elf-me's eyes in place of a normal shine mark.)

And then of course the mist and editing of the unicorn so he'd look more like he was fading into or out of the sky, plus a little subtitle magic wisping near his horn. I could have made that bolder, but I really thought it looked better super subtle this way.

The finishing touch, as anti-climactic as it might seem, was an effect on the reign that I thought of almost as soon as I decided it should be there. It's lighter and more transparent on the unicorn but gets darker and more solid as you follow the rope from him to the elf's hand. I'm not really sure why or how it makes sense, but it felt like the right thing to do.

Admittedly, the reign being in her right hand (our left) looks a little...odd, and it would probably be more realistic to be in her left, but it felt far more awkward to me to think she'd use the same hand she had the reign in to hold up her skirt like that, so in my mind, the logistics work out like this: She had the reign in her left hand, but switched it to her right as she's...courtesying? I guess? And she'll move it back when she drops the fabric. I possibly could have flipped her over as a solution, but that would've messed with my concept of them looking at each other (sort of), and had I left them in the same location, her movement would've been directing your eye off the page instead of to her unicorn friend...It just wasn't the same and would've messed too many other things up.

The good news is, despite whatever flaws are still very much present, now I feel like I have that "wow" factor I was looking for. At least a little.   It's turned out to be one of my art pieces I just want to sit and stare at for a long while, whereas if I hadn't changed my plans, I'd probably still want to stare at it for a little while, while's it fresh, but I don't think I'd want to come back to it the same way I can see myself continually coming back to this one.

In fact, this is one of a few candidates I have in mind to work into a new banner at some point...as soon as I decide for sure and have the time to make said banner. But I still won't need to worry about using it for a while anyway since the Drawn like a Magnet banners I'm using right now are still very relevant.

I know I've got some stiff competition for the #ElfMyself challenge, but I can confidently say however the contest works out, the art was still worth it in the end. If I place in the contest, great! If not, oh well. I can still stare at the art incessantly if I want to.

Or well, I can do that in between working on other art projects, which I should probably get back to now...

Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings

Where to find me & my artwork:
My Website | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble |   Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram

Description
If anyone remembers I mentioned recently the last bit of this month was shaping up to be really busy for me, here's part of why!

This is my entry in ChrissaBug 's #ElfMyself Challenge (which you can read the details of here ), and I really meant to have it finished sooner but I had some other things going on when it first popped up in my notifications and I didn't pay close enough attention to my time management after that. But! It's here now, and that's what really matters!

Chrissa mentioned she approached the challenge as "an #OutfitOfTheDay but with a twist," and I very much liked that idea as a couple of months ago I finally obtained this dress after one heck of a search that originally started with me wanting a casual blue dress to express my inner Alice-in-Wonderland. That's a whole lengthy story by itself I won't bore you with the details of here.

The point is the dress is absolutely gorgeous and was definitely word the long, winding path I had to take to end up owning it. I was so thrilled to have it in my hands I did in fact put drawing it in some form on my list of art ideas to tackle at some point. Of course, this isn't exactly what I had in mind, but this photo of me in the dress is one of very few photos I have of me that's anywhere close to "full-body," and really the only one that felt like I could make it work for this event. (For the record: I did think about adding the photo into the final piece the way Chrissa did for her example, but I decided not to because I couldn't think of a way to do it that would compliment the rest of the art.) And it's sort of poetic to me how some of the details of the drawing ended up coming together largely because of the dress, as the story of its creation will likely reveal.

Originally, I had more humble plans than the final result you see here. In fact, I already had not just the sketch but the inking done too before I started to feel like the vision I had for the final product was...lacking.

I'll be frank; I'm fairly comfortable drawing myself. It's not something I do all the time, but it happens often enough that by now I have something of a..."formula" I guess for how I go about it. This combined with the fact I was partially working off of an actual photo of me means I really flew through sketching in a way I normally just...can't. Even moreso, a lot of what I had in mind for this drawing specifically makes it not that different from how I drew myself for another piece that I haven't properly posted yet: The piece I put for July on last year's Art Summary . (And a little secret: That drawing has me in a unicorn-printed dress, which I drew before I had even started the dress hunt for the one I now own )

So right out the gate, I had a pretty solid plan. The major changes I made between the drawing and the picture were mostly to make it more elvish: Add pointy ears, change the tiara to a diadem (not that elves aren't allowed to wear tiaras; the diadem look just fits better with the aesthetic I had in mind), add some extra jewelry, bring the dress sleeves off the shoulder and give them little extra poof, begrudgingly decide an elf would probably not have unicorns actually printed on the dress*, add shoes (sandals because I own a far less dramatic pair that inspired these and I did not feel like drawing full-on boots) and a corset (for visual interest, and it just felt like a must in this case...and also I wanted something I could match a little more easily to the shoes, which felt like they needed to be a darker, maybe earthy color), and change the hand that I was using to hold my phone in the photo into one just held to my chest.

