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A Fire Emblem: Three Houses fan piece that took me over a year to take from concept to final painting.

I’m documenting this one here now because all the WIPs are in a Twitter thread and actually a blog post is probably a better medium for chronicling things and adding some thoughts.

I’ll start with thoughts on the final piece. I’ll admit, I’m not fully happy with how it came together. The colours are nice, but looking at it three years later, many of the faces are a bit weak. I think I was torn between how much detail to put into various parts of the image when working with watercolours, which can be temperamental – and I was trying to deliberately incorporate unpredictable elements like paint splatters to boot. I was probably too afraid of messing things up further with the faces to work them much more, including adjusting skintones. Some of this fear is justified – watercolours are not a medium that afford a lot of flexibility for adjustments or fixes.

Still, I think it’s fair to say the final piece suffers for my fearful approach.

I’m going to take you through all the test pieces that went into this piece and I think you’ll understand my disappointment after you see them – when there’s great elements in a test piece, their absences in the final artwork feel like a letdown.

We’ll start with the very first scribble, which apparently was the product of insomnia. I think it was pen scribbled straight over a watercolour gradient.

After that, the idea for the full painting quickly formed – a circle to span the whole rainbow.

I was torn on whether to include Byleth or not in this – partly because I was unsure whether I’d try my hand at the other Houses as well. In the end, they didn’t make the cut.

After this, I did a ton of experiments for the colour bleeds.

I LOVE how this one was coming together. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough space on the test paper to continue it. I think I spent the entirety of the rest of this undertaking trying to chase what I’d done in this piece. Argh!

Some style experiments. The paint splatters came out great in this one and the one below.

I think what I didn’t appreciate in my test pieces was how little space there’d be for splatters to not collide in the middle. I then tried to lean into it, placing the eagle logo in the centre where all the colours converged.

There was a lot of time between the test pieces and before I was finally ready to undertake the final piece. I think in the intervening time, I considered doing the entire painting digitally, and experimented with how that would look.

But eventually, I got back on track to do things in watercolour. That didn’t mean throwing out the digital tools! Instead, the composition was drafted digitally for tracing. Of course, it went through a couple iterations too.

I think this tracing has made the sketch feel quite rigid as a result. Byleth was officially excommunicated.

Here was how things were looking after the paint splatters were done. I definitely went into that scared.

Looking at this progress photo, I think I definitely oversaturated the scan. Maybe things could be helped somewhat with a colour retweak… ok, let’s look at these files.

Hang on a moment… what the heck? Looking at the files in my art folder… I already did a re-scan! It’s dated February 2022, about seven months after I originally posted the painting online. But I never posted the rescan? Or at least, not in the Twitter thread. Another reason why using Twitter as a digital archive is a bad idea…

Anyhow, here it is. I think there’s some definite improvements in the colours, and it looks like I adjusted some of the skintones. I wasn’t able to fix Dorothea’s dark blotchiness, but at least Petra doesn’t look so pale in comparison. I think one of the issues I had with the original painting was how dark the paper scanned, so when trying to eliminate the paper textures and shadows I ended up really pulling the colours in weird directions.

So I’ll present this version without trying to wash out the background to white. Still not perfect, but an improvement, I think. Maybe I should go in for a third try, sometime…