#i wasn't sure if i was going to go (mostly bc of my 'blend in' mindset) but i'm glad i did!! it was pretty nice

[spaghett-onaplate]

sixth day at my new school and i didn't sit alone at lunch today 🥳🥳

[nohtora]

process stages & comments below

( original painting )

process: i did 70% of this (up to img #6) on my samsung tablet, on my train commutes, battling motion sickness & neck pain lmao

drawing on my tablet is still a lot harder & feels more restrictive for me bc i'm limited by unfamiliar software (still learning CSP) and lack of keyboard shortcuts (my digital art workflow for years). i also struggle with starting / continuing artworks on my tablet unless i've already planned / sketched most of the composition on my PC. likely because 90% of the time when i'm drawing on the tablet, it's on the train. hard to get in the zone as it turns out lol

this is the first full painting i've started and made substantial progress on purely with my samsung tab, so i'm happy it's starting to feel a bit more natural.

also first time i've tried doing a funky gradient map as a colour base. then applied colour on top with multiply blending mode. 10/10 would use fun gradient maps again - helped me introduce more colour variation bc i feel like my colours are usually quite flat by comparison

given the nature of the fucking bumpy melbourne trains & my broken commutes, i can still only do so much rendering on my tablet. the more refined painting will probably always happen using photoshop on my PC bc that's where i feel i have the most control

i tried not to overwork / overpaint it too much as i often tend to do, and kept the brush strokes rough and loose as much as possible. made sure my brush wasn't set smaller than a certain size so i wasn't tempted to go into fine detail. you can see i didn't refine harry's form/clothes much beyond img #4 because i didn't want to lose the soft/loose quality of the clothing folds. pretty damn proud of that shoe though. but then i posted it before i realised i forgot to paint in his fucking tie lmaoooo

but yeah, i got my tablet as a secondary drawing device to help me draw more often so i'm gonna keep trying to get the hang of it !!

composition/concept: the pose was referenced from this shot of arthur in peaky blinders and i had a vision of HDB slumped over in his kitchen like this

the composition was built around that, and i had the idea of framing it him in shadow and having a strip of light from a doorway illuminating his body. evidence of his drinking and smoking are kept in the shadows.

the original idea was to have a silhouette of someone standing in the doorway (likely jean finding him), but it didn't work with the overall balance & i felt like it interrupted the shape of the light too much / wasn't very legible at that angle. kitchen design was inspired by soviet & post-soviet era style kitchens.

*** feel free to send in an ask if you actually want me to explain how i did things in more detail. these are mostly thoughts for my personal reference

[yeenybeanies]

Hi so this is gonna be weird but I need to freak out about ur g/t au. I love it sooo much you have no idea.

I just wanted to ask, since in a tweet you said giant bones are hollow, does this mean they follow bird bone rules? Like hollow but still dense to provide strength?(for example a bird and mammal that are roughly the same size will have a very similar weight despite the mammal having solid bones!)

Also it is believed that hollow bones help with air circulation during flight via pneumatic sacs connected to the respiratory system located in the bones themselves. So (if your giants follow this rule) does this mean they have amazing "lung" capacity? I imagine that their proportional lungs already compensate enough for the oxygen requirement but it is interesting to think about the implications. Being able to hold their breath for longer? Heavily oxygen saturated blood? How buoyant would they be?

Another thing I thought of! You already addressed the calcium requirement, but do your giants also need extra collagen? Since collagen is a primary component in bones and ligaments (and a bunch of other stuff but i need to keep mostly on track) and provides structure to your bones and joint support.

Anyway. That's all for now. Im sorry for the long message. I wish I could blend your AU and drink it. Also science is my jam. Thank you for your content!

this is a super fun ask!! thank you for bouncing biology ideas off of me!!

under a cut bc we get a lil long here:

so, to your first point: i'd like to point out that i'm going off of what we've seen in the past with dinosaurs, wherein these huge creatures had hollow bones to reduce the weight they would otherwise be carrying. i will admit i arbitrarily picked a weight scale factor for giants (12x instead of 15.6x), & am working in the hollow bones/additional air sacs/slimmer build in to make that work.

that being said! i would agree that giants have a (proportionally) different lung capacity than humans! probably bigger, more efficient lungs (taking advantage of those extra air sacs), which would help their metabolic efficiency. given their slower metabolisms ,too, i would wager that giants could probably hold their breath for a bit longer than humans.

hippos, which outweigh my giants, & are also fully warm-blooded, can hold their breath for about 5 minutes at a time. so, somewhat arbitrarily, i'd say that giants can maybe hold their breath for 5-7 minutes at once. still longer than a human for sure, but this ties into another question of yours & point of mine:

i have it in my mind/headcanons that giants in my au cannot swim well. they're somewhat like other great apes, like chimps, in that they don't maintain a lot of body fat––at least not so much to offset the density of their muscles, so they are more likely to sink in water, despite all the evolutionary adaptations to keep them light-weight. i touched on this a little in one of the MitB chapters where ghost & soap were bickering about ghost's ability to swim, where he asserted that he could, which wasn't common among giant kind. those that are dedicated can swim––ghost is able to & does know how to swim––but it is incredibly strenuous & exhausting & not sustainable.

which does tie into another aspect of giants! while they are undeniably bigger & stronger than humans, they don't have as much stamina. it's kinda impossible to maintain the same degree of stamina that humans have evolved at a giant size. so, while giants do have relatively more stamina than the average mammal, humans can still smoke them in terms of distance running. so, the the olden days, humans would wound & chase their prey animals into giant ambushes, where humans would chase the animals to exhaustion into a team of giants that would then take them down, or pursue them in the last few miles until they fully dropped.

moving back onto your points!: collagen! i find research on the consumption of collagen to be dubious at best, & have had college professors tell me that collagen "supplements" are just a bunch of bs, so... idk, i feel like whatever requirements giants need to maintain themselves is largely found in their diets. they do have very fibrous diets (mostly plant matter), & eat most of the less desirable parts of animals, like skin & bones.

but hey!! thank you for the ask!! i love thinking about stuff like this!! even if some of it has to be hand-waved, it's still fun to consider in a way that might make it semi-realistic!

[the-villainous-ace]

Saw some discourse (can't remember where) about Crowley's sunglasses in the timeline

Vaguely I remember it said that him wearing glasses in the Job minisode, Land Of Uz (2500 BC) , seemed "out of place" / unnatural when later he doesn't wear them in Golgotha (33 AD), when they witness the crucifixion.

Originally in the season 1 timeline of their encounters, we first witness and therefore, were inclined to believe that Crowley's first debut of their signature shades was 6 years after Golgotha, in Rome (41 AD) .

But we find later that he actually debut a pair of tinted spectacles earlier in 2500 BC, which is year's before we were led to believe in season 1.

And even then another flashback minosode could change it yet again.

Now, we know that Aziraphale and Crowley's meeting in the Land of Uz is the first they've seen of the other since The Flood, Mesopotamia (3004 BC) * [Aziriphale makes a comment about it].

I did wonder if maybe this was the first time Aziraphale sees Crowley with eye-glasses. But I feel like he would've made a comment about them. Upon recognizing Crowley he sort of gives him a look up and down at their appearance, but he dosen't mention anything about it despite it being the biggest change in apparel worn. Prior it was mostly just variations on long robes of white and black respectively seen worn at the Garden (4004 BC) and at the flood (3004 BC).

I feel like Aziraphale would've said something about it, unless he had already seen Crowley in something similar previously. Or rather he understands that Crowley is simply blending in.

This leads into my PoinT...

That Crowley wears glasses in order to pose as a human (aka. Billdad the Shuite).

Crowley has a number of personal reason he prefers to where his Sunglasses (look cool and mysterious, hide his expressions/feeling, as an armour to protect himself etc.) But professionally, it would be hard to go about your buisness if people were freaked out by your serpintine features. So he wears them to blend In.

In the Job-isode, the times Crowley is wearing the glasses (aside from his first introduction) is when he is posing as the HUMAN, Bildad the Shuite, professional midwife/cobbler. He even fools multiple Archangels of heaven with his human guise.

Now compare that to when he isn't wearing them. After taking them off to taunt Aziraphale he doesn't put them back on? Why?

Because he isn't pretending to be the human family friend Billdad the Shuit . With Job's kids, He is acting as a demon, "sent here to destroy you all" (but not actually, just turn you into lizards, temporarily).

So I pose the reason Crowley wears glasses in 2500 BC, but not in 41 AD when he meets Aziraphale and re-introduces themselves as the now "Crowley", is because he wasn't assuming a human identity at the time. In fact he could've just popped round after doing some demonic work. He does mention how he "showed him all the Kingdoms of the world" (one of the temptations offered to Jesus in the dessert).

Eventually, approximately starting 6 years later in Rome (but possibly as far back as Job), eyeglasses become a permentant feature of Crowley's earthen appearance/apparel for year's to come. In fact I'm sure Crowly inadvertently invented all the stereotypes of cool/dangerous guys in sunglasses for the future.

I believe the glasses become a facet of their identity, as he creates it while living on Earth. As he begins to re-invent themself (beginning with re-naming himself) and develop his identity on earth he adopts the sunglasses more.

For convenience as times became more modern, but also because they proved useful in tricking both heaven and hell. Heaven won't recognise him and Hell can't tell what he's thinking or feeling. Nothing is given away.

Anyway that's ma'point. Better stop now before I start rambling more

I have more to say, I especially want to dive into the change in Aziraphale's demeanor with Crowley from the start of the Jobisode, towards the end as well as how it compared with their previous encounters shown in season 1.

Here's a link to a Youtube video by o0Zewy0o of Crowley and Aziriphale's meeting.

o0Zewy0o- Aug 5 2023.

Aziraphale & Crowley, meeting through the Ages, In Chronological Order, GOOD OMENS S1 + S2

****(might edit with gifs/images later)****

[slowdripsunrise]

MORE READING UPDATES OMLLLLLLL i forgor about this blog again. it will happen again tbh but i still have to go through all of the books i finished in late 2023 up to now... i'm gonna try and get as many as i can done but probably wont get all of them lol. probably very long post/rant + spoilers for various books under the cut

keep in mind i have shit memory and all of these books were finished a while ago so be warned for bad analysis and summaries

-How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu: this book was a collection of short stories that are interconnected through characters and a central storyline - a plague. i thought the concept was super interesting and i had heard really good things about it from people i share a reading taste with so i went into this expecting to be blown away and i just. wasnt. i LOVED some of the short stories and there were a few that made me cry, mainly snortorious and the robot dog story where the mom died, but other than that it was kinda a let down. the ending fucking sucked ngl. like i thought we were leading up to some profound moment, especially calling back to the chapter where people are relieving their memories in the dark, because i thought that was really compelling and interesting, but it was just fucking aliens. like it reallly feels like a cop out to me. like a whole "and it was all just a dream" type ending. im not gonna rate it actually yes i am i'd give it like 2.5-3 stars. only because some of the chapters were super hard hitting but other than that. meh.

-The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater: WHOOOOO BOY. i ate this shit up. god if i had read this in middle school or high school i am 100% certain it would have become my entire personality. like i fucking get it. i totally fucking get it. i'm treating the whole series as one book rn bc they all kinda blend together in my mind and its been a while but just. the fucking vibes. good lord the vibes were so good. can't pick out any 100% certain things i particularly noticed but i will reblog every webweave about this series there is trust. rating the entire series as 5 stars mostly because i listened to the audiobook and they did SUCH A GOOD JOB ON TH E AUDIOBOOK OML like. at first i was kinda thrown off bc i wasn't expecting it to be so. southern? but once i finished the first one i knew there was no way i could just go back to reading it with a physical book like audiobook all the way the narrator was so awesome and i love the southernness of it.

-What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher: my first t. kingfisher book! i loved the vibes, the world, the whole new set of pronouns, that shit was so fun, overall a nice short and sweet creepy ass fucking book. like im a huge wimp so i was deffo nervous and freaked out at some points, especially with the rabbits lol idk why but those were unnerving. the author did a really good job of conveying the mc's anxiety and fear while also adding in some humor and soldier rationality and stoicism. lol. cute i liked it 3.5/4 stars.

