#oh also for this I referenced the Lemire run and also the Moon Knight t-shirt my big sis got me- thanks sis!

[halfaleagueonward]

Spent today drawing some Moon Knight art! Thought it'd be fun to walk through the process!

I started with a thumbnail I did in my sketchbook a few weeks ago. I did a page of six smaller thumbnails, then a larger take of my two faves, and this is the one that stuck! I redrew it from scratch on my actual paper, then masked off the edges so I'd have a nice clean picture.

The most important step one to working with oil pastels is to lay down the base colors for any scratch board technique you're gonna wanna do at the end! You can see the faint color of the transparent pastel I layered down absolutely everywhere I thought I might want to be able see white underneath- practically the whole paper on this one, with the stars I was planning! Then I put the bright colors over top that. If you put the color directly onto the paper, that's all that will ever show through!

I like working with bright colors in all mediums, but in oil pastel I like them underneath darker colors for richness and color variety-its also cool when they show through in scratch board, though with transparent underneath I largely planned for this to be more subtle

Kept the green only on Marc's side to subtly visually separate him from Khonshu

Filling in colors! I decided to change the stroke direction of the sky and ground to separate them more

Went over the entire sky with purple and blue, and filled in the ground with a tan. This begins to mute and mix the different colors, and creates a solid layer I can smudge to get rid of any clunky white gaps. At this point I had to leave it alone for an hour or two so the pastel could solidify and wouldn't smudge wildly if I tried to add anything on top of it!

Went over the entire sky with two shades of dark blue! ...Pthalo and Prussian, apparently. This let me continue to emphasize contrast and outlines, while still keeping some richness and depth. Having good sillouhettes of the figures was important here, and you can see where I started getting rid of the clouds so they wouldn't distract from the rest of the picture

Raised the arm, not for the figure itself, but so the shadows would be more interesting to look at! Did some shading in the figures, and tested out the scratch board for the stars and the temple- it worked great, thank goodness!

For scratch board, I literally use the same mechanical pencil I use for the sketch, just without lead! I also used a bit of sponge I had lying around to brush away the oil pastel bits that got scraped up, so they didn't gunk up the rest of the picture.

Fleshed out the foreground! At this stage, I took pictures of the drawing and put them into grayscale to make sure I was maintaining good contrast. The left side was a bit boring, so I made it darker- this works thematically for Khonshu, while also upping his visibility.

There were definitely more subtle ways I could have done Khonshu, and I struggled a bit to render without overworking, but I like where I ended up.

I also smudged out and re-scratched the temple so it would sit better!

Scratch board fun!!! Because I got rid of the clouds I needed some visual interest in the sky, so I added a star for each of the three of them- they're color coded to match the shadows I detailed as well! Is the 'multiple shadows' visual inspired directly by yugioh? Yes and with no shame, someone please give me this crossover!!!

And after some tweaking, detailing, and removing the tape- tadah!!!