#This was meant to be just a flat colour sketch;

[mertensia]

Sparring

Loved this stream, it had such a nice vibe :))

[mclalan]

Can you share what your art-making process is? What software and tools do you use?? I'm falling in love with your work!!

Thank you, I'm so happy you like my work and are interested in the process. The short answer is I mostly use Adobe Animate.

I hate how I'm using an Adobe product (although I still regard it as a MacroMedia Flash product), but there's just no other software that compares to its jankiness. Perhaps it's just my long familiarity with the program, but nothing I've experienced matches how it simultaneously feels like drawing in MS Paint and using Microsoft PowerPoint vector shapes. The result is something that feels in-between the two; handmade yet computer-generated.

Typically, I'll start with a hand-drawn sketch, often beginning as a thumbnail done with pencil and paper.

I'll then do a mix of hand drawing and vector shape tool rendering. I use the Paint Brush tool to hand draw strokes, and the line and shape tools mixed with transform to make more geometrically accurate shapes. The design is rendered into divided closed loop shapes, ready to be filled with a solid. The strokes are kept or removed depending on the design.

These fill shapes are then either coloured and rendered in Adobe Animate, using fills, gradients, or a more complex process of masks and effects.

Alternatively, I'll bring all these vector shapes into Photoshop and use them as clipping masks. The vector shapes act like masking taped areas or shields to maintain sharp edges, while the brush is like an atomized airbrush used to build soft volumed forms.

Please excuse all that horrible Adobe Cloud and AI bloatware...

And there we go!

Variations in the process include just using MS Paint, index color in Photoshop, or 3D programs.

Very old works of mine were almost abstract, just exploring digital mark-making, which was a trend I was following in the mid 2010s that I loved. This kind of stuff.

While my current work uses its digital material specificity as an intermediary to the subject in the illustration.

For example, #ersatz.world parodies clip-art and flash edutainment styles but imagines the characters living within that kind of world. The designs are meant to be cute, easy to read, light in computer processing, but also irreverent, janky, and generic too.

People typically regard this sort of clip art style as ephemeral trash, but I always found them charming. I use Ersatz World primarily as a satire vehicle, parodying educational formats to spoof corporate explainer content and digital media.

However, part of the problem with Ersatz is I've made it look too polished, complex, and I've grown too attached to the characters, which I imagine is a typical issue with overbuilding a world. So recently, I've made an even jankier Ersatz-like set of characters to play about with, using an even simpler style with less cohesion. I like to try and use slightly different styles and digital material styles to relate to the property at hand.

That’s why #autonymus has a bitmap digital material and a denser feel to it. Unlike Ersatz, Autonymus is not meant to be an overt semi-meta fiction. It’s not exactly pixel art, but the pixels are just about visible, as the intention is to create a digital expressionist depth to the setting. Although it’s still stylized and not realistic to our world, I definitely still want to evoke semblances of our world. That’s why there’s attention to landscape, plant life, and implied life beyond what you see in the frame with the characters, etc. But I'm still making a cartoon, and I still want it to feel at ease with itself being a digital material work. Characters are therefore flat, simple, stiff, and the speech style is like a bad Shakespeare parody. I like to balance between ugly and appealing, simple and complex, familiar and unfamiliar.

In regard to things like inspiration, references, and my relationship to aesthetic genres; these things certainly factor into my work, perhaps I'm even overtly dependent on them. My work can definitely be post-modernist in method; creating new, ironic, or fragmented interpretations through deconstructing a mix of various styles or methods. But at the same time, I'm still trying to make a digital gestural representation where the aesthetic is driven by my relationship to the software and techniques directly—not simply in an attempt to reference a style. For example, I like drawing lines in sweeping strokes, not to a point of geometric perfection, but just in a way where the curves are smooth and simple. But if I want perfectly curved or straight lines, I'll use the vector tools.

Working this way, you can sort of learn why certain styles and design choices in past vector aesthetics were made, as they would have also needed to make similar choices. That’s why I’m more mindful of using digital material specificity as a foundation to build narrative and subjects upon these days.

For example, genre references like cyberpunk clichés for #cyberhell or late medieval design for #autonymus or 2005 to 2015 era subculture fashion for #gradientgoblinz.

I think it’s important to take inspiration and reference from a wide variety of sources, but I think they’d mean nothing without having something to say or express. Autonymus, although it is a collection of tropes and clichés, isn’t just about that. It’s a story about the tensions of socially constructed systems and how that shapes faith, technology, and the natural world, or at least that's what I'm aiming for anyway.

But despite all that, I think there’s a danger of locking myself into the past by using these methods. For example, using nostalgia and references to past aesthetics can result in just recreating the past in a form of role-play. To avoid that, I try and evoke the past through a messy, inaccurate pastiche rather than caring to accurately re-enact anything. I’m probably not always successful at communicating the deliberateness of this, and it can certainly get very frustrating and pedantic. To be honest, I do kind of hate aesthetic labels (terms like Y2K, global coffee house, utopian scholastic designs from a pre-9/11 world).

I do not believe that a project aimed solely at mapping history through aesthetic styles is worthwhile. Sure, they can be handy for organizing style trends, but they can also be reductive and ahistoric. Who are these people to define the history of these design eras? The result is a kind of suffocating simulation of design history but removed from context, perfect for moodboardism. I wish it felt more tongue-in-cheek, less absolute of itself in its own practice. Instead, it acts to legitimize and engender those making these labels, almost giving them ownership of the design styles. It’s similar to the logic and process of generative AI and its databases in a way, just done manually.

