Rain Of Sorrow by Iardacil on DeviantArt (original) (raw)

Japanese garden, pond by the veranda. Autumn. Red maple leaves falling in rain. She stands there and stares into the emptiness.

It's beautiful - the garden, the view, even the rain. But she is sad. There is bottomless emptiness in her. She feels like she is part of the rainchain - rain falls in, rain falls out. Nothing remains. Not even the sorrow.

I have always loved autumn in Japan - the beauty of red maple leaves is breathtaking. This image was slightly experimental - trying to keep the tones to minimal (so red, black, greys) while still creating something that is visually beautiful, striking and realistic enough.

The original idea was inspired by the scene in movie "Hero" where there is fight scene in the rain. There is blind musician playing in the rain while the two enemies face each other. The way how the rain was visualized in that scene, made me wish to draw rain in detail.

Drawing the rain was technically not the only challenge (but I did love bringing every one of the rain chain buckets into life with different water flow) - I also wanted to play with the perspective - having detailed foreground and model and very rough background - to create the dimension to the image. Figuring out the right "roughness" of different elements was a headache - I redid the foreground so many times and the lantern at the back also got repainted over and over again. The small bridge (painted after my photo of famous garden in Nara) is hardly visible (hint: left side, behind the lantern).

Now when I have spent so much time learning more about the kimono, I also had much more trouble with "trying to make fabric realistic" - I did not do it everywhere (sometimes I want to keep artistic freedom of flowing fabrics despite knowing that kimono has very clearly defined lines/heights). I tried view versions of the obi but the last one really fitted - it made sense "knot wise" but also fitted with the theme after adding some maple leaves as a pattern there.

I am personally very happy with the result after more than a month spent on this. I like the simplicity and high level of details combined with few tones. Happy to do art again (life has gotten into the way of my plan to have an artwork a month).

(And check my X account for step by step)