I’ve recently finished an illustration created with a help from Lamp Post Guild course. It is a pencil drawing on a bristol, scanned and colored digitally. On illustration you can see all four main characters from my story Circles of Magic, while they pass near  Fargdad, city of fireflies and the oldest city of questing era.

City of fireflies

What’s important. I redraw whole picture several times before I commited to a final drawing and then screwed up and start over. But.

“Artist should be able to do the same thing twice”. Sorry, but I don’t remember who said that. It’s called craft. Yet there are so many people who can’t do that because they rely heavily on spark of inspiration  and improvise a lot.

Well, that’s not entirely bad. But craft is important if you want to be consistently efficient. And belive me, you want to be consistent to avoid situations when in the middle of comission suddenly something goes wrong and it’s because you did your “magic” instead of slowly build up illustration. I’ve been there couple of times.

So althought speed painting is cool, helps maintaing daily posts and gives you fans on facebook, from time to time consider going harder way of craftsman and share with society something you both will remember.