A painting of Fan'ore Forest, a location within the fictional world of Fan'driel.

Fan'driel is an eternally autumnal world where even the smallest hint of green is considered bizarre.

Green is the rarest of eye colours, emerald the rarest jewel, and even the great sea serpents that lurk beneath the ocean depths are more commonly found albino than this strange colour.

Inspired by Fan'driel, the fictional world that lives in my head, I whipped open Artrage and tried to bring a small part of it to life. Fan'ore Forest.

I wanted to create an actual artwork today, to create something that I'd deem decent enough to upload into one of Hive's art communities. But in my mind this still isn't quite worthy enough...

For my first ever digital painting though, I like it enough to share! Just not in a proper community. 😆

Fan'driel is described as having fields of golden grass as far as the eye can see, bordered by a great forest dressed in burgundy and vermilion. This forest is also home to one of my favourite scenes in the first book.

They travelled the dark, noisy forest for at least two miles before Cael stopped and faced her. He was barely visible beneath the shadows but the pride in his voice was as clear as the screeching insects as he exclaimed, “Behold!” and pushed aside an enormous branch.

Lyria gasped.

By the Gods… the first moon illuminated a perfect clearing with a crystal lake at is centre. The flawless waters both absorbed and reflected the dreamlike iridescence of the moonbeams that shone through the Aethya and their purpose in the glade was forgotten as she drew closer to the water’s edge. An ethereal aurora danced upon its surface, skipping and twirling atop the perfect mirror, and she stared in reverence for several silent minutes before forcing herself from the awe-inspiring view, stumbling into Cael as she turned around.

I originally intended for that to be this location, but what came out ended up a river or large creek rather than a lake. And that's completely fine, I was happy to work with it.

I haven't written it yet, but no doubt there's a river spiralling through the forest somewhere.

Within a perfect circle of ancient trees, long golden grass rose up over a large glittering lake — Vaithe had found Darien’s glade. The timing was fortuitous: the moons were descending. Travelling the forest alone was bad enough, but during the utter darkness of the descent? When the world was as black as those damnable dread horses? It didn’t bear thinking about.

I decided to stick with this one brush for the entire painting -- the watercolour brush set to 'small strokes on wet.'

This is my first time ever using the watercolour brush, and also the first time I've required so many layers in one work. With my normal drawings, three layers are easily enough. One for the sketch, one for the inking, and one for the colouring. This painting required 6 layers and I probably could've gone for a 7th for a little bit more detail.

The slow rise of the first moon peeked over the treetops and faint moonrays touched the lake, allowing a perfect replica of the Aethya to shimmer upon its surface. A light mist slowly manifested and writhed across the surface, interweaving with each colour in mesmerising tendrils, and his breath caught in his throat as tiny ethereal orbs appeared in the depths and shattered one by one.

In all of his years he had never lingered after moonrise; now he wished that he had — it was a spectacular sight.

Although most of my future drawings will be funny looking doodles jammed into a webcomic, I want to improve my general art too. I want to draw nice things. Paint nice things. Perhaps one day create something good enough that I'd like to have framed and have hanging on my wall.

This is the first step towards that.

This is my first proper painting using the Artrage program and I hope that you like it. 🙂

 

Until next time! 👩‍🎨🎨😊

Thanks for stopping by!

 

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_{All images/screenshots/drawings in this post are courtesy of me, @kaelci.}