Hopefully it's obvious why I made that last change, as funny as an elven maiden holding a phone in front of her face for a picture might've been...

I already knew I wanted to ink & color the drawing traditionally with alcohol markers, too. I've just really been enjoying using them lately and since I should be seeing something of an upgrade in that department soon (which I will tell you all about when it happens!) I figure it certainly doesn't hurt to keep polishing my skills with them. I even had plans for a background, which is kinda rare for me. I wanted to do a heavily simplified scene a lot like the background for To Imagine , in more of the style I used for Ziggy Crossing . (Just, y'know, with alcohol markers instead of watercolor.)

As I said, I got all the way through inking (including a test run to warm up my hand a bit) when I started questioning, "Yeah, this is pretty alright, but is it going to be contest-worthy in the end?" And when I thought about it, other people might have looked at the product I had planned and thought yes, but my answer was no. It's not that I thought anything about it was bad, it just felt like it needed more, y'know? It was missing that "wow" factor.

The thing was, at that point my time to pivot and figure out how to get said "wow factor" was getting pretty short. After all, I did still have to finish the drawing one way or another and have time to get it ready to post before the June 25th deadline.

Truthfully, the latter half of this month turning out as busy as it has kinda messed up my timetable for a few other things...And therein I sort of found my solution to my "wow factor problem."

Some of you may remember when I posted Rockin' Horse I mentioned there how I'd still like to get one more, more typical, unicorn drawing out before the end of the month. I've also mentioned before how I've had lingering plans to make another piece like One in Billions (and those are still on the table for the future), and in general, I've wanted to do more with the constellation art concept I fell in love with after I made Light in the Darkness last year.

I can't really explain how it happened, but all that information sort of coalesced in my mind into what would become the final product here: There's a "star unicorn" with her, coming from the sky behind them.

Now, I didn't have a ton of time to experiment with how I would handle that traditionally, so I defaulted to that part being digital, but I would still go ahead with coloring "me" traditionally with the markers per the original plan. Then I'd scan that part in and go from there.

This also ended up working to my advantage because I did a test run of coloring the dress traditionally and learned it was not the best idea to try and shade it traditionally because I'm horribly unpracticed at shading complex gradients on clothes like this with alcohol markers. Flatly coloring the gradient and adding the shading digitally was a much safer bet. And while I tried to color her corset and shoes with a stippling method to make them a dark teal, that did not work for two reasons:
1. The stippling did not at all end up looking like the "scuffed leather" texture I was hoping for (which I probably should've seen coming)
2. That teal color, especially stipple-shaded, did not work with the dress by the time it was said and done. (Solid teal might've been okay, but there wasn't much I could do to take the texture away after the fact.)

Fortunately, both of those things were remedied by digitally blurring the stippling and using an overlay layer to turn it black, then adding some extra highlight on top. It's still not really any kind of "leather" texture, but it is a different texture from the dress so eh.

Also, I had to fix the hair color digitally. For the life of me, I cannot figure out why sometimes the marker combination I use for my hair scans perfectly fine, and yet others it does as it did here where the darkest color turns too blue and sticks out like a sore thumb while the middle color falls totally flat and winds up too light. Paper doesn't seem to make a difference, and it's the same markers each time...I just don't get it. But then, I guess I should be glad I've dealt with it enough times now that I know roughly what to do to fix it digitally. (A combination of an overlay layer and manually re-coloring the gap between shading and mid-tones in some areas)

Oh, and I used the same method for the jewelry here that I did on Jade's for the Bratz 20th Anniversary piece; Trace it digitally, then add a glitter texture and layer style to make it all look properly silver. I knew when drew in the lines traditionally that it would be a waste to hope a silver gel pen could give me the effect I wanted, so I didn't bother.