I’m very inspired by artists like Oneohtrix Point Never in this regard, as I think he’s able to create an aesthetic portal to all kinds of memories, feelings, and worlds reminiscent of the past, while still being in the present. It’s more a reflection of how timelines are messy now, like a memory or dream, rather than an audacity to say the past was actually like that, or to try to actually map some kind of timeline.

I think the benefit of this process is how it avoids the other side of the spectrum—being locked into chasing the cutting edge of digital processes. I don't necessarily think using an old digital process means your work inherits the semiotics of old aesthetics. Non-digital mediums don’t have this issue to this degree, as you can still paint in oils and be considered contemporary, or at least it's not frowned upon to such a degree. And I also don't think anyone in the heyday of Flash ever made work the same as I do, especially as computers are more powerful now so can handle more. I probably shouldn't boast too much about that though, as artists at the time probably just had more sense than to use Flash like a painting program! So then, why is my use of Adobe Animate critiqued as obsolete and an aesthetic dead-end? Because to whose standards is this process obsolete? If you value digital aesthetics as an apparatus in industry practice, then sure, my work is redundant.

But as wonderful as the latest tech can be in creating new aesthetics, I do feel it can be overtly dependent on the trends and directions of tech corporations, and therefore act as an indirect propaganda tool to their hegemony over digital aesthetics, such as the ever-demanding processing power needed for simulated realism. If anything, work that does follow in the direction of the latest tech trends is ironically the quickest to date once the trends move on.

I've noticed I've not really described what my work is about, just the process, in this text. But I don't know, maybe I like Flash because it is regarded as redundant. No one really cares about it, so I feel free to make whatever I want, and can decide on form myself, to my own standards, the quality of my work. As fun as making images is, I find it difficult to put into words what it is exactly I'm expressing in my work, and perhaps that would spoil it anyway.

[epiicaricacy-arts]

taking places

more fatui lyney ft. arlecchino bc unfortunately i am obsessed and also have been listening to early p!atd songs once again hehe haha

read the “behind the design” for my fan design here

close ups

sketch + rough colour map

very short process discussion utc because for once i have very little to say!

this one kinda came outta nowhere. i was just doodling some angles and i turned one into lyney and not long after i found myself drawing my fatui design again 🥲 the premise was totally on accident though since the angle the face was at meant his hair covered the only visible eye and i didn’t wanna restart

nothing too special style-wise either. i just wanted to do some painting so i didn’t put much thought into composition as i usually do. wanted to experiment with some greener colours since green is a color im very unfamiliar with and i saw some art on pinterest with very limited palettes that had green in them. i noticed that for drawings under really bright lights the artists tend to lean towards green, which is cool!! i hope i pulled that effect off, i think i did pretty well with this piece 👍

misc notes would just be me experimenting with limiting my rendering, meaning i put details in the shadows and tried keeping the bright areas relatively flat. originally arlecchino had her jacket but i took it off since it was too complicated ☹️

also i have no idea how i pulled off that one sleeve with the frills and i’m very pleased with it. 👍

thank you for reading expect some horrors soon 🫶

[kozachenko]

(Click the image for better quality)

Yipeeee that Keiki and Mayumi fanart I posted the WIP of is finally done woooo- This piece was a very experimental one that I'm kind of OK on. Maybe because I've just gone insane looking at it for so long and I'm my own worst critic lol.

Artist's Notes;

So I've once again been playing around with my rendering style, mainly because I have been wanting to improve my lighting for a while now and as I was just scrolling through Tumblr, I saw some of the official art for that one webcomic-turned-animated-TV-Show Lackadaisy and was immediately inspired. I also have seen a technique a few times in the past where the lineart and shading are merged together, so I've been meaning to try that for a little while.

I did some experimentation on this one sketch of Keiki I posted in my sketch dump and I really liked the results of it, so I carried those over to this piece.

I ended up scaling up Keiki and Mayumi from the original WIP because I felt like they were both getting lost in the composition, and I'm glad for that because I think it works a lot better. I'm not a fan of how Mayumi's sword turned out at all, but it's not really meant to be the focus of the piece so eh. Overall, I think I could do better with my colours, probably because with Keiki and Mayumi's colours, I did them flat in greyscale and then used a brush on the overlay blend mode to colour all of them over, after which I changed the base layer for their colours from white to yellow and then lowered the opacity so it all went together better. I also decided to use gradient maps for a lot of the background elements, mainly to experiment with getting in my values first to make them pop out more. I ended up finding a really nice sky gradient on Clip Studio Paint that I really liked, and that kinda helped to establish the colour scheme of the background a lot. I think the whole "start in greyscale then colour" thing really works better with painterly styles rather than more illustrative ones, and while it is good at making sure your values are more readable, I honestly don't think I have the skill level to pull that off yet. Honestly, I think I've been looking at this drawing too long or maybe I added too much to it, but I wish I could've made the colours less monochromatic, but I'll just save that for the next piece I do.

I do love how the flame (...well it's more of a weird space rift than anything in this piece) and the lighting turned out, those were fun to do. I was initially struggling with the flame and how Mayumi is positioned in front of it before realizing "Oh wait! This is a weird abstraction of a weird creature! I don't have to follow the laws of anatomy!" and just dislocated it's flamey bottom jaw from the main body. I also changed the colours of it since I was really not liking how incredibly bright it was when it had lighter colours. Again, the gradient maps served the more painterly style of the flames well.