-Fault Lines by Emily Itami: tbh mostly picked this one up for the cover and it was really just a standard cheating story where the mc gets back together with her original husband because of their kids. nothing i remember to be groundbreaking at all really. 2.5 stars

-Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez: I really wasn't expecting to like this book as much as I did. the pov changes i think were very well done and intentional and weren't confusing at all! the narrators for the audiobook were wonderful and really brought life to the story, a lovely book.

-She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan: honestly, looking back on it, i was never really captivated by this story. it took me a long time to get into it, and i really never connected with any of the characters. a lot of it was more confusing than not, and i'm honestly not sure if i feel the need to continue the series. may be a case of me not being in the right mood for it, but i don't see myself trying it again. kinda sad cuz i was excited to love this but oh well. win some lose some.

-Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr: hands down my fav book of 2023 and one of my fav books of all time. like i have a feeling this review is going to be either very long or very short because there is no way i will be able to write out all the ways i love this book. the owl motif. the environmental extremism from seymore that i can 100% relate to. the way that he fell down that path in a way that felt realistic to me, based on his circumstances, and it isn't implied in my opinion, that all autistic people are like this, that all autistic people can take things to the extreme like seymore did. the audiobook was wonderful. the interconnected stories over time i think is one of my new favorite tropes/plots/metas. if done well (cough how high we go in the dark) it gets me every single time. XENO and everything about him. i was listening to the audiobook at work and during his death i had to fight back tears lol. god. and the kids in the play and how they wanted to end the story.... fuck my life. and konstance and her curiosity and oh my god everything about this book messed me up. 5/5 i think thats all i'll be able to say before i combust.

-Chlorine by Jade Song: what a weird little book. really liked it. audiobook slayed. not much else to say. recommend for weird lesbians. 3.5/4 stars.

-A Dowry of Blood by S. T. Gibson: THE AUDIOBOOK NARRATOR IS SO FUCKING GOOD AT HER JOB I COULD LISTEN TO HER TALK ALL DAY I THINK IM IN LOVE WITH HER. the story was really good love a good vampire story love a good creepy story. fun time. listened to the audiobook in like an hour hour and a half car ride it was a good time. 3.5 stars.

and that ends off all of the books i read in 2023 !!!!!!! YIPPEEE!!!!! i'll stop here and make a separate post for the books i've read so far in 2024 just for organizational purposes and also because i am hungry and need to stop lol. if you made it this far through the post i love you and also sorry for the long rant but also too bad because this is my blog and you clicked on it. happy reading :)

[tazzy-ace]

Thanks @dual-domination for tagging me!

Currently watching:

Oh boy, strap in. This will be a lot, and I'll still probably miss some 😅

Bed Friend - Was not expecting this to be as emotionally heavy as it is, but I'm so here for it. This couple is coming for my heart

A Boss and a Babe - I mostly started watching this just bc I was bored bc I wasn't sure how well they'd handle the power dynamic between the main couple very well but it's honestly really sweet and adorable so far

Our Dating Sim - How could I not love the lost love from high school reunited again when adults at a small video game company? So many adorable moments already.

Watching Ultimate Note slowly with Hyde - I'm already impressed by how well it builds tension visually and leans a bit more into the horror genre of the unique genre blend that DMBJ has going on

Watching The King's Avatar with another friend of mine - Who doesn't love a character that's really good at their one thing and just a mess in so many other things. A really fun watch so far

Happiness - slow going bc I'll watch an episode then take a break. Even though I love this show and it's characters, sometimes you need a pause from the modern setting virus outbreak series that gets a lot of things VERY right. Jsksj

Formula 1: Drive to Survive - Aka my newest obsession that I'm really enjoying. I even built a modern fantasy version of Formula 1 in the ttrpg game I run 😅

Legend of Vox Machina - I started it as it was coming out and then got distracted so I still have a few more episodes to go for this one. I swear I'll finish it soon jsksj

Rewatching:

Long time No See - such a good short series that I constantly go back to when I want some good action with queer characters

In Space with Markiplier - an awesome and extensive choose your own adventure style series FREE on YouTube. Markiplier is a big comfort creator for me and this project was created with so much love and passion that it's always a rewatch for when I'm feeling a bit down

Looking forward to:

There are some shows that are already out (or starting to be released) and I just haven't gotten to but excited for from my watchlist: Shadow and Bones, Midnight Museum, Alice in Borderland, and the Sandman series.

Not sure when The Old Guard 2 movie is coming out but I'm so excited to see the immortal battle queers back again!

No pressure tagging: @signed-potato @dissociated-and-tired @foxofninetales @pespy

[justtogetthrough]

In follow up to that last post about going from online to IRL.

Our mix of online and IRL interactions blend together and I find it interesting. The second work was over today we went out on errands and then I went over for dinner and stayed til we were gonna go to bed. But we ended up not going to bed and kept chatting over text after I came home.

It's just this fluid comfort, this entangling of our lives, the smoothness of flowing in and out. It's weird for me bc I'm not used to relationships, let alone ones like this. Online and IRL feel the same. My anxiety about being around people has disappeared. I talk more freely with their parents rather than clam up with anxiety like those first few visits. When I show up through the door into the room where their parents have their computers they just look up and say hello and sometimes be like "they're upstairs I think" so I just go straight upstairs. My appearance through the door is just... normal now. It's uneventful.

When I walk into their house the dogs don't even bark anymore.

We can be texting on and off all day and then they'll be like hey wanna come over for ____ and I'll say sure when and they'll say whenever and I'll be like where are you and they'll say ____ and I'll say cool gimme a minute. And then I grab my water and put on shoes and carry my slippers in my hand and just jaunt across the driveway and now I let myself in without feeling weird about walking right in and the animals don't find it weird when I appear and their parents don't find it weird when I appear. There's just... continuity. A continuity and now a comfort that is so rare in my life.

I feel a part of something, peoples lives, I exist in real life again, rather than anxiously lingering around the edges and it's mind blowing. To be real in other people's lives.

To have an online relationship become an in person one. Something I longed for my whole life, because as a kid i didn't have IRL friends, only online friends, and they mostly lived in the USA and in person wasn't possible except for meeting once or twice and having to fly/cross borders/make arrangements for whole trips. I grew up so damn lonely. Wishing to just chill and be low key in the same room together. I've always liked proximity.

I can spend all day talking to my best friend online and then just go over to their house to watch a TV show together on a whim. No planning. I just get up and walk 30 seconds and I'm there.

I can't grasp what words are needed to describe this freedom, this fulfillment, this realization of a deep longing I've held since I was a lonely and isolated child. The online/IRL has disappeared and I'm starting to feel like I'm alive again.

Those months between kiddo moving out and me moving here were so hard. Living 1.5 hours from the only friend I had who truly cared about me was so hard, it was so hard to get to spend time together. It was back to that feeling trapped by distance/stuck in an online pit I grew up in. But then I moved here and yeah it stopped for a bit while I was in crisis but now I'm not and I'm tolerable to be around again and my world is expanding again. I can see people and socialize and it doesn't require partying like the last time i could go to someones house with great frequency and I think today is the first day I'm really feeling like, things are changing. The change I needed, the reason I left that town, the new lifestyle I wanted. It's starting to happen. I'm... connecting.

[candicewright]

From planning to posting, share your process for making creative content!

To continue supporting content makers, this tag game is meant to show the entire process of making creative content: this can be for any creation.

RULES: When your work is tagged, show the process of its creation from planning to posting, then tag 5 people with a specific link to one of their creative works you’d like to see the process of. Use the tag #showyourprocess so we can find yours!

Thank you so much for tagging me @highwarlockkareena 💜

I'm tagging:

@zazrichor and this piece

@mushroomtale-fanart and this piece

@snowyfuxue and this set

@wuxxxian and this piece

@satuwilhelmiina and this piece

Of course, feel free to not do this if you don't feel like it, absolutely no pressure 💜

I'll be talking about my process for this art of Wen Qing.

Fair warning that this is going to be a bit of a mess because my process is all over the place, but I'll try my best to explain without it being too confusing.

Planning

Since this was a request, I started by reading the prompt, which asked for Wen Qing and roses. Roses are my one of my favorite flowers so I claimed the prompt and started thinking about what I was going to do with it.

I knew I wanted to do a portrait with roses surrounding Wen Qing, but I still wasn't sure about what the composition was going to be, so I started looking for references to see what would work and to get some ideas.

