I just finished a new art piece for the Seattle Worldcon Art Show coming up in August, which I’ve titled Freedom. The piece is a mix of sci-fi and fantasy as I pulled in one of the cat-like creatures from my Boahim Trilogy because who doesn’t love cross-genre?
I love doing these “art in progress” pieces because it lets you into my process and my brain. Working digitally means that besides hitting the “undo” key, I can zoom in a LOT and work with much finer details than I could with a canvas, even if my eyes would cooperate at that level. But because I’m working digitally, there will always be those who say something is AI. I hate that that’s the world we live in now. As a friend said, most GenAI was trained on my work (and the words of others), so I’m not surprised when people say it. I’m going to walk you through some of my process here so you can see the hard work I put into this painting (if you couldn’t already).
Background First
This was my original painted background. Some basic colors and a single star, which is what I was going to originally have the two characters looking up at.
As I painted more of the foreground, I decided I didn’t like the star being that distant, which is why I changed it.
In this layer, I added additional stars so that the night sky looks more like a night sky and less like staring into the void.
The distant star is still a distant star at this point in time.
Working Forward
This was my original pass of painting the open escape pod. The outer edge was really wobbly looking and as I stared at it, I realized the oval was way off.
I’m not great with ovals at an angle like this, so I knew I needed to redo that portion of it. I used ProCreate’s oval drawing tool to play with an oval on a separate layer over and over again until I could see what adjustments I needed to make.
This was my redo of the oval for the open escape pod. It’s not perfect but it’s closer than it was.
I show this to show you my process, which includes the flaws. I’m still learning a lot with regards to viewpoint and angles.
A Character Appears
Because I feel like everything is better with cats, I pulled in the chathula creatures from my epic fantasy Boahim Trilogy and painted this fine creature into the escape pod as well.
In some future, when Boahim travels the stars, Margaret’s long, long-time descendant and a member of some chathula tribe could be out in space.
Why not?
Cross-genre is awesome so of course I did it.
I didn’t like the distant star so I decided I wanted a closer planet in the background. I picked Jupiter because I love painting it.
Originally, Jupiter was much closer, but as I stared at it, I thought about how close one would have to be for Jupiter to be that large. O_o
So after this iteration, I decided to change the size of Jupiter.
The Details
This is not quite done. While I made Jupiter smaller, I still have some detail work to do, including another pass for shadows and highlights.
I paint the original passes with lighting in mind, but sometimes, when I make changes throughout the layers, more work is needed to bring out additional shadows and highlights.
Sometimes I also had additional hatch-mark work or dirty up things for texture, add in linen lines or other bits.
Finished Work
Finally, I added my signature into the escape pod’s rim and the image is done. <3 At some point I’ll record myself painting. I need to figure out the best way to do that on my iPad.
And that’s Freedom. I’ll be adding prints and other stuff to the store in a few weeks with some of the new art so stay tuned! The original for this piece (a giclee canvas) will be available at for purchase at the WorldCon art show in August. If it doesn’t sell there, it’ll also be added to the store.
