Dark Spirit Consumption

This is for ~Katusia's contest. You have to pick a character and draw them based on one of the given songs. I choose dark spirits. I listened to each song several times and thought of image ideas, and most of them were beach or underwater scenes, relaxed sunny, except this one.

So the song is sort of dark, but it has some happier bits to it. So here we have gabriella, trying to stay above the surface in the sunny, beautiful world, being pulled down by evil (weeds, black hair monster- the grudge? lol idk.). Ocean or watery depths sort of creep me out, so I'd think being drown in the dark would be quite terrifying.

There are also weird shadowy bits under the trees that are exaggerated, maybe hinting the world above isn't as perfect as it seems.

so, technical art wise... I took some of *Shimshims's advice on my digital piece and tried incorporating colors from the sky into the shading. So gab and the trees have lots of purple and yellow and even blue.

now, the most fun of this drawing. Once I got the idea for it I was floored to start, but I'm on exams so spending hours on a drawing is careless at best. SOO I was like omg physics, and so I busted out the protractor and ruler and measured the angles of gab's body, used the refraction stuff we learned in class to get the angles and displacement (thats why she's "broken") and I tried to get the depth as well but failed so left it. I knew it would be magnified but didn't calculated that, just drew her lower half a bit larger.

yay.

I thought it was funny so I took a picture:
[link]

I'm sure all the calculations are hideously wrong though.

The song is called Dark Spirits and is from the atlantis game soundtrack by cryo (the video was in another language so correct me if thats wrong.)

hope you like it. done in derwent colorsofts (I got a giant tin of them) on 9x12 paper, took about 3 or 4 hours. no ref for anything, hence the crap clouds and such.

one thing that definately irks me is that the water doesn't look uniform. I probably should have just colored it all one color to make it look underwater...now it looks glowy. I definately like the top half better.