I started looking for photos of Meng Ziyi that I liked and at first I really liked this one.

She looks great, but when I tried sketching it I couldn't really get the angle of the face right, so I tried to look for a different picture that was within my skill level. Luckily, I remembered seeing a very pretty pucture the day before so I looked for it and this one was the one I ended up going with.

After that, I downloaded some free to use pictures of roses. I really liked the contrast and the color scheme in the pictures so I though I could apply it to the painting itself and so I began getting a clearer idea of what I wanted to do.

Creation

I opened my art program (IbisPaint X) and did a sketch of what I wanted using my references. My sketches are always super messy and I can't be bothered to do lineart, so I usually just clean them up a little bit and work over them directly. I should actually learn how to do proper lineart at some point, but today is not that day 😂

Then, I chose my base colors and filled in the drawing to get an idea of where I was going with the piece. I really likeed how it looked like this so I sent it to my friends for validation. They were extremely lovely to me as always so I was excited to continue working on it 💜

Before rendering, I knew I wanted my light source to be on the right and I wanted the shadows to be quite dark, almost black, but that's the extent of what I knew before going into it.

And then I started actually painting! Unfortunately tumblr won't let me post the process video into this post so I'm going to upload it on twitter. You can see it here! I don't really know how to describe how I paint other than there's a lot of going back and forth and over stuff that I already thought was finished. The whole thing took around 12 hours, which is a bit longer than I usually spend on a portrait but I think it was worth it!

For the main piece I only used three brushes. I did add a bit of glow and sparkles with different brushes on a separate program, but I mostly used these three:

Note that these are at full opacity but I usually work a very low opacity because my stylus doesn't have pressure sensitivity (bc my equipment sucks) and that's the only way I have to blend my colors without the blending tool, which I don't really like because it takes away the texture.

I also had a bit of trouble with the colors in this one because it's not what I usually do, but after multiple adjustments and with help from the references, I ended up with something I really liked!

After the piece was done, I added some of my usual sparkles and a bit of glow and then saved it to my gallery. Then, I opened my editing software and played with the contrast, saturation, brightness and some filters. I was left with three versions of the art that I liked: the one I eventually went with and these two (I still really like the first one tbh).

I sent it to my friends so that they could help me pick which one looked better and after a long period of very serious deliberation (read: we all panicked bc we're gay and can't choose) we ended up going with the one that ended up being posted to the mdzs net!

I then sent it to the net for posting and waited (im)patiently for it to go up! ❤

And that's it! I hope someone can get something put of the mess that is my process or that it was at least enjoyable!!!!!

[buggerup-busters]

Had a lowkey benliza dream last night it was mostly them being friends it was super cute:

The first bit was Kate had released like a draft page of a rejected storyline or something?

They were about to go investigate something together but needed to blend in, I think it was a big party, so Eliza went to get changed

No idea where the fuck they were bc it wasn't the apothecary or Harry's, it was like the hallway of a terrace house, maybe she was nicking clothes from somewhere else they investigated?

She comes downstairs is this really gorgeous blue dress and her hair in braids it was hella cute and Ben blushed when he saw her and then complained she took forever

So in the dream this was a bonus page I was reading and I also remember the art was amazing she really changed the style so it was v detailed and soft and pretty, I specifically remember Ben was handsome but looked fucking shattered (Mal was still missing during this thats why) and also had blue eyeshadow ? But pulled it off, it was tasteful dw

Anyway then my dream did other stuff but later I was back to them, not as a page it was like 3rd person Ben POV

They'd solved the mystery but Eliza brings Ben up to her flat above the apothecary

It was super cute and cosy she had a little kitchenette and loads of books

Then it cut to like modern AU and her flat is also filled with plants and also she has some pet ginea pigs

They just hang out and chat? She makes some tea and happily tells Ben about some books and stuff and suggests a film they could watch

And Ben's having a nice time but is rly confused so eventually he's like "that would be nice but i dont understand why am i here?"

