#but instead of a knife it’s rolled up prints and a sharpie

[howlingdemon13]

what if i just went back to stage door…?

like nothing is stopping me besides my own fear of being cringe…

[mysticsparklewings]

Wire Sunset (+ Time Lapse!)

An attempt at a speed draw/time-lapse number 3! Link: youtu.be/BllxcQOvWQg I'm trying to get myself into something of a habit with these, just to see how it goes over time. This one is a bit different though, as this isn't exactly a typical drawing for me. The drawing is more fitting with my little collection of sky hexagons I did a while back. So what gives? Well, before I did my Happy dAnniversary to Me! piece on the tan paper, I had actually planned to do it on my gray paper, and I got as far as most of the line art...Except I had already run into the problem of the gray paper being unusually difficult to see my sketch through when using my lightbox (which is still exceptionally weird to me, considering the tan paper does just fine ) and then to top that off my own hand was just not cooperating with me.  So I decided to save myself some frustration and just use the tan paper instead. I wasn't really sure what to do with the gray paper after that. It was already a "scrap" piece, leftover from cutting a piece down for Applet, and now it was being scrapped again. I couldn't very well try tracing another sketch, as I'd partially already learned my lesson with that (it is possible, as I've done it before with mild success, it's just that the sketch needs to be dark/have a layer of pen on top and my hand needs to be in the mood to be steady) and now I had pre-existing lines that would get in my way. That reality didn't leave me with a ton of options. For a little while, I toyed with the idea of doing a galaxy/sky piece before going through my camera roll to see if I had any sunset pictures I wanted to try my hand at. And more than ever I wished for a set of tree/leaf stamps to make my life easier because there's something just really appealing to me about having the pretty sunset colors broken up by stark black tree branches and stuff, and trying to draw those details out has just always felt like way too much work that never turns out quite right to me. (And very very easy to screw up.) But ultimately I did a bit of practicing and decided to just go for it and hope for the best. To be fair, the majority of my time was actually spent building up the color for the sunset in the background. I started with Faber Castell Polychromos, and that might have been a mistake? For whatever reason, despite them working just fine on the tan paper on my first test piece with them and on my Stellaluna picture, miraculously, they just weren't turning out very pigmented on the gray paper.  Like I really needed the white and lighter yellows to be bright and pop and they just refused. I tried not to; I really did. But I ended up having to pull out my Prismacolors for the majority of the good color payoff. The Polychromos did make a good base and gave me something of a starting point, but as far as the pigment, on the gray paper, they couldn't touch Prismacolor. Side note: Originally, I hadn't planned on using the Neon Orange Prismacolor, but the bottom portion of the sunset was supposed to be really bright and I wasn't sure how to get any of the pencils to do what I wanted, so I tried it on a whim and over the pink it actually looked really nice! Also, I ended up using this blender pencil by Derwent when I noticed I was seeing too much of the pencil strokes for my liking. I've had the blender for a while; I just haven't given myself much opportunity to use it. When doing reviews/first impressions/tests for colored pencils, I try to keep it fair and not use the blender to see how the pencils stand on their own, and half of the time I just don't think to use it otherwise. And, if I'm being completely honest, I've always still had a bit of a bad taste in my mouth (metaphorically speaking) left from the Prismacolor blender pencil. That's actually part of why I bought the Derwent blender in the first place: I had to see if all blender pencils were that difficult to work with. The Prismacolor blender technically does its job, but I feel like I always have to press way too hard to get it to work properly, and even then it doesn't always do what I want. Just after I got the Derwent one, I did a small side-by-side comparison with just some little circles and color swatches, and IT WAS SO MUCH BETTER LET ME TELL YOU. It doesn't take nearly as much presser, and I would argue it's just better overall. And I think it has to do with the Derwent one having just a little bit of a white/neutral pigment in it, as you can kind of tell that if you sample both blenders on a non-white paper. It's not enough to really notice when you're actually using it to blend, though. I'm not sure how that science works out, but hey, it's saving me hand pain and making my drawings look smoother, so I'm happy. Many layers of colored pencil and blender later, it was time to add something so it looked like more than just blobs of color on a page. I used a ruler to get a few lines, but beyond that, I was mostly free-handing everything (I did look up some extra reference for the birds, but I wasn't super picky about them) and I was trying not to be too picky about symmetry and everything be perfect and all that. (Hence why the power line pole might look a bit wonky). I learned pretty quickly my black markers didn't seem to like going over all the colored pencil wax at all. This worked out in my favor for the actual power lines, as even in my photo reference they looked a bit spotty like this, but those trees... Both of my Copic Multiliners, my Prismacolor liner I used on the pole, my black Sakura gelly roll I used for the birds, even my ultra-fine tip black Sharpie...NONE of them wanted to do those trees! You can see me constantly having to scribble on my scratch paper in the video to get through them. Ultimately, the Prismacolor liner worked the best, but that wasn't saying much. I think I would've been okay if I had stuck to just using the Polychromos, as they're oil-based and I've noticed my gel pens don't fight over top of them alone that much, and I have definitely had plenty of problems with my gel pens trying to go over wax-based pencils like the Prismacolors in the past. And dare I say the Derwent blender pencil probably did not help with that, either. Either way, I did manage to get through it. After that, I cut the edges off where my pencil strokes didn't go quite all the way, then had to cut a bit more to kind of straighten it a little. Then I grabbed my metallic cardstock and cut a piece down to mount the picture on. Neither are particularly straight because I was using an Exacto knife and my own judgment rather than a paper cutter, but eh, I'll live. (I have since borrowed my mom's paper cutter for future endeavors.) In the video you can see me applying mod podge to the back on the picture semi-off screen because I was trying to hide my jacked-up, unused line art.   Then I decided I needed one more bird to cover up a small smudge that was bothering me and signed it with my purple gelly roll, hoping my signature would blend in a bit more that way. (Not entirely sure that succeeded, but whatever.) Overall, I am quite happy with how it turned out  Though I'm not sure how this managed to be the longest video since I felt like it took the shortest amount of time, yet looking back I guess it actually didn't Next up, I've been toying around with some watercolors, so there's that. No clue what I'm going to do for the next Time Lapse, but we'll see. ____ Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings ____ Where to find me & my artwork: My Website | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble |   Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram