#help me it's 2019 and i'm still drawing homestuck

[lucabyte]

ppl saying they look to my comics for inspiration and pointers on how to format things is WILDDDD to me (and delightful don't get me wrong!! i am overjoyed) because like. none of you are privvy to the absolute WAHHH I DONT WANNNAAA bitchfits i was *CONSISTANTLY* throwing every time i forced myself to make a comic before i got into isat. like no joke. i considered comics such a fucking difficult medium they always drained my drawing energy so hard because they always felt like they took sooo long and had so many moving parts and were so much harder than storyboards (WHICH I ALREADY STRUGGLED WITH) because you had to account for panel shape and speech bubbles and-- like you get it. but genuinely for real. the sheer amount that i complained whenever i clawed my way through drawing a comic (which thus! was not very fucking much!!) compounded by the fact that i *genuinely have trouble reading comics*. as in, i really struggle to parse the flow of contiguous movement or action between panels (possibly connected to the fact ive got mad aphantasia?) of even really well done best-of-the-best professional comics...

... BUT. basically. what im trying to get at is. if you wanna learn to draw comics, evidently you super can?! I genuinely *didnt* draw comics before drawing isat fanart! I have no idea what it was about ISAT fanart that made it finally click for me? (I think it was... not having to think about colour? Removing a step from the process really helped. Plus, it being fanwork meant I could just start en-medias-res and not have to think about setup... Trying to cram too much explanation and setup into my oc stuff was always a big hurdle too...)

I find them fast to do now! and damn if i dont value speed in art (<- impatient little fucker). its still going slowly on my oc comics.. mostly due to the colour again, i think. but it's not extremely, ecruciatingly difficult anymore. is what im saying. and im genuinely baffled by it every time i put pen to page. its fucked up. did you guys know that practice makes things easier? . fucking perverted if you ask me.

As for looking at other people's things for inspiration. if you want to know where I was looking when I was piecing together the first couple fancomics I did for ISAT i want to specifically point at . well besides everything rebecca sugar has ever done (for hands and facial expressions *especially*), the main person i really dug into the work of was Leo Fox (Website link). I feel like i wanna point people to the source of a lot of the inspiration for my more off-kilter panel choices so you all can get the full experience rather than through my regurgitated mimesis. I'm now at the point where i can wing panel layout so i wasn't in there for longgg but. everyone go add it to your knowledge banks as for SUBJECT MATTER aka why i am i so deranged. those are squarely the 2019 postcanon homestuck golden era bleeding through my CLENCHED BITTEN DOWN JAW. A BULL TERRIER ON YOUR BRACHIAL ARTERY. namely that @/floralmarsupial and @/tomatograter's works (no i am not tagging them . im shy) are things i go back to frequently and floralmarsupials pure black/white inktober comics were *especially* an inspiration. if you've been following me a few months you may remember me reblogging a bunch of their stuff from 2019~2021 for seemingly no reason. this was why. The narratively divorced reality of jade strider & Liminal Space are big in my mind here. I balk to call myself anywhere near as good as these but these are what i'm aiming for, tonally and quality-ways with it. also detective pony but ive mentioned that already and thats farrrr too inside baseball for this post.

BUT YEAH TL;DR: I DIDNT DRAW LIKE ANY COMICS UNTIL UHHHH LIKE, WHAT, LIKE 8 MONTHS AGO? JESUS. ANYWAY. THIS MEANS YOU 🫵🫵🫵 CAN DO IT TOO. BELIEVE IN YOURSELF. DATTEBAYO!!!!

[calware]

I love your young!Rose design with the braids & hair beads, it reminds me of the Black girls i knew in elementary school (2005-2011), so its deffo “period accurate” and also a delightful choice. The way you draw the human kids in general is really nice, youre really good at conveying specific features with minimal lines (like her & Mom’s nose shape). Do you have any tips for how you draw faces to make them not same-face or repetitively “white” features, especially when drawing in a less “realistic” style (i dont wanna say your style is cartoony but idk what i would call it tbh)? I took a life drawing class back in 2019 but we mostly drew the same two models or our classmates, and it was both a limited pool of features plus feels hard to translate into art that isnt attempting to be 100% realistic.

Sorry if this is rambly. Congrats on 10k. Love ur new icon, tho i miss the Horb. Do you take commissions? I think i asked this before but i forgetful af.

thank you for the ask :)!! i'm really flattered that you think i'm good at avoiding same-face syndrome because i am VERY LAZY when it comes to drawing and i could definitely be doing a better job ;^^ i'm also not the best at drawing people diversely(?), it's just something i have to get better at. there are people way more qualified than me to give advice about this... but i can try giving some tips

the first is that, like with anything, if i'm not confident that i can accurately portray something or a specific feature i will usually look up a reference. i like paying attention to things like the position of the browbone, height of the cheekbones, shape of the chin, shape of the eyes, length/width of the face, width of the nostrils, shape/position of the bridge of the nose, roundness of the cheeks, etc. when i draw characters (specifically the homestuck characters i like, because i think about them a lot) i have an idea in my head of how they look and how they differ from one another. for example i see jade with a longer diamond-shaped face while rose has a shorter heart-shaped face, so i do my best to depict that in my drawings

(idk if this illustration makes ANY SENSE bc like i said i think that i also struggle with pushing myself in regards to this and i think i still have more to learn/practice)

i think it comes down to paying attention to the proportions/types of specific facial features and adjusting them each to create a unique face

that said when it comes to stylizing what you see from photographic references, i understand that it can be tricky to simplify it. i really don't have any advice for this.... i just play around with it until it looks good while also being recognizable as the specific thing i'm trying to draw.......... so in that case i think it helps to use other people's art as a reference too! i don't really care about sticking to one "style" so i don't mind drawing in a slightly different way if i want to do something another artist is also doing. so for example if you're struggling with drawing 4c hair i recommend looking at other people's drawings of characters with 4c hair that you like and playing around with if you can incorporate their techniques into your own art.

i hope this all made sense ;^^ there are definitely a lot of tutorials out there that are way more informative than this one

also, to answer your last question, i plan to open up a few commission slots next week! (as long as i have enough time to that is)

[salamidoodles]

Me? Drawing Homestuck in almost 2020??? More likely than you think

[iknowyunholeeknow]

i haven't seen the bean but only because i was like 7 or 8 when we went (the only other times I've seen my aunt and uncle were when they visited us) but I sure would like to! I also wanna see the Thorne rooms at the Chicago art museum, they're these miniature rooms and there's 99 total in existence. Also, I'm still trying to figure out what to make for your gift but for some reason I can't think of anything to draw :( - secret stay

I just looked at some of the Thorne rooms via the wonders of the internet and they look so cool!

I'd love to visit the museum to look at textiles! I love tapestries and old clothing! I really, really, really, want to visit the Met Costume Institute! I've been eyeing their online directory to get inspiration and information for period accurate dress descriptions (this is typically harder than the clothing men would have worn because women's fashion was changing so much from decade to decade and everything was evolving from hats to heels to patterns to makeup, though I do go for historical accuracy with both).

I'm sorry I'm so difficult :( I'd honestly be happy even if you don't draw me anything! Heck, you could go to like a drawing prompt thing and just incorporate someone from skz into a prompt you like. But in the spirit of trying to help some more I really like noir (the aesthetic not necessarily the genre, that's kind of hit or miss) and I kind of think that fits minho. And I really that one scene in the voices performance vid with hyunjin and the gas mask. I'm also a sucker for mermaids and chan's obviously the most like a mermaid out of the group. Hold on! Ratatouille au where Chan is actually an okay (read: really good) chef and then squirrel!han comes along and messes everything up for him (can you tell I'm tired?). And I still like Homestuck in 2019, and trollsonas are pretty cool in my opinion, so if you have literally any idea what that is please don't judge me. stray kids? more like sweater kids, I'm the softest of stans and seeing them in sweater brings tears to my eyes (it's up to you to figure out if I'm exaggerating or not). I'd probably consider you for a money related marriage (tax breaks or college, you decide) if you drew one of boys looking soft and fluffy as hell in a sweater.

What's your favorite thing (or things) about where you live (region, city, county, state, province, country, whatever works for you)? I live in Ohio and despite all the corn fields everywhere we also have quite a few forested places to hike! We also have a bunch of prairies to walk through and my city has a bunch of bike paths and I love biking (I haven't gone on a long bike ride since spring because of... an incident in which I almost died, but I lived so ayyyyy). And if I go into Kentucky and southern Ohio they've got a bunch of (accessible) cave systems, and caving is another thing I really love to do (I love the outdoors if you couldn't tell).

Anyway. I'm gonna go fist fight Hypnos or whatever. I hope you have a lovely night (or day or whatever other day "chunk" term is correct)!