#and this drawing was made only to test the shitpost brush my friend created

[iamhereinthebg]

✨The stars of season 2 ✨

[dysfunctionalbatfam]

Do you have any advice/tips/tricks for new artists?

I’m definitely not the most qualified for this but I’ll try my best!! 😅

I kind of started out sort of using other artists’ art as references (just personal studies that I threw away right after) - that’s how I actually got into drawing. I did it for fun and when I finished I thought, “Huh. Neat” (even though it was terrible) and then I just tried a few more. Unlike working from real references, some artists may choose to have a style that’s more simplified and easier to understand. (Do keep in mind that you should never just trace it and repost online.)

Another thing I took from were speedpaints and tutorials - and they don’t really all help me, but they at least give me some motivation, even if they make it look overwhelmingly easy. They help break down the steps and give you a process so that you don’t only see the masterful finished product and that the beginnings can be rough. There has been, however, two (2) that really did help a lot. (Probably will drop the talented users in the tags 💞💞)

And honestly? Most of it has been just, making up shit, and that’s okay! Even if you have no idea what you’re doing, it’s not going to hurt your art progress, and often times you learn from them. Explore things, different styles, programs, tools, until you find some you’re comfortable with. And don’t worry if you’re unsure, this process takes a ton of time, so just keep exploring. Sometimes you just gotta say “This looks bad to me, but it helped me learn this and that.”

Another good thing to do is find a group of friends willing to support you! You could share your shitposts to more serious drawings and get their feedback. Bounce off ideas off each other, find other artists. People encouraging you to push on can do more than you’d think.

This is said. A lot. You hear it everywhere, but it’s commonly said for a reason, y’know? Practice. Practicing is so much of the gig. No one’s going to automatically be amazing at art, which also means that if your art isn’t what you want it to be right now? Doesn’t mean it’s never gonna get there. Try your best to draw everyday! Don’t worry if it varies, do whatever the fuck you want, this is for you. A two second scribble one day and a portrait study the next? Heck yeah.

Last general advice, methinks, is to use references. I’m a huge hypocrite for this because I just. Randomly put stuff down. But don’t ever be afraid to use them. They’re a resource all artists have used.

Onto more technical stuff -

Digital Art Programs (that I’ve tested and would recommend)

-Firealpaca (computer) and Medibang (computer & tablet): Always my recommendations. They’re absolutely free and easy to install, yet they offer such a reliable program. They’re basically the same, to be honest

-Krita (computer): I don’t really know how to use this but it’s free and capable of producing gorgeous pieces of art.

-Photoshop (computer & tablet): I started with this, it’s pretty good, but my personal issues made it just keep crashing, so I’m not very versed in it 😅 but it lives up to its hype.

-Procreate (tablet): Good for painting, but lineart is a little harder, in my opinion. The brush stabilization is wack. But it’s very comfortable and whelming to use, worth the ten bucks. You can also download a fuck ton of free brushes online, always a plus (I SWEAR I get twenty more every day)

-Autodesk Sketchbook (tablet & computer [?]): The interface is very similar to Procreate, so if you want a subsititute for Procreate, go ahead! In my opinion, it’s a little harder to use, though.

-Paint Tool Sai (computer) and Clip Studio Paint (both): Never tried, but probably really good, I know a lot of people who use them.

[Do keep in mind that starting out with free programs is enough, and many extremely good artists stick with them!]

Traditional art stuff -

-Same stuff applies, you don’t need advanced supplies to create good art!

-Hoard sketchbooks like a dragon, eat hot chip, and cry

-A lot of professional artists prefer sketching/inking traditionally and then digitally coloring it

-My favorite traditional supplies are charcoal pencils, if that’s anything? 😂 I find them more comfortable to use than pencils.

-You can tell I can’t do traditional to save my life, I’m SO sorry if you do traditional dhdkhd

-Brushes can be bought cheap!! They’ll still work just as well (many supplies that come cheaper are still good, I got a whole set with paint, a sketchbook, etc. for under twenty USD)

-Some advice I took from a youtube video somewhere: Have two notebooks, one for more serious artwork and one just to do anything in, as we know we all have failures and get nervous to fuck up. This ensures that you unleash your creativity! In that notebook, don’t worry about making your drawings look good, just put your ideas down.