Once I had "me" taken care of, it was time for the grand spectacle.

I debated briefly on if I wanted to go for a more "normal" silhouette and/or outlines for the unicorn ( a la One in Billions) or try the more "true constellation" style where I'd break it down into straight lines and add stars at any bends. It's clear what my choice was. The second method takes a lot more time to get right because if you rush through it you can end up losing a lot of the shapes you had and things winding up too cluttered, and I could tell the pose I had in mind for the unicorn probably wouldn't work very well overall. It's sort of the same idea I used with On the Edge where I made the wings more constellation-like, but the girl needs to be smoother if I didn't want her face and hair to look like a tangled mess of random lines and dots.

To that end, I got sort of lucky I was able to find a reference I was happy with at all (this one ) since nearly all the others I found with a pose like this were cropped too close so you couldn't see the horses legs at all...And I still had to "cheat" a little because you can't see the back legs on the reference I picked. But! I did have reigns on the horse though, something I really wanted to show it's not just a figment, the elf is actually interacting with the unicorn!

While I'm here I should also probably disclose that I'm not sure about the placement of the horn. Obviously, the original picture was of a real horse and it wasn't dressed with a faux-horn, so I had to totally guess and this is generally kind of a weird angle for the horn anyhow. So if anyone else looks at this as goes, "that's really not how the horn should look from this angle..." you will get no argument from me.

It's also a little funny I was so concerned about the feet looking weird because I'm not used to drawing semi-realistic hooves like this (basing it off the breed that was pictured) and yet I ended up obscuring most of the detail trying to make him look more ethereal.

Speaking of, I didn't fully realize what I'd need to add as far as the glow is concerned and what I'd need to soften and blend for the lines when I originally put him there. Most of that I handled after I had the background 90% finished.

Particularly eagle-eyed folks may have noticed this background bears a striking resemblance to On the Edge 's. It should. I used an alternate file of it I had lurking around. It's flipped over and the colors are a bit different, plus the...rock/cliff/thing is larger. For this piece, I took the orange out, brightened the pink and bit, and added more dark purple. Then I added the treetops between the "cliff" and the sky to keep it from looking quite so empty. I was hoping for a mountain-top effect...Not sure that's what happened, but close enough!

A few extra stars were also a must. (Including one in each of the elf-me's eyes in place of a normal shine mark.)

And then of course the mist and editing of the unicorn so he'd look more like he was fading into or out of the sky, plus a little subtitle magic wisping near his horn. I could have made that bolder, but I really thought it looked better super subtle this way.

The finishing touch, as anti-climactic as it might seem, was an effect on the reign that I thought of almost as soon as I decided it should be there. It's lighter and more transparent on the unicorn but gets darker and more solid as you follow the rope from him to the elf's hand. I'm not really sure why or how it makes sense, but it felt like the right thing to do.

Admittedly, the reign being in her right hand (our left) looks a little...odd, and it would probably be more realistic to be in her left, but it felt far more awkward to me to think she'd use the same hand she had the reign in to hold up her skirt like that, so in my mind, the logistics work out like this: She had the reign in her left hand, but switched it to her right as she's...courtesying? I guess? And she'll move it back when she drops the fabric. I possibly could have flipped her over as a solution, but that would've messed with my concept of them looking at each other (sort of), and had I left them in the same location, her movement would've been directing your eye off the page instead of to her unicorn friend...It just wasn't the same and would've messed too many other things up.

The good news is, despite whatever flaws are still very much present, now I feel like I have that "wow" factor I was looking for. At least a little.   It's turned out to be one of my art pieces I just want to sit and stare at for a long while, whereas if I hadn't changed my plans, I'd probably still want to stare at it for a little while, while's it fresh, but I don't think I'd want to come back to it the same way I can see myself continually coming back to this one.

In fact, this is one of a few candidates I have in mind to work into a new banner at some point...as soon as I decide for sure and have the time to make said banner. But I still won't need to worry about using it for a while anyway since the Drawn like a Magnet banners I'm using right now are still very relevant.

I know I've got some stiff competition for the #ElfMyself challenge, but I can confidently say however the contest works out, the art was still worth it in the end. If I place in the contest, great! If not, oh well. I can still stare at the art incessantly if I want to.

Or well, I can do that in between working on other art projects, which I should probably get back to now...

Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings

Where to find me & my artwork:
My Website | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble |   Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram