#I've been learning how to draw people's likeness with only linework

[amethystina]

Hello!

How are you doing? How is life going? How's the writing going?

🌸🌸🌸🌸

Hi! 💜

I'm currently sick x'D So things could be better? But it's just a regular cold, I think, so it'll hopefully pass relatively soon.

But, before getting sick, I was restoring and painting more windows at our old family house. We've almost done half of them now! JFC it takes a lot of time and effort. Like, there are four of those panes to each window and there are nine windows in total that we need to get done — and that's without counting the HUGE one in the stairwell that's four meters up in the air because, well, stairwell. I have no idea how we're supposed to do that window. And I also have to paint the actual window frames.

I mean, it's worth it in the end because I love this house and it's a part of my family history etc. etc. but goddamn if it isn't incredibly tedious work x'D

As for writing, I, uh, haven't done much. I got A LOT of writing done last month but, as is my habit, I write very intently for a short period, then take a break. So the only writing I've done is the words I've added while editing. Which, then again, came up to a total of 4k this month, I think? But editing has been going pretty slow, too, especially right now since this is what happens whenever I try and my dad's dogs are in the same room:

At least it's the smallest of the three. She's still not quite aware of how big she is and thinks it's fully reasonable for her to climb into my lap like she used to when she was a puppy (it's not).

But at least she's smaller than the other two, fully grown monsters. I mean, try writing with this in your lap:

He's my cuddly little baby and I love him to bits but he's also VERY big.

... and yes, you can bet I shove my entire face into his neck fluff as often as I possibly can.

(And no, they're not wolves — they just look like they could be x'D)

But yeah. Very little actual writing is happening. If I'm less feverish I might give it a try this weekend, though? We'll see! I haven't decided on what story, though. I have so many I want to work on and so little time!

Anyhow. Thank you so much for asking, nonnie! I hope you're doing well! Or at least aren't as sick as I am xD

Take care! 💜

[creaman]

Hi there! I apologize for taking up your time, I am just so curious: When you tackle a comic, what does the process behind it look like?

Asking because I found myself scrolling through your blog once again and couldn't help but marvel at all the beautiful effects you use, at how flawlessly the structure guides the viewer's eye across each page, how the graphic weight seems to always be in just the right places…, and wonder how you learned doing this. Everything you put out looks incredibly professional and I aspire to reach your level of skill 😌❤️

Thank you Finz!! You're no bother at all, I'm an open book. This is such high praise for a guy that really doesn't have a set process, I feel like a hack. Ha. Rest assured my style is still developing. Besides the referencing of the linework and composition of official comic books, (practicing by redrawing panels for fun), explaining the process makes me feel like a serial killer but I will do my best.

(WIP Riddler panel, scrapped Scarecrow composition)

My comics usually stem from a single panel or concept — I like to focus on/emphasise particular panels of my pages, the heavy hitters, the main piece that catches your eye. I know I'm not a profoundly technically proficient artist so I prefer visually interesting elements and formatting, i.e. drawing characters outside their frames, negative space, notation, perspectives etc.

(Kung Fu Panda 4 sketch god I hate Kung Fu Panda 4)

I like to establish 'main focus' panels, the bits of the comic that really, well. make people want to chew on it. This is where the technical effort is concentrated, really, and the rest of the comic is generally build around these concepts.

('Restaurant Balthazar' focus panels)

Textures and effects are done on individual panels first, then the entire page as a whole to even out the unity. Generally, blocking in shadows, hatching for visual interest + middle tones, then textures/half-tones, then highlights.

(Script excerpt WIP)

I'm not a writer per se, but having a vague 'script' in your pages helps with pacing and direction. Comics are a versatile story-telling medium. I only really do scripts for comics longer than 2 pages. An optional but recommended strat is to send your script to a friend for a second opinion.

(Script excerpt — 'Restaurant Balthazar', annotated by @vincepti0n I don't know why he drew a face in the middle)

With the script crudely slapped together, I rough out the thumbnails and composition with the text, prioritising coherence and clean integration of previously mentioned 'main focus' panels.

Settling on a composition sucks the hardest. Drawing is fun, thinking makes brain hurty. Variety is good! Close-ups, wide shots, visual metaphors. Every panel is its own artwork.

The text bubbles are usually added in post, yes, but I'm just one guy and I don't have a writer to call me a good boy for doing things correctly. Bite me.

(Early 'Restaurant Balthazar' drafts)

In addition, keeping the text graphics in mind help create a sounder composition wherein even if the panels don't read cleanly left to right + top to bottom, the text can stagger and create the same reading order effect.

Panels and concepts are constantly tweaked, and my comic process is still highly experimental. A lot of industry standard comics aren't illustrated to their full potential due to deadlines and such — I strive for visual epiphany by treating each panel as its own artwork, and every page as a a bit of a mural.

