#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

[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?

[pyrosomatic-metamorphosis]

i've learned how to draw from complete strangers. like just. little internet tutorials, or seeing how someone draws a nose or a jawline and copying them, or watching speedpaints on youtube and learning what the hell an overlay layer was from that. like sure i've learned a lot of my ability from a few studies and experiments, but my perspective rules? colour theory? shape language? i only knew to study and experiment with those Because of all the tutorials i've seen. the second-most given art advice (beyond "practice") is "see what your favourite artist is doing and pick out what you like about their style!" and! idk! there's something so beautiful about how we're all strangers, but there's so much community in the art community? there's so so many strangers who took time out of their own lives to make flesh clouds or anatomy guides or explain perspective rules, and I wouldn't be where i am today without them. i cannot explain how grateful i am to those people, and how happy i am that so many people fucking. share. sometimes i think about a rose drawing tutorial made by some 15 yo that i watched when i was 12. it was pretty basic im not gonna lie, but i drew roses like that for years. I still draw roses like that when i want to spent a little extra time on them. i saw some artist talking about using thin lines so they'd have to get better with their linework rather than relying on the juicy thick lines, and i copied them and can now wield linewidth like a beast (when. i want to . which is not often). i've watched so many speedpaints that render skin in so many different ways that its all boiled down to the one method i use. neck width. hair physics. hair shine or lack thereof. eyes, pupils, mouth. fucking noses and the million variations. clothes???? idk i am like 100% rambling at this point but it's so fuckin nice to look at my art and see the ways i've been shaped by the kindness of other people

[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!