This is getting to the point that I’m just rambling, so I’ll end it here. Hope it helps, even though I should follow my own advice- ❤️❤️❤️ good luck, you GOT this, anon!

[eriisaam]

I feel like I bottled up so much about my summoner OCs for a long time. Just recently, I had a “final straw to break the camel’s back” feeling, and I’m just... not sure anymore if I should feel I’m being fair about my feelings and anger or not. I feel like at the very least, this will help me clear some air to maybe move on and re-focus while recovering from other things, but I’m also really sorry to the people following me to dump this out of the blue too. You’ve all been incredibly patient and amazing with me, so whenever I get to the point I need to vent, I feel somewhat guilty of it.

But I’m also incredibly hurt and angry in ways I also don’t feel like I’m fully justified or not in them, for a lot of things well beyond the scope of what is currently setting me off... Maybe it’s best I unbottle it even if only for the sake of clearing the air. 

And then after this, hopefully we can move back to regular light-hearted posts and shitpost art... I’m sorry.

For anyone whose seen me play Fire Emblem Heroes, or even played with me otherwise via friend codes, you know that I go by the handle “my butt” (as for why, Takumi is all too happy to share), and the summoner I send out is Eclair. He’s the only one of the OCs I felt was best able to be represented in-game out of the current summoners selection, so he’s been the one out of the six whose remained ever-present with his dumb little quote and eventually his dumb little gifts to go with. Nobody else in my friend group previously had a summoner named “Eclair” (not to be confused with Eclat), and it’s understandably not a very common name. 

So it came as a surprise to me when one of the FEH friends I had for a very long time, recently changed their summoner (I believe from “Kiran” originally, and with the guy with the brushed-over brown hair) into this:

Any other day, this might’ve been funny, if in poor taste. Maybe I would’ve laughed at it and moved on if I was in a better frame of mind and just ignored it.

But lately, as many of you saw in my past few notes, or even privately, I hadn’t been doing well. I had a lot of frustrations online and off. I’ve been incredibly ill to the point of collapsing a lot, I have a backlog of attempts to work on writing and art that wound up crashing to a halt because of it, in ways that left me even more upset and manic, and pretty much for a long time now, I have felt like I was in constant hell that I tried very hard not to bring up often in public, even when I’ve reached my breaking point multiple times in rapid succession under various circumstances, and I was to a point that a single pin-drop would’ve made me go nuclear.

It wasn’t funny, I didn’t take it well, and I ended up removing them after debating long and hard if I was overreacting to do it or not. And even now, I’m not sure if it was as bad as I make it seem exactly because of how they couldn’t have picked a worse time to try to have a go at me through Eclair.  

And the more I think about it, the more I feel bad that this had been the final straw to a lot of old feelings I’ve had stewing and trying and failing to clear in private, a lot of which were things I didn’t bring up that’s been upsetting me about my summoners for a long time, because I didn’t think ranting about it every single time in the moment was fair, and I feel guilty every time it’s come toit. But seeing this, having all those feelings drum up again, now I wonder if I bottled it up too long, to the point of it being on the opposite extreme and being incredibly unhealthy for me, too.

For a long time, I used the summoner OCs I made for various reasons. Some of them tested waters for like-ideas I wanted to try in some capacity on other works, but wasn’t sure about. (For those who read my other longfics, some of it are a little more obvious than others of the overlap.) Other times, and was one of the biggest pressing things about them, is that I use a lot of them as coping mechanisms. Some of them explored traumas I really did endure, albeit of course theirs might be more extreme, or the same in spirit, or represented or experienced things I myself am still processing. They’re also why I tend to work on them heavily in lulls when I couldn’t properly focus on stuff I otherwise wanted or needed to work on more, or as practice when I needed to figure out how to grasp things in plots or art otherwise, which is why they’re so prevalent on my works so often. 

It’s also why I kept apologizing in realizing that they take over so much, but at the same time, working on them helped better frame things or prepare me for how to continue on other projects I was previously stuck on. They were important to me, and maybe, I got a bit too attached, but without them, I think my productivity and quality in it would be significantly worse if the summoner OCs hadn’t picked me up and carried me through how to figure things out better.