(Old art hurts the soul)

Constantly experimenting allows you the insight of looking at your current art in comparison to your older works. In more recent works, I've been blocking in more shadows wiht lineart with thinner lines and more line weight, and learned to integrate the subject characters with less plain, abstract backgrounds.

TLDR: I have no idea

[ace1diots]

In my experience, before I was the holder of the skill I used to just doodle on paper. I love markers. I love whiteboards. Thick blocks of shaders similar to what you see in comics is my go-to style for traditional art. But ever since I became The Artist representing BOW, I learned digital art quite faster than the rest. It was tricky on my first try, like waking up a dormant muscle, but I managed. Once in a while I revisit styles learned throughout the years by my predecessors and improve them, learn a new one so if someone's interested in drawing they can claim it for personal use, or teach a friend to bond with their chosen style like a living book in our magical library if that's relatable. 😂

I'm curious. Do some or each of you have personal art styles? Are there friends who hold the skill, and, probably, consider it as a collective art style? Are you able to share the skill to those who are not used to drawing?

The questions are specific to one skill but it's also applicable to other skills you have like handcrafting, or writing, or a secret third thing perhaps! What have you! I'm happy to listen if you love to dive deep (haha) into the details, or not! Whatever you feel comfortable sharing if it sparks your autism.

Bonus question, free to skip: Cerberus or Hydra are suggested a lot when making a collective sona in and out of the plural community... Did you all vote for the cool bat (the one on your profile) as your collective sona? If so, were there other ideas thrown on the table before choosing the bat? If not for the collective, that's cool. Whoever the bat belongs to, I need you to know that I love it! Still curious about the process. 👀

I've been thinking about what ours could be, but our species differ on a wiiide ever expanding universal scale and nobody agrees to one specific form to represent us all. For sure, we have The Collective Symbol, but it's abstract in nature! We require at least a shape of a creature of some kind! Help! 😅😂 (I'm being silly, not serious! I'm not actually asking for advice but if you're happy to speak your suggestions, I don't mind. Honestly! I'm only invested in your bat - the colors and design are so cool, I love it so much - as someone who is comfortable under the ducksona rather than my human form.) (Sam Lake is a furry, confirmed. —Casey) (I don't know. I like ducks, and cats, and dogs, and deers, and fishes, etc... 😅😂)

Also, maybe it doesn't show but I'm anxious about sending an ask under my name and people finding out who I am but to hell with feeling spooked for simply existing. I consider this exposure therapy. Thanks to my peers support. And thank you to Vis for enjoying the Kesä/Jakala art, and to all the others who enjoy our art in general. My heart swells. OK, where am I going with this - it's getting too long. Excuse me for writing a wall of text. That's all. Please don't feel pressured to answer right away! I have no trouble waiting for months or years, in fairness. Thanks for sticking around reading to the last bit, haha. 🥹

!!!! Ok ok uh for the art related questions yeah a couple of us have different artstyles yeah! For the most part most of us frequent fronters share collective art skill and style as we tend to operate with multiple folks in & around front! But we do have some differences in art style and such, like uhhh Pom and Byte are way too good at art and need to be stopped, Horizon & Zone do linework and stylistic choices that somewhat different to how most of us draw, ❄️ & Sootly & NPC draw very angularly while most of us draw with very round shapes! Sometimes when people haven’t fronted in a while they need a little help drawing because its been a while for them, and other times they’re up to speed on our mostly collective current style already! We don’t quite have one art focused individual but the people i would point at for being the best at our craft would probably be Pom and Byte as most of our favourite pieces have been drawn by them!

Writing is a skill that not as many of us hold as drawing- Gnocchi & Biohazard needed a lot of help writing, while meanwhile our own personal coffee fiend wrote an essay for an exam very well & managed to not panic about it (thank you our coffee fiend,,, i know we all make fun of you for being obsessed with your favourite drink and the rest of us not always wanting it but your really a cool guy so thanks man)! I think Cake, Ark, Amy, and sometimes Timespiral are also some of our general writers, but again thats less of a skill for us in general I think!

Now onto the collective persona development rant >:D !!

Our profile’s little bat guy is actually a variation of our current collective sona, as inspired by one of our irl friends who drew us as a bat! We’ve been wanting a collectove fursona for a little while but were never really set on what to do other than a bit of a general shrug and going “maybe a protogen?” but not ideas other than that. Our irl friend drawing us as a bat made us design this lil guy, as a reflection of our current collective sona with an outfit more like something we might wear irl!

Heres our actual collective sona! Yes its very minecraft themed but in our defence Every Ancient City Is Our Hause !! Most of our past collectivesonas ended up becoming their own people (this actually happened with Byte- it was designed as a concept for a collective fursona and then it formed and now its here as its own person!), making their form no longer represent all of us, meaning that yeah, we fully understand the struggle of trying to make a design that represents most everyone comfortably and that won’t go ahead and form a new guy or just wont be fitting enough to everyone xD

To be fully honest we designed our collective character kind of on accident! It was originally designed for a fashion class we were taking, and then we kept thinking about this guy and at some point someone made him a minecraft skin, and then it got put into an art piece about our experiences with disability for an art assignment, and kinda from that point on, fae have been representative of all of us!

Heres the original sketch of our guy, the artwork in question, and the block version of our beast.

Our collective persona’s a little of a happy accident, but I think it fits us well :D ! Having a collective persona that was a Good Neighbor was incredibly affirming for a lot of us, as a large amount of us in here either are of that ilk or sort of lean slightly in that direction due to our collective perception of self! Of course not all of us are Fae, which is why this guys also a little of a shapeshifter for anyone who wants to draw the collective sona but tweak fae slightly so that its form can feel more fitting to themselves!

At some point, we decided that every Ancient City was our house thanks to a joke we made on our friend CharmLikeTheQuark’s twitch stream while they were playing on Art Of Survival smp, and that jokes kinda stuck around ever since!

The whole deal with our collective sona being a quantum superposition of an offshoot of a Fae court came later when hanging out with our friend Solar, who noticed that for some reason our username was displaying twice when we were playing on a server with them & a couple other friends of ours!

If you zoom into the first screenshot you can kinda see it but its more evident in the second one! But yeah, thats sort of probably why this sona has stuck to us so hard, the idea that it, as a vessel of expression for us, is multiple people too!

Overall, having a guy with themes that fit with things a lot of us enjoy as well as sort of thematically & literally being multiple guys is sort of how we went about realising it was a perfect fit for us, but collective sonas are hard! I send you all luck with designing yours! I guess some of the advice we could give is to go with themes & design choices that primarily stick with frequent fronters but can be slightly altered if need/want be to do so, that way even if it doesnt resonate with everyone, the general idea of “this concept is moldable or perhaps shapeshifter-y in its nature” could stick with more people overall!

so uh yeah thats about it! As stated before the bat variation came about as a variation of our already collective sona as inspired by an irl friends drawing of us collectively as a bat!

Fhew! That was a lotta text, ok! But I hope we answered and got to all of your questions Sam! This took a while to write and is somewhat messy as we’re still sleepy and still in bed, but HOPEFULLY ALL THAT MESS IS HELPFUL XD!

hoo boy did the persona bit take a while but thats ok, it was fun to try to elaborate on all of that!!!

thanks for the ask sam!!!! ahhh !!!! this was super fun to answer :D !!! <33 !!! i hope yall are havin a good day so far !!!!

[geminid]

The other ask about college reminded me, I just brought a physical copy of superbright to my college professor, I took digital painting with him and now he's letting me sit in on his life drawing class. He did a quick flip through and he liked it! He also immediately said "yeah if you like this art get into the history, who did they learn from?" I've only been following you for 2ish years? And it's just been what's landed on my dash. But I looove your pieces, the coloring on the backgrounds versus how Leo and Takumi are drawn, and then the pieces like the mainly pink diner.

So yeah mainly wanted to say you're super cool! Things that you learned from would be neat to see but no pressure.

hi i was honestly very shocked to read that you would show this to your professor who is probably a really great artist but im glad he liked it? ???

i answered the rest of this under the cut

as far as my art history goes, i have no academic background in art so i'm just making stuff up. i think like a lot of kids I got my roots in wanting to draw like shoujo manga, particularly the big eyed round faces of the early 2000s. I would just try to copy the eyes or something. To this day I honestly don't really look at tutorials or watch speedpaints i kind of just look at finished art and try to emulate the things I like about them. It's very simplistic I think and perhaps means I don't make art that's as clean or efficient as people who actually go out and try to learn how pro artists actually draw.

i went on pixiv a lot as a teen and followed like 1000+ artists and looked at a lot of art all the time. I was really enamored by people who could draw characters and backgrounds, like fuzichoco. (this is a super weird fun fact but one of my favorite artists in like 2011-2012 who specialized in like drawing beautiful girls with beautiful backgrounds ended up getting into leokumi under a different name/account and i was their mutual! and i didnt realize this until rather recently. im too shy to share the name tho. my teen self is throttling me btw). I Really wanted to learn how to draw backgrounds so i had to go through the struggle of teaching myself perspective and later on downloading 3d software so i could see boxes on the same plane at angles lol.

When I see art I like I try to capture the essence of what it is I liked about it in a piece (maybe one time its desaturated colors, and the next its dramatically long legs, or adding blur to the foreground), and i decide if it worked out and I want to keep doing it. Some stuff i definitely continue to use is i draw upper eyelashes the way i do because of Sata (touken ranbu, feh artist) and i started drawing leo with weird non-blond hair colors because of Araki (the jjba mangaka, who often colors his characters in alternate palettes than their "canon"). Even though i think there are stuff im a bit rigid about, like i always kinda stay in the realm of anime style, I'm still trying to keep trying out stuff I see in other artists, not just even anime artists but everyone's favorite Leyendecker or Mucha, or I'll take photos of random stuff to file away as an idea. Like I have a photo of leaves my coworker collected that have a nice green to pink gradient that I took for inspiration.

As far as the diner picture goes I think to pull off that piece I needed to practice making art with less colors and also less contrast. Similar shades of pink take up most of the picture with teals being a secondary color and avoiding adding other colors in large amounts. I think the linework is doing a lot of work in that piece. I had to google a photo of a person sitting at a diner table for the perspective.

idk if this answers anything but it was fun to think about?

[dovahbutt]

Artist to Artist (although I don't post my art on tumblr...): During my four years drawing digitally I've always used my finger and my iPad; now in college I use a laptop that doesn't have touch screen (because I'm cheap like that...). Even though I don't plan on pursuing an Art major, I still have urges to draw. I was doing research on various art applications and hoping you can give me some pointers?

hello anon! i’m so sorry i have no idea how long this has sat in my inbox as tumblr never notified me about it, so i’m really sorry if you’ve been waiting a long time for an answer ;;

damn it must have taken some skill and incredible patience to draw with your finger! and ah boy, college is such a strain on money it really sucks ;;

by art applications i’m assuming you mean computer programs and the like rather than applying to do an art course/degree of any kind? (as you’re not pursuing an art major). if it was on degree applications, i don’t know how much help i’d be there as I’m sadly not at uni for art, instead i’m doing a physics degree..... though i did do an art a-level. didn’t need to apply for that tho. anyway i digress).

(((sooo the rest of my answer is kind of long and rambly, so putting it under the cut!)))

i’m also assuming that you don’t have a graphics tablet of any kind in this case? i have been very fortunate in being gifted one when i was 12 (and i’m still using this old piece of kit and it works fantastically for its age though it is getting cranky and i want to get a new one soon in case it breaks...). mine is a genius g-pen M712, so not as expensive as a wacom while still working very well. Only downside is a tablet like this does not have the screen to draw onto (it’s just an opaque piece of plastic), so it’s reliant on you learning the hand-eye coordination to draw on the tablet while looking at a screen... getting a tablet with a visualiser is pretty expensive, especially if you want a wacom (welp).

If you still have your ipad, you could look into getting an apple pencil as that does the pressure sensitivity stuff that a graphics tablet does, and is cheaper (though still uh pretty expensive). i can’t vouch for it personally because i’ve never used one, but i’ve seen a few high profile concept artists use it when they sketch out and about. additionally, the (free!!!) art program i use, medibang paint pro, is supported by apple devices, so you can get it on your tablet/phone as well as your laptop, which is super neat!

i highly recommend medibang - while it’s not as complete as a program like photoshop, it still has a fair few brushes (and more are added all the time), and retains a lot of functionality. it’s all i’ve been using to create the art on my blog! and it’s freeeeeee.

i have used photoshop in the past (and enjoyed it) and so many people use it, plus kyle t webster’s mega brush pack is to die for. so if you can get your hands on photoshop, you’re set art program wise. HOWever it is soooo expensive to buy on its own. im pretty sure adobe offer the photoshop cs2 suite free, but personally i could never get it to download correctly for whatever reason (my laptop hates me). so you could try and get that!

if you do ever look to buy a graphics tablet (and imo, if youre really passionate about drawing and want to get better at producing digital art, it’s well worth the money) they often come with some version of photoshop included. i got photoshop elements 5 with mine, but the cd is lost.... somewhere.......... (i’ve been through so many harddrive wipes and resets since i got this tablet and so now i can’t find where i put the cd to redownload it ugh).

another big program a lottt of people use is sai. i used it in the past also (i may or may not have pirated it) and it is pretty damn nice. the main useful feature it might have for you is a stabiliser! so if you’re drawing with a mouse, or can’t get a grip with lining smoothly with a tablet, it’ll take the wobble out of your linework. however it does not have as many tools and brushes as photoshop, but that goes for any program that isn’t photoshop really. i can tell you i enjoyed its water colour brush a lot though.

so to conclude, those are the three programs i have used in the past, and recommend looking into! medibang is a very good one to start with and i haven’t yet found the need to get (read: pirate) photoshop.

if i completely missed the point of your question (i’m a bit worried i did), or if you want to ask anything further (or need me to clarify haha), please shoot me another ask or an im or something! i’ll try and keep a closer eye on my inbox for you :’) and i’m always here to chat!