I also love how Mayumi turned out. I could do her sleeves better but that's more of just me needing to study how those types of sleeves fold in that position more. I'm also very happy with the posing, the technique I used for that was taking photos of myself in the positions I wanted, blocking in the silhouette and then modifying that by adjusting it to my lines of action that I drew on top of the original photos, and then sketching over the silhouettes and drawing in the shapes of the hands overtop of the photo if I needed to get the fine details right. As for what I do to take the pictures myself, I use a tall chair I have, prop up my phone with a phone stand, put on a ten second timer and scramble to get in position. Yes, I did have to use a bunch of thin markers I had to try and get the hand positioning on Keiki's pose right, yes I do have a fake sword that I used to get the positioning of Mayumi's arms and hand right, the sword was for an old Halloween costume from several years ago. I really like how both Keiki and Mayumi turned out in this drawing, I'll have to play around with these designs for them more in future drawings.

Also, if you wanna know why I draw buildings like that, when I watched Fantasia 2000 as a kid (One of the Disney movies where they make really beautiful animations to classical music) the way they drew the buildings in the first few sections Rhapsody in Blue segment (the jazz one with the cities) changed my brain chemistry and now whenever I need to draw buildings really quickly, I refer back to that. Since the buildings aren't really the main subject, I didn't put much thought into them.

As you can tell I am very tired of this piece, mainly because I made things harder for myself by overcomplicating the process compared to what I usually do, mainly with the whole "starting in grayscale then adding colour." I'd honestly just prefer having a black layer set to colour that I can just toggle on and off when I need to see the values, but it was good to experiment. And that was mainly the point of this whole drawing, to experiment. I'm definitely going to have to play around with this new style I'm going for, mainly because I liked how it turned out a lot in the augmented Keiki sketch, and also because I want to find ways of making it suit my style more. I also really want to keep experimenting with my lighting like this, it's very fun. Last but not least I am never starting in greyscale again because dear god I do not like the workflow it forced me into. I don't have a problem with the method itself it's mainly just a skill issue lol.

If you wanna read my headcanons for these two, I put them in my WIP post, so you can read them there if you want to. The more I look at this the more I prefer the simplicity of my WIP. I might go back to this and just take away the fancy colours and effects to see what it looks like without all of that stuff and reblog this post with that drawing, but for now, I don't think I can look at this drawing again for a while.

[misunderstandings-georg]

look at my simpsons oc boy

Quick someone pick a colour

[thedenofravenpuff]

How do you draw the metal shine on your animatronics?

Oh geez

Honestly?

I have no frigging idea! Couldn't start to explain what I'm doing, as I just draw and add shine and shading as I work. At least if yer talking about my robot shine in my sketches.

But alright, let's see if I can try and make examples for this..

Fig. 1

As said above, I usually shade and shine as I go, so leaving this one mostly blank was bit of a toll on me.

But yeh, just a flat sketch of our favourite Sun guy just happy to be here

Fig. 2

Alright, this is a very simple example for how I do most shine on areas meant to be a light colour. Can't be too drastic and risk making it look like the casing is supposed to be darker.

Best way I can explain the "shine lines", hmmm.. I'm not smart enough to have the words, I guess. I just learn from observing art and things around me to try get an idea what gives the right effect with the tools given..

Fig. 3

Let's try with more detailing by adding soft shading.

I really do just add these things based on feel and vibe, as I go.

Do pay attention that whether it's metal shine or shading on non-metal parts, it rarely goes all the way to the art lines. Gotta preserve white space for effect, it helps giving the needed illusion of light when ye only got pencil to work with. Is the best way I can put any instructions on this.

Fig. 4

Of course matters on the shape and desired effect on what you are drawing. There are many ways to draw shading and shine on different materials, for the right feel. This is just some basic and simple examples I can think of to try and illustrate.

I'm sure you can find plenty of better tutorials out there to explain this concept in deeper detail than I'm able to.

I never really looked it up myself, I just experimented with my techniques as I went. Even trying to set it up in separate parts have me unsure if this gonna help ya understand how I do my work.

Best I can tell ya, is I mostly tribute the backgrounds of Hollow Knight some credit for my shading techniques today. Some arts done attempting to copy the style of the game's backgrounds and detailing gave me some pointers to work from.

(Moth character my old OC Grave Keeper)

So, yeah, that's the best I can give ya on the subject of how I do metal shine in pencil. Best I can offer is ya look up examples that work for you, to try draw from as you figure out your own technique and vibes for it.

I do hope that was any help!

Enjoy!

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[xephia]

Hi, i hope this question doesn't bothers you, do you have any videos of your process?, im currently starting to learn how to do digital art and have trouble knowing where to start and what to do (im always like, should i start drawing this part first?, is it better to do clean lineart or just paint over the sketch?, do i work on the lights first or the shadows?, etc)

I can probs make you a video on this at some point based on something I'm currently working on, although I have a few on my tiktok already (@ xephia) if that helps!

My process is a bit messier than many other artists - I alternate between stages of sketch and colour before I even think about ‘final colour’. I’ll start with a sketch like the ones below, then slap some rough colour on. This is because IMO colour is an important part of the composition so I want to see what works before I line. They’re not meant to be pretty or social media ready. This stage can look super messy or tidy depending on how I feel or how complicated it is. And they can look wildly different; here’s some examples:

That stage also helps me decide if I want to finish the piece or if I should abandon it (I abandon a lot). Sometimes this stage takes 15min, sometimes 2 hours, it really depends on the piece. But for me personally, it’s crucial because otherwise I find it very hard to envision how it will look later, or forget what I was planning.

Then, I do at least one more layer of ‘sketch line art’, which is basically a first layer of line art to see what works and what needs changing. I colour the important bits relatively cleanly (usually character/s) and add might some subtle shadows/gradients and/or lighting to get a feel of what it will look like finished. Sometimes I repeat this process a couple of times if I’m not happy with how the first iteration looked. This stage usually looks a little like this character sheet I’m working on, and this slice from a Kiki delivery service sketch:

It’s usually not until I’ve done all that, that I go over and do the final lineart, making it thicker, colouring the lines, redoing the flat colours, tidying it up, and adjusting where needed. Essentially I don’t start ‘finishing’ a piece until I’m happy with where everything sits and what colours I’ve picked. It’s only at this point I feel like the sketch is ready to line, and lining and final colouring can actually take less time for me than all those layers of planning somehow haha.