They’ve also, unfortunately, had been the subject of a lot of negativity I’ve sat through and stomached for a good part of the entire pandemic year, and even to this day in this year. I’ve made lore docs for them that got vandalized and littered with comments telling me to “try again” or how wrong I did or how wrong about my ships or shipkids are to come about as they had, to the point that I now deleted them because looking at even my private copy of it drums up the same negative memories and sends me into a panic of whether or not I’ll open it up and see it mass crossed out and littered with even more comments of how terrible and wrong it all is again. It was also partially why I lost heart working on old sketched concepts I initially planned to fully realize, only to drop what I have and post them to share, but would rather redo them (sketch and all) instead of work on them: They are littered with a lot of memories too painful to work on them directly.

I’ve had needlessly hostile messages, telling me off for certain ship combinations, or my OCs being misconstrued into horrible ways and based on their assumptions of what they think my OCs are like, assume the worse of them and me and harass me across multiple messages in my inbox over it. This had even boiled down to harassing me over my design choices of certain OCs, maybe not coincidentally my two female ones, or ones who are short and petite in build compared to their far more larger counterparts, despite every summoner and support all being adults. I’ve had people decide for me they knew the ages of my “minor” OCs better than I do. Despite me being the one who created them.

I’ve had people make not-as-vague-as-they-think-they’re-being comments, shitting on my ideas on the core concept, simply because they’re rooted to either a fandom that’s very subtle and low-key now, a game that seems popular-to-the-point-of-being-a-meme to shit on simply to shit on it and everyone who likes it, and had constantly been made to feel like various ideas other people are ok doing are bad when I do it, solely because I’m doing them. 

They have been through a lot. I’ve been through a lot with them. They still exist because certain people I was very close with, among which Saam had been my rock and pillar through and through, refused to let me give in to the many, many times I found myself in such a dark place and in a really shitty mindset, that I would’ve stopped creating in totality, whether or not it’s related to kiransonas. 

And even now, even when I’ve been trying to pick up the pieces and move past that, there’s still little hints here and there of the damage that’s done that I still haven’t fully gotten over yet to try again. Or I’ve been trying in baby steps, and not in the best ways I wish I could yet.

I don’t draw Erin, Ephrel and Sparrow quite as often anymore, despite wanting to try them again. Ephrel’s and Sparrow’s circle in particular, I felt insecure trying to work on anything to do with them as often, especially if it’s related to Chrom that’s not just with him and Robin. I hesitated to do anything with Sparrow’s and Ephrel’s Robin either, despite having many ideas of what more to share of him. I stopped doing plushies, or being open about plushies anymore, due to still overcoming the feelings fostered from what I’ve been made to feel was bad about them and how I did them. Plush designs and sprite designs I wanted to do as open source were put on hold because I felt more closed off and hesitant to be too open in fandom spaces as much anymore. The Scars of Time, I’ve also hesitated to continue most of all out of my current longfics, because even when it’s been the fic that had the most progress in its latest chapter over the course of the pandemic shoving a wedge across all my longfics, the core elements to it were elements deeply rooted to a lot of the above ill feelings whether directly or by extension of what kiransonas already bore through themselves that hit similar beats. Were it not for incredibly kind commenters who still encouraged me and clearly hoped for other longfics to continue, there have been many, many times I was debating on deleting everything and giving up in totality, but held on because of all of them, and all of you, and people like Saam. 

There’s a lot of things I still had to work through, and it shows.

So I see this dig at Eclair, and I’m torn anymore.

Maybe it was meant to be a harmless joke, and I still have second-guesses that I overreacted and jumped the gun to kick them out of my friend lists over something like this.

But as with how long and scattered my thoughts are in a post like this... It’s been a long time. It’s been a lot of really harsh, unfortunate, hurtful things leading up to this. I see this, and it’s like everything that I listed all came full circle all at once, and it painted all of this in a far worse light than it probably was, but unsurfaced a lot of things that, on top of being sick constantly and stressed out with other major fears, I think I finally cracked.

I don’t know what point I was trying to make of this, and I’m sorry too for all of you having to post this. 

I’m just... tired and confused anymore of if this is fair or when I’m overstepping and overreacting anymore. Or where to go from here.