Poor Madeline Illustration + Extra Process

So the file for the first illustration completely and utterly died almost immediately upon finishing it 🥲 I was running too many tabs at once and Photoshop went kaput, serves me right but I'm still butthurt about it waaagh... The file also contained some extra sketches and a whole other colored Hazel drawing, my heart broke a little when it happened cuz I really liked how that one turned out. Oh well, always have backup files people!! As a result I can't show the process, but I decided to whip up a quick extra drawing to make it up. I had tried redrawing the OG pose after it crashed but something about me is that I have a really really hard time drawing the same thing twice if I've lost work. I just physically can't do it (don't worry WH episodes I have like a million backup files for I don't play about those lol), it takes away all my motivation and often the redraw is never as good. So I just scrapped the idea entirely, and instead opted to draw something super easy and chill that'd only take me an hour or so. I didn't put a lot of pressure on myself and as a result I had a lot of fun with the new one! I didn't even want to make the coloring clean, and worked around that by playing with more of a watercolor look. That was definitely the move, because after blocking out colors I could just overlap brush strokes as needed, nothing having to be too neat or perfect. I finalized it by once again experimenting with blend modes, trying to balance the hues and make sure things looked pastel-y without it getting too washed out. I emphasized the heads with black lineart, added a loose sigil sketch to bring the background together, and voila!

I also wanted to play around with the idea of hollyhock rust, this fungal disease that affects the leaves of hollyhocks and other plants. Metaphors and all that, a lot of it is spoilers but essentially Hazel has a hard time fitting in, both as a 'human' and a witch. It's been difficult for her to make connections considering her responsibilities and the need to keep them a secret, so despite living amongst them she's pretty isolated from humans. She feels similarly out of place in the supernatural world, since I will say that a witch going to human school is not normal, and she chose to do so herself. 'Poor Madeline' is a song by the band Daffo that perfectly encapsulates Hazel to me, it's why I made Madeline her middle name! The song is pretty somber and focuses a lot on feeling unwanted and being of the mindset that nothing ever really lasts--in short she has a lot of insecurities and a major complex of needing to prove herself as a way to make up for them. Poor Hazel!