At this point I keep tidying, cleaning, lining, colouring, until the piece feels complete. Sometimes complete for one piece is tidier than complete for another, it really depends.

I’ll also use Procreate’s push tool to adjust things as I go in all steps - it saves a lot of time and isn’t cheating.

Although as you can probably tell from my examples, I do change this procress up a lot depending on the piece! Sometimes I’ll even paint over parts of my final piece like I did in this magical girl street. I think find whatever works for you, everyone will work differently and things like mood, energy levels, how patient you feel, how stressed you are, if you have any hand pain or shaking, and how much free time you have that day to draw can all affect your process day to day, week to week.

Some days it will be easier and more comfortable to sketch messily, other days tidier. Some days you will draw well, other days not well at all. At least for me, I find consistency almost impossible.

So I think there's no right or wrong order to do things and it's great to switch it up and keep things interesting for yourself, and different processes work for different people. Hope this helps!

[i-am-worm]

(This is an old idea I had for Quarians here, I just think Tali looks adorable in this old pic, lol).

Today's inktober word is 'Nomadic' and this made me think about Quarians in the game Mass Effect. And to my self-imposed horror, I realized I never bothered uploading my ideas for what they looked like back in the day. I went through a phase like that. I did lots of stuff back in 2010 and never really uploaded it...Possibly for the best, as it looks pretty rough in places now, but I did want to share some of my ideas before I upload my more current version from today.

I did at least upload my concepts for the Volus and the Raloi though (two other unseen races in game, one is coved up, and the latter just mentioned in other media). You can see them here:

Quarians are masked aliens in game and back in the day, I had to have my graphic settings turned WAY down in order to play mass effect. Have my low graphic crunchy Shepard

Because of that, I never saw the two glowing eyes or slightly human nose bridge reflection you can see in a normal setting. So I had in mind an alien species that somewhat resembled the Geth - a race of AI the Quarians themselves made:

So I was picturing something with one eye, armour and maybe even mandibles? So here is my first go:

BUT later on, when I played Mass Effect 2 on a better pc, I was disappointed that you could see a bit of a human face. No matter- I could still work with this.

MORE BELOW so I don't clog up your feed with ancient quarian debates I should have posted a decade ago, lol.

So I got to playing around with ideas, using my old ones. I mean- Quarians are mentioned to be attractive to Turians and later Javik mentions that ancient Quarins looked attractive. And they look like this:

So definitely not very human....right?

One thing I also noticed was that male Quarians have a flat nose compared to females, almost like a muzzle. (screenshots are mine, the model I downloaded back in the day and can no longer find a source sadly)

And that made me think about the sci-fi trope of cat people.

Seriously, these are just some of the books on my bookshelf that contain sci-fi cat people, and that's the ones I could find off the top of my head:

It makes sense; Mass Effect is a bit of an amalgamation of sci-fi tropes into new ideas. You have the insect race (Turains), Warring tank race (Krogun), the classic 'Grays' (Salarians), Animal-like with tentacles (Hanar), The 'sexy human female but a colour' (Asari). etc. etc. yadda yadda.

So I sat down and tried to design something that sort of encompassed all these ideas, Geth-like, attractive to Turians, Javik and maybe even humans...and a little bit of space cat thrown in.

So this was my first idea that I meant to upload back in 2012.

I think I wasn't happy with the body and I had meant to come back to it. I had over the next few years dabble din other sketches, even going back to the drawing board on the face.

I think what stopped me was the things we learned from Mass Effect 3. If you romance the Quarian Tali, you can see a photo of her face!...

...they were purple humans.

LAME.

But recently, The legendary edition took the critique on board and revamped the picture to the one on the right. Now they look ...even MORE human.

EVEN MORE LAAAAME.

Utter disappointment. Now I always knew that if Bioware revealed the Quarian face they would disappoint some people, but this was such a missed opportunity to design something unique. Bioware did they that they were worried if it was too alien, it would be hard for cosplayers to dress up? But come on, cosplayers love a challenge and will overcome anything. We knew they had two eyes and a nose bridge, it didn't have to be too alien, just alien enough.

TALI RAGE.

BUT the best answer is to REJECT CANNON.

And in a moment I'll upload my more updated Quarian idea.

[wordsandrobots]

Hehehe, I'm just really curious! Because in all of my fandom existence, I've never ever met somebody as prolific and consistent as you are. A lot of the things you'd like to see are already on my list. EDIT because it posted too soon!!! Anyway, I figure this is a good opportunity to ask for some refs about things I've been having issues figuring out. That is: Shino and Yamagi's pilot suit designs, some more specs on Ryuseigo the 5th, like which parts am I supposed to reference, cause I'll be damned if I don't draw that thing. I'm guessing Shino's Goibniu team rides in standard issues Gjallarhorn pilot suits. Also Sri's skin tone comes to mind. There are other things, I guess I'll just pester you for refs as things come up o/

@lilenui Pulling out my reply so you don't have to scroll past the whole ask-answer-reblog chain to get all this! (I am extremely flattered to hear that you think I'm prolific. That'll probably happen when a story idea consumes my brain's every waking moment for a couple of years!)

OK. Shino and Yamagi get the same type of pilot-suit that Tekkadan used (or very similar), but with the orange swapped for blue and the grey replaced by dark navy, in line with the standard Teiwaz mobile suit colours. Like before, the inner skin/wetsuit thingy worn outside of the full spacesuit matches the under-colour, so dark navy (never could figure if that was actually meant to be the under-layer of those suits).