And Eliza's like "we've solved like 4 conspiracies together so I'm pretty sure we're friends and I don't only want to see you when there's a crisis or whatever"

And Ben's like oh okay :)

And Eliza's also like :) i will now continue infodumping about my special interest :)

And i was also :)

[pioneeroverc-my-5000th-sideblog]

plan from July:

-Drawabox lessons 4-5 (two weeks each - 2 pages of insects per day) ✗ finished lesson 4 except for the very last insect drawing

-finish 100 heads ✓

-studies for Shepard: textures, hands, draw mass relay, red/blue lighting ✓ (kinda - mostly focussed on hands though)

-study people interacting with everyday objects (hands) ✓

ACTIONABLES: use more references✓, plan out multiple light sources better✓, clean up lineart✗, reference faces/necks/hands in particular✓, figure out a less cartoony way of drawing eyebrows✗, try to define edges on faces more when painting✓, keep going with composition✗, try to do background in two sittings (?), study textures more (ongoing)✓, more figure drawing mannequinising stuff✓

Overview of August:

finished 100 heads challenge, nearly finished lesson 4 of DAB. Drawing all the insects has helped me analyse stuff better and also has improved my sense of 3D->2D space. Redid a few of them until they made more sense, which I think is probably a very important thing to keep doing at this stage of development.

Figure drawing improving. Need to keep trying to mannequinise them instead of falling back on ~the intuitive way~. Path of great resistance but great reward. Gave self permission to focus on interesting bits and not worry about finishing each figure. Thinking about 3D and hip/torso orientation is helping my unreferenced sketches too, which is nice.

Drew a bunch of hands but they were kinda too sketchy to actually help go to something more precise. Quality of hands in my finished art varied WILDLY this month, although they mostly look 'ok'.

Put the stuff I learned about head structure into practice with a painting - was good to actually try out defining nose/eye/lip planes. Need to keep practicing this, though, and not sure how much focus I'll be able to give it. aaaaa

During the painting, I also used lots of references (although my ability to use the information was pretty limited), tried to represent texture and learned how to blend in a more smooth way. Even though I'm not super happy with the way the finished thing turned out, I did get presented with a lot of new information - hopefully I'll retain some of that.

September plan:

finish DAB Lesson 5 (multiple pages per day if possible so I don't lose momentum)

study whatever the next step in the Radiorunner curriculum is

do 30min figure drawing/other studies at least 15/30 days

finish that damn comic

sketch out/thumbnail every prompt fill for October prompt lists

probably a busy month, but I got this!!

notes and improvements from finished stuff:

orochimaru: hands SUPER off and ended up being 'eh, kinda looks like a hand, whatever', forearm connection is kinda fucked, lines too messy/pointy to look graceful, hands don't really look like they're interacting enough

good points: tried several iterations on a difficult pose, arm movement is relatively clear, sense of energy

kylo: values WAY off & look washed out (I THINK because the background has more contrast??), hand is completely fucked up (too wide and lighting doesn't make sense on it), glove doesn't look like leather, mouth too low, cutout effect isn't done well (+ it isn't obvious whether it is a flat graphic effect or a physical sheet in front of him - drawing a thin shadow on his face didn't help here), level of messiness in foreground/background and kylo is uncomfortably different

good points: I really do like the colours (hues) even though the values are messed up, nice sense of energy from brushstrokes, the detail fadeoff in the shadows looks intentional (I mean, it was)

femshep: shadow values went too dark too quickly bc I wasn't sure how to handle multiple light sources, sunk-cost fallacy w/ left eye and/or nose (facial features are in different perspectives), overall shapes not interesting, neck connection to body is wrong, near shoulder looks dislocated even though I took a photo reference (possibly related to the neck being wrong - or maybe the strap going across her chest is oriented wrong too & flattened out), background looks messy, composition is boring, clothing folds aren't realistic, shading is too soft

good points: at least there IS some texture to everything, I LEARNED HOW TO BLEND, facial features are overall painted pretty well, nice transition between lightsources on face, hair texture and placement of texture looks really good, somehow the hand came out looking 3D with minimal effort, tried to do a lot of things I had 0 experience with and learned a lot

ACTIONABLES: CLEAN UP LINEART, reference/learn about neck-body connection & shoulders, mannequinise figures, take own clothing reference photos for exact pose instead of trying to abstract existing images (not skilled enough to do this yet), draw hands, study leather texture in particular (since it's a common material), start drawing in greyscale again