Super Mario Galaxy - A Bunny with Star Bits

Hello! My name is Dana. I create art as a hobby, but I'm really interested in improving my skills.
Below is a screenshot of a piece of art I made in recent years inspired by Super Mario Galaxy, a game made by Nintendo. I have always loved Nintendo games since I was a child, and Super Mario Galaxy was no exception.

This piece was created entirely digitally, from start to finish. I used a HUION Kamvas tablet with a screen as my drawing device, and Krita as my choice of art program. My screen-tablet has been a wonderfully fun tool to use for art creation, and Krita is honestly one of the most impressive art programs I've ever used. It just keeps impressing me!

The entire piece was created and rendered using the brushes and tools included by default in the Krita 5.0.0 program.

I always begin my illustrations as a sketch that I work to refine until it's satisfying to me. Sometimes that means putting the sketch through multiple iterations, or just changing the positioning of a line here and there. Sometimes it takes a while, but I know the sketch is finished when I can visualize the art being fully-rendered even with just the sketch being there, or if the sketch just looks great by itself.

Then, after the sketching phase is finished, I turn to the line-art phase and begin finalizing the lines of the drawing. My usual choice is outlining the subject with a black ink, although you may notice here the lines are not one color-- that is because the black lines in this piece were rendered later with color on top of them in a separate layer! I think the colorful, blended lines added a lot more personality and interest to the rabbit that would have been lost with just solid black lines. It gives the effect that the star bits are glowing onto the fur of the rabbit!

Once the line art is finished, that's when I begin coloring and rendering the details in both the subject(s) and the background/foreground. This would include the grass and the sky, as well as the star bits as well, since I chose to render them differently than the rabbit itself. This phase is filled with lots of experimentation and LOTS of rendering. For example, I used two separate brushes for the grass, and multiple grass colors, but then on top of that, I used overlay and multiply layers to give certain areas of the grass a sort of "glow" to them. You could also look at the sky and notice how the nightly baby blue color I used actually is layered with the presence of clouds, the suggestion of faint stars lighting up the sky, and other hues such as purple or a dark indigo blue.

After everything is finished rendering, I consider the piece done! Now I have this beautiful piece that I admire so much and is an homage to one of my favorite and beloved franchises to ever exist. It's still one of my favorite illustrations I've ever made.