The Goibniu test pilots wear standard Gjallarhorn pilot-gear in flat black with red trim when active in the field, yeah, but during testing they wore simpler flight-suits, more akin to modern day fighter pilots' jumpsuits, normally in grey, though obviously Shino's was magenta. I pictured those as being intended for lighter duties, meant to be much less of a faff to deal with when you're coming in and out of a cockpit and maybe just spending ages on stand-by. (Plus it visually distinguishes them from standard Gjallarhorn troops, and the discarding of that represents the reality of what they are ensuing.)

I've said before that Sri is explicitly of Indonesian descent, by which I meant Javanese specifically, and she has 'pale' skin. That most likely means she's going to be more golden-toned than Eugene or Shino are depicted, she's just less weather-beaten than they are by dint of her history (something of a parallel to Yamagi, there).

(Eugene was being uncharacteristically un-clinical in that moment of description because he was having a hubba-hubba moment. He did continue to labour under the impression she was Doc Chaifin's biological daughter after that, though, and I describe the doctor as having 'weathered golden skin', so...)

As for the Ryusei-Go the Fifth. Well. Here's a quick sketch of my current thoughts on the matter, pending me getting a move on with my Gundam frame/Flauros and derivatives blender model.

The torso is very similar to Flauros but with an extended cockpit module for obvious reasons. The bracer pads on the arms are replaced with storage modules; basically fancy weapons racks. The backpack is some freakish combination of the guns and the Unicorn Gundam's fancy pop-open backpack. Actually, the new Buster Gundam has given me Ideas in that direction.

The waist is somewhere between Barbatos and Barbatos Lupus, while the legs take inspiration from a Hugo, only the reverse knees are optional and the lower legs work ala Kimaris. I will, eventually, be able to produce an actual CGI model of all this, but I'm currently still struggling with the Graze!

(For completeness, the Flauri start out in unadorned greys, probably with a bit of hazard yellow thrown in, and are then repainted in Graze Ein black and red trim (think, everything yellow on Ryusei-Go 4 is red on the Flauri; I think the white bits are switched for grey. Ryusei-Go 5 meanwhile is magenta with purple highlights [that's indicative of Yamagi's influence since the theming is Yamagi = water = blues, Shino = fire = redder colours] and black trim. There is probably some gold and white in there too but I haven't figured that out yet.)

I shall now proceed to vibrate in anticipation of what you're cooking up (I mean, just in general, your art is always utterly lovely!). Please pester me for whatever references you like, or about any IBO stuff in general. :)

[polkadotjersey]

For the fic asks: maybe 4, 13, 29?

Hello :) Thank you for these <3

4. How many WIPs do you have right now?

Harder question that it looks ahah I have one WIP for F1 (Lifeguard AU). I suppose everything else I've started to write counts more as abandoned than a work in progress. I think I need new ideas 😅

13. How much planning do you do before writing?

The amount of planning of a fic is directly proportional to the probability I will abandon it, so ideally I don't plan much. Maybe I'll do a rough sketch for more complicated things (like non-linear narratives), but most often I start writing something and it goes on an unexpected path so I just let it happen. Then the nightmare of editing everything into a coherent story begins.

29. Share a bit from a fic you’ll never post OR from a scene that was cut from an already posted fic.

Here's an entire scene from 'got milk?' that didn't survive the editing cut (because it was really pointless 😂 also I reused parts of it in other scenes):

Fifteen minutes is a deceptively short amount of time. Jonas wastes no time in slipping into the first pair of jeans he can find, but it all derails after that. 

He spends a good five minutes in front of the bathroom mirror, trying to flatten his bed-mussed hair with his hands, then fluffing it up again when it becomes too flat, then frantically dragging his fingers over the uncooperative blonde strands before giving up altogether and leaving it as it is, flopping uselessly over his forehead. 

His face looks too pale even for Jonas, doing nothing to hide the blooming dark circles under his eyes. It irks him—even if Jonas has never cared much for the way he looks, it’s still an expression of weakness. And Tadej—he never looks weak. The last time Jonas saw him, he’d looked—

‘It’s Armani, eh’ Tadej had told Jonas, holding the right side of his jacket open to show him something—the brand tag, maybe, Jonas couldn’t tell you because his eyes immediately strayed to the fabric of the shirt clung to Tadej’s chest. Delicate, white linen, almost see-through, the hint of a pebbled nipple underneath—god. He’d seen Tadej shirtless countless times before, of course. Again, it’s the sort of thing that comes with the job. This shouldn’t have been news to Jonas. There was no logical reason for him to get flustered over the mere suggestion of a perfectly normal anatomical feature. Except—

‘Looks good,’ Jonas had mumbled, averting his eyes. A waiter passed by, offering him a timely distraction in the form of free champagne. (In hindsight, that was the first poor decision of the night.) At least Tadej had seemed pleased about his answer.

Except.

Except, maybe Jonas should have seen this coming. He’s worked through this in therapy too—how he shouldn’t let his feelings bottle up inside him until they blow up. How he should cut them into small, manageable pieces. Work through them, one at a time, so he can remain calm and focused. 

Of course, in therapy they meant to address things like anxiety, anger, the fear of failure. Not-- Not whatever it is that grips inside Jonas’ chest whenever Tadej smiles at him. So, of course, he’d let that bottle up inside, and, of course, it has now blown up in the most spectacular, ill-advised, world-rocking fashion. 

And so all there’s left for Jonas is to scour through the depths of his suitcase, trying to find a shirt that is not team-branded, or contains the words colouring history, or is an actual yellow jersey—what the fuck, he needs to start packing properly—so he can meet Tadej and figure out where do they go from here.

