I feel like every artist is both versatile in what they do but also has a distinct style that makes their art different from everyone else. I've always drawn in a stylistic style that was influenced by Disney, Studio Ghibli, anime, and comics like Marvel and DC. I've never taken a realistic approach and I thought I would try to push myself to see if I could attempt digital painting.

My test subject is this sketch of Mulan from their movie Ralph Breaks the Internet. It was a really popular topic with having the Disney Princesses dressed in modern attire

This sketch was really lose in order to give me the feel and attitude of the character

I would usually try to do clean linework, flat color, a multiply shade layer in purple with an opacity of 27%, and a overlay gradient with the opacity varying.

After completing this image I still didn't feel satisfied with how it turned out, I felt that the original sketch still had a lot of good use and thought it would be good to practice rendering on it.

I watched a lot of tutorials about rendering for digital painting. It was laying down your flats and finding your transition color and blending it with a round opacity brush. Some challenges I did face was figuring out what edges should stay sharp and what edges needed to be blended out and softened.  I still added a overlay over the entire painting just to balance out the colors towards the end.

Overall this first attempt at a digital painting I felt was a success and I felt that it was something that I wanted to personally focus on this year.