His fifteen minutes are up and his phone rings once more just as he manages to find a plain white t-shirt with a wash-resistant ketchup stain near the collar that will just have to do.

“Your Uber ride has arrived, sir,” Tadej announces in a mock-solemn voice. It takes the edge off Jonas’ shoulders, even if only momentarily. Maybe things can be as easy as before. Maybe nothing has to change.

“Yeah, I’m coming.”

[the-lost-beast]

Trivia: Drawing Akah-El

🍂 All pictures have images descriptions. Click alt.

Oak's (Akah-El, never mind the misspelled name on the sheet) design was the one I struggled the most with. Drawing birds is much easier, who would've thought.

First, here are the earliest design I made for Oak. Dates back to 2020, during lockdown.

Hair down then up. First drawing I ever made of Oak. They were a much different character back then and I wasn't really happy with how they turned out, but looking back now, I think these drawings are pretty good for a first try. It set most of the features they still have now. As you can see on the research sheet below, I played around with their hair a lot and it took a while for me to ditch the strand of hair on the right side of their face - I think, for the best.

Oak's scar was established pretty early. I wasn't sure about the feathers at the time but ended keeping them. Got rid of the big ones on the forehead though. Idk. Might bring them back.

Giving a character recognisable features is just something I usually struggle with and Oak was no exception. The Hebra being people of the mountain and cold weather, I knew quite early on I wanted to base their design off the Inuits. That ended up evolving into something quite different that's really just my own style but the inspiration is still there. None of the sketches on this page really fitted what was on my mind. The big one at the centre helped me define the nature of their hair, its colour, and how the feathers would look like. The green ends on the hair and red outline on the eyes were ideas that came with the new design and were based off Kíran's. Hesitated on making their eyes red. The sketch labelled 'Rito style' still looked too Caucasian for my liking.

Same thing with this sketch on the the left. The face was not what I wanted, but it's still a good sketch to show their body features: Oak has wide hips and strong limbs from climbing. Their feet are sort of scaled and look like not fully-formed talons. They have feathers growing along their arms and calves and their body hair is dark green.

The one on the right at least set me on the path of what I wanted for the face and hairstyle.

Tried a different face and eyes shape and this happened. Something clicked. I think it was the eyes. I tried drawing them higher up on the cheeks. The left one was still too Caucasian.

So then I drew this and it was super satisfying. Like when you can put a name on a face you'd thought you'd forgotten,

I love Oak´s nose and scar. They have a flat, rounded nose due to their former beak growing on top of it.

The Hebra and Rito outfits were a nasty piece of work and even now I'm not satisfied with how they turned out. For now, Oak´s Rito outfit consists merely of their Hebra trousers and the Rito breastplate they sell for Hylians. The fabric they wear is obviously Kíran's. Their hair is also loose as opposed to the ponytail they wear in their Hebra outfit. There´s a small mistake: they shouldn't be wearing the shoulder pads because they are an indication of a Rito's skills, according to whether they're still an apprentice or an accomplished warrior.

I went for that overlayered look with the Hebra outfit, hoping to recreate something in the style of the Inuits, again, although trying to keep it Zelda-like. I went back to the artbook and clothes references a lot while drawing this. There is much inspiration from the Sheikah, including their prior iterations. The Hebra outfit is meant to keep them warm but its moveable layers are meant to be adaptable. Given Hebra do a lot of climbing and goign in and out of caves, where the temperature is milder, I wanted to create an outfit that would easily adapt to all these apsects of their daily lives. Oak wears a face mask to hide their bird-like features but I don´t know yet if that´s just a common piece of the Hebra outfit.

I like the triangular motive. It gives off a nice touch to the outfit and is meant to be reminescent of the mountains. I figured Hebra probably use polar bear furr to make their clothes, hence the beige/white/grey colour scheme. But I also wanted the Hebra outfit to be easily recognisable as that of an enemy, hence the touch of red.

I kind ruined Oak´s face with the colouring but I'm thinking on touching the illustration up later, digitally.

Overall, I think I succeeded in showing Oak´s duality in their features. They're probably still going to evolve as I grow more confident with my drawing skills, but for now I´m proud of the result.

Bonus sketches in terrible quality.

I know I said I´d post this back in early November but I love lying, now who knows when the next chapter might be dropping.

[corowne]

1 of 4 guest adoptables for Starsnares! (The sale is hosted on their IG post here)

Below is just a few notes on my thoughts working on this set.

Guesting for closed species!!! It's fun to shop around their trait lists and design without committing to owning the design haha. The mods are lovely and the critters are adorable, it was a great experience and I'm grateful for the opportunity 💕

The shading is experimental, I wanted to see if I could make it work (shaded final artwork while being able to turn off the shading entirely for flat colours) and I think it did pretty well across the entire set of 4, although...it certainly took longer than I'm probably going to earn from these...might have to workshop that a bit.

After going to Design Festa this year I'd been itching to play around with graphic design more so here's an attempt. I had fun with this - all four are composed differently on their graphics with a similar visual theme, split into 2 pairs of 2 adoptable design themes. Stars goes with sky/rainbows (I guess this is a day/night pair), sun goes with moon.

Also yeah I couldn't make this one a square. Or the next one, so I have to deal with awkward thumbnails. Instagram sux

A friend once said that if you don't have enough visual "noise" for a generic floating character kind of drawing and want to add more complexity without adding anything extra, turn on the sketch layer. I'm not sure if this is what they meant (probably not, they use it differently) but it was a lifesaver for filling in the empty spaces in the background.

I think it's really weird thinking that my primary platform for posting art is not dA now. RIP dA

[aemiron-main]

I adore your artstyle. I feel like I'm never happy with my own cause it looks so boring and unstylized. Got any good tips?

AHHH THANK YOU ANON!! <<333

And believe me, I’ve been in your shoes. Seriously. Even now, I still have 26474885 new things I want to try with my art and things I want to change. But I DO have some tips for you- hopefully theyre good tips!

So, I think one of the key things is looking at other artists and pulling their art apart.

Practice and spending the time actually creating art is important, but I’d argue that spending time analyzing art is equally important. I spend a lot of time looking at art, and then instead of just staring at it, I try and figure out what EXACT elements of it that I want to incorporate into my own work. For example, if I like the way somebody does lineart, and the way another person does their rendering, I’ll try and figure out how they did it & why I like it & try to combine it with the way another artist does rendering or lines/the way I want to do them. I spend a LOT of time pulling at apart, seriously. I send various pieces to my own private discord server channel & literally talk to myself about them and what exactly I like about them and how EXACTLY I want to change my own work. I do probably as much typing as I do drawing when it comes to art.

Also, a good question to ask yourself when you see a piece of art you like is “I like this art, BUT- do I want my art to look like this?”. There’s artists whose styles I ADORE, but I don’t want my art to look like theirs- for example, I love looking at people with super heavily stylized art with only flat colouring & no rendering, but it’s not how I want my art to look & isn’t the type of art that I enjoy creating.

So, being able to pull apart various pieces and go “okay, WHY do I like this piece and DO i want MY art to look like this?” is something that’s definitely helped me.

I also think it’s super important to set actual, solid goals and figure out what you want your art to do.

What I mean when I say “figure out what you want your art to do,” is in terms of “okay, well, do you want everything more flat and visible with less rendering and less volume? or more rendering and more volume? Do you want to focus on design/concept work? Do you want to be able to do complex poses or complex lighting or both? What matters more to you- having a painting with dramatic, heavily contrasting lighting, or having a style where everything is easily visible & not obscured by shadow, or some combination of the two? Do you want to be good at drawing couples? Complex backgrounds? Both? HOW do you want to draw those couples and complex backgrounds? Lots of volume? Minimal volume? Focus on lighting? Focus on lines? Somewhere in between? tc"

Personally, I try and visualize it as a give and take situation/a sliding scale with tradeoffs when it comes to stylization. On one side of my scale, I’ve got super linework-focused, flat colours art that’s more focused on shape and less focused on volume and minimal lighting. On the opposite side, I’ve got super rendered, painterly art with complex lighting. And I’ve been trying to find an ideal combination of the two, and that’s where the tradeoffs I mentioned come in.

My work used to be even MORE linework heavy than it is now/flatter (which is great, just not the direction I wanted to personally keep going), and I had SO much trouble doing painting/rendering and it frustrated me and I couldnt figure out why. But then, I realized I had to make a tradeoff- my complex linework didn’t work well for heavily rendered styles, because the sketches/drawings/lines for paintings on that “super rendered basically no visible linework” side of the art scale are generally meant to be more for function rather than form.

My lines weren’t serving the function they needed to, they weren’t doing the heavy lifting that they needed to, so the rest of the painting would collapse & wouldn’t work and I would get frustrated as all hell when trying to paint.

What I mean when I talk about the lines doing heavy lifting is what I said earlier with the sketches in painterly styles generally being more function over form. I needed to think of my lines as supporting the painting and acting more as a *map* for things like the lighting (see: shadow mapping) & as using fewer lines to make room for more volume (the tradeoff). My lines weren't doing that, I wasn't really thinking about where I was putting them/how I was using them/how they interacted with other elements of the piece (such as the lighting & how that affects the way I do lines).

I also highly highly highly recommend the book/resource "anatomy for sculptors"- you can find a bunch of excerpts from it on pinterest/all over the internet, but it really is a phenomenal resource and a unique resource IMO because it does a really great job of demonstrating the link between the anatomy vs the planes of the face/shapes that make up that anatomy, and bridging the gap between 2D shapes and 3D forms.

Also, just some basic tips that help me in general: -Your areas of detail should also be your areas of high contrast. This sounds more complicated than it actually is, but basically, it doesn't matter how much detail you put in a low-contrast area of a painting, because it won't show up (because it's low contrast). So, keeping your high contrast areas as your detail areas is a good thing to keep in mind, esp when working on more complex paintings. -General proportion "rules". I try and keep in mind some general rough tips like "the eyes should have the width of one eye between them," and "the face should be roughly the sized of a splayed out hand".

-Straights vs curves. I think about the straight lines vs the curved lines a LOT in my art.

-What works for me may not work for you. Different people think differently. What works for other artists may not work for either or us. What works for other artists may work great for you but not for me.

Also, experiment with different brushes. They DO make a difference. No brush will fix a lack of understanding of the fundamentals, but a brush that works for you will make those fundamentals easier to learn/apply. Personally, I draw with a combination of the default photoshop pressure opacity tapered airbrush and one of Ruan Jia's free textured square brushes.

And also, experiment with overlay layers/all those different types of layer. Seriously, that was a gamechanger for me, especially in terms of stylization and giving more of my art that warm feeling/look that it has. My art actually usually starts out very cool toned and I slowly warm it up via colour changes and various yellow (or other colours) overlay/soft light etc layers.

And I don’t say any of this to box you in/overwhelm you, just to give you a list of things I wish I knew sooner.

Also, I think people focus too much on having one consistent style. I 10000% understand needing to have a consistent style for commission purposes, but as far as just developing your art goes. just experiment and figure out what you like and what works best and the style WILL come.

ANYWAY! Hope this helped, I'm like half awake rn so it's not as coherent as I'd like it to be.

[gammathefool]

A list of some past "Outros"

So this the first of the "Stack" type, and is based on a scene from Sailor Moon of all places, very flat and kind of derivative of the source material

Next version, "The Fool" sign is added, the stack is redesigned and more shading. I should note the TVs cycled through images

Revised the stack again (this was to have an image across multiple screens, it didn't turn out too well) revised the colour scheme bring in dark purples for the night sky and made the moon more Yoshi's Island

This one never got past the sketching stage, while a cool design it was...too much

This is another over ambitious idea, the back was meant to have an "astronomical clock" but realised that was way too many moving parts (I just want to incorporate gears)

And the current one, I tried to balance the TVs so the was at least one main screen to focus on and divide the area better into thirds to balance the sky, cityscape, and junkyard

I am looking at reworking it again, but I haven't hit on an idea I full like just yet

[poemarsviner]

Creating [Trading Card]

Our overall project goal was to create a trading card featuring our pirate, their name and possibly their ship name.

I spent a long time thinking about just the pose. When we took the photo, I knew I wanted something 'flamboyant' so I chose a bow. I also hid my left arm behind my back, hiding his amputated limb. Perhaps he's trying to seem nice, hiding his more zombie-like features.

After taking the photo, I started to thumbnail over it and then create a background.

[Thumbnailing is when you use various shades of grey to show a pose/background with contrast but no detail]

I did also draw a sketch on top of the background and figure to make it easier.

After a long time of not drawing it, my deadline was getting closer. And I still wasn't happy with my idea.

But to distract myself from the front and still make progress, I made the back. I used the pattern we had created for the sigil and I used a dark blue colour scheme. Then I drew over a voxel icon from fontawesome.com (I could NOT work out how to download the icons) for a compass in the middle as a focal point.

Like with my original concept for a back, I added a black and gold rim to make the card look special. I also added this onto the front to keep things consistant.

Using Procreate on my iPad, I decided to draw the lineart. The pose was relatively easy, not to toot my own horn but I think my lineart looks good and I can draw it quickly. I did have an issue with perspective on the face, but I got some help and made it look a lot better.

For the background, I used a ship in World of Warcraft to take a screenshot of and then I drew vaguely over the screenshot. The background is meant to be the large windows at the back of (usually) the captain's cabin underneath the wheel.

I changed the background from the end of the ship because I felt it was rather generic, so there was a possibility another student had the same background idea. I'm also not good at drawing ships and I thought it wouldn't make his card stand out.

Here I had added flat colour to the card. I colourpicked from my reference for the pirate and then for the background I stuck to a cold blue palette, wanting the wood to look 'off' and old.

To add an extra flair to my card, I wanted to add unique lighting. I had two choices, a cracked open door from the front or backlighting from the window. I made concepts for both.

I think both look good but I chose the backlighting as I felt the concept looked better and it had a more ominous feel to it.

Here I started work on the background. You can see the part in the middle I avoided drawing, since the pirate was covering it and it was faster to avoid it. I added shading using Multiply layers and Gaussian blur and then added some texture on the planks with Gaussian blur too.

After that, I darkened the edges of the windows and added highlights to it. On top of a darker layer, I added circles that I blurred over the windows and turned on the 'add' layer setting so it glowed.

Once I had rendered the background, I used a darker colour for the lineart which really made it all look cohesive.

Then I rendered my pirate. Using my traditional shading methods I worked my way through my 50 or so layers (I think I finished with about 70) to render him. Then I added a dark layer over just him and lowered the opacity of the Multiply setting, lightly erasing the edges of him to show the backlighting.

As you can see I also coloured his lineart and on the darker layer I erased the pupils so they were pure white, shining through the dark.

Here is my finished result. I added the ships name to the small section above his head, like a golden plaque. I used various layer settings to make it look good, like Stroke and Inner Shadow. I even warped it slightly so it looked like it was actually on the walls perspective, not just flat.

Afterwards, I used the same layer settings and wrote his name in front, using Gaussian blur to make a shadow in the background of it for contrast.

While I dreaded it for a while, I'm glad I have this card finished. It's the exact vibe I wanted and I think the final result looks great. You can see his design well but also you can tell something is 'off' about him from just the lighting alone. Ignoring the zombie patch on is face which definitely proves he's not human.

I've learnt a lot while making this, especially about composition and cohesiveness and I look forward to future projects.

[futurequibblerjournalist]

I hate to text twice in one day but I'd love to hear your artistic process! Wow! It turned out so well!!!!

You can text all you want in one day,,, haha the more the merrier!

So as for the character designs themselves a lot of them were not originally my designs,,, a good handful of them are originally by @literallysleepy and they’re just like,,, my take on them

The actual artistic process tho,, idk I feel kinda silly explaining it cause it’s obviously quite obvious to me lmao but anyways,,, I spent ages finding references, did the sketches and then just kinda chipped away at the sketches until they worked as lineart? I had to redo Igor three times cause I kept drawing him too small cjfncjfncj it was honestly such a struggle to keep everyone somewhat proportional to each other and even with how it turned out I feel like it wasn’t entirely accurate still?

I copy my lineart and do one on 30% opacity and as a normal layer and then the one below I make an overlay layer to get the coloured lineart. Once I’ve done flat colours I’ll add details, shade (I do that with a multiply layer and a purple-ish blue) and once all that is done I’ll copy the full drawing into its own layer where everything is merged and I do details that way, whether it’s correcting proportions or fixing outline colours etc

I think that’s pretty much it? I spend the most time on the face trying to get different colours in there but yeah,,,, I think that’s it. I really hope this is what you meant to ask cjfncjnfjc

Also just!!! Thank you!!! I’m so glad you like how it turned out < 3