I love your artstyle!! Do you have any tips for drawing?
thank you so much! i'm really happy you like it!!💗
as for tips, what i would say would change drastically depending on what kind you're looking for, but some very general ones:
draw what you love and want to see most, regardless of whether anyone else wants to see it. if you don't enjoy what you're drawing it'll never come out as good or genuine as something your whole heart and soul is in. i mean you'd think this would be a no-brainer but sometimes i've had to sit back and ask myself 'if no one was ever going to see this except me, would i actually spend time drawing this?' and i was surprised by the answer
that said, it is also completely valid if your motivation for drawing is to draw for other people! there have been plenty of times where i was too artblocked to draw my own ideas but was still able to draw commissions or gifts and enjoyed it simply because making other people happy with my art makes me happy.
don't get too caught up in having a consistent art style. in my experience this 1000% hinders you
having your sense of anatomy degrade over time without you noticing because you keep drawing the same types of characters is a very real thing! if this is a concern to you be sure to draw a variety
follow a billion artists that you like the art of and you will have endless inspiration injected directly into your brain every time you open social media
my favourite practical tip for those who draw at a desk: keep a small mirror next to you at all times. absolute game changer for quickly referencing hands
if you're drawing digitally, make the canvas huge! in my experience this lets you draw messier/faster and you can't tell at all when you zoom out. if you tend to get stuck spending unnecessary amounts of time micromanaging pixels (me💀) keep it zoomed out while drawing
related to the above point, messy drawings can have far more expressiveness in them than neat and polished drawings. nowadays i never do lineart and go straight from 'barebones stickman pose' to 'varying-levels-of-coherent sketch' and use that as my lineart. sweet freedom from the sketch-looks-better-than-the-lineart phenomenon
if your goal is to improve, then you really do have to scrutinize your art, figure out what you're not satisfied with, and commit the time to focusing on it. 'practice makes perfect' kinda rubs me the wrong way because of how much i've seen it interpreted as 'just draw everyday and you'll magically improve' but genuinely it won't get you very far if you don't actively think hard about what you're trying to improve and take the steps to do it. is this a hot take idk. also hand in hand with this, not every artist is trying to improve and you shouldn't feel bad for this! maybe you just wanna make a little headshot doodle of your fave blorbo and that's your only drawing goal ever. awesome. maybe you know your art has flaws but it's passable enough to convey what you want and you're perfectly satisfied with that. (this is the stage i'm usually at). also awesome!
don't hesitate to draw something because you think it's out of your skill level. the worst that can happen if you draw it is that it comes out terribly but you learned something and can always redraw it better in the future. the worst that WILL happen if you don't draw it is that you'll never draw it. and then it will sit in the back of your brain haunting you for years. it's not like i'm speaking from experience or anything aha
look up 'hand stretches for artists' and do them if you draw a lot unless you wish to summon the wrath of the carpal tunnel demons
of course, these may not necessarily work for you, and most importantly(!) these are coming from the perspective of someone who is primarily a hobbyist. some of this won't be practical for people who need to build an audience, maintain a consistent style for work, etc. these are just things that have personally helped me over many years of drawing :)
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It's been rolling around in my brain the last few days for some reason, but I still hate the family backstory reveals for Sophie and Eliot. I've seen some of the meta for it, but quite frankly, it still makes no sense. If it had been something actually thought of and intentional in the original, I think it could have been so fascinating. I mean, Sophie's willing abandonment of Astrid to contrast with Nate's loss of Sam or Eliot's adoption in contrast with Hardison's and Parker's? Could have been excellent! But they came out of nowhere in Redemption and don't work with these characters.
Sophie was still actively using the fucking alias that she met Astrid under! She met with someone from her past on the show! Like. Quite frankly, that one is unequivocally bullshit that they made up and threw in and pretended could fit with the established canon. (And I'm sorry, but the idea of Sophie abandoning Astrid and never telling Nate about her just... So much of Nate's trauma was rooted in the loss of Sam, and I think that introducing this element after he's gone and unable to respond to it taints Sophie and Nate's relationship in a way bc I'm not exactly sure how Nate would've responded to learning about this but I think that it's something he'd have needed to know. I don't know how to fully express my thoughts on that but yeah.)
As for Eliot, I don't like the adoption aspect literally at all. The way that he would interact with his family and the memory of his family would be different, and I think that it's flat out ridiculous to think that he'd have never mentioned it to the team in the original show, especially when dealing with the kid cases. (I also dislike the biracial adoption as its own element because if Eliot was actually raised by Black parents in the... idk what 80s/90s? That just. doesn't feel congruent with how they write Eliot interacting with PoC, not necessarily in a bad way, but babe, he's written like a white southern man raised in a specific kind of culture that does not jell with that. It also makes Eliot look... really bad that he was apparently raised with the knowledge of how fucked up the military was and his parents' history and made the choices that he did.) Like the show may not have explicitly stated it but the implication of that relationship was vastly fucking different throughout the original show.
Just. These were not backstories that were congruent with their depiction and characters in the original show, and they're also just moves that I don't particularly like or find interesting directions for those characters. There's also something to be said about how it was apparently unacceptable for a woman to not have kids or someone not reconciling with their biological family when that was something that the original show handled a lot better. Out of all the directions to take Sophie and Eliot's stories, that's just not really one that I think was a good idea.
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How would you fix Lestat's bisexuality then?
[ARMAND VOICE] there is no fixing lestat('s bisexuality).
yeah this is why I don't really like talking about it because it's so baked in that there's no real use, and also it's pretty low on the list of priorities (personally I'd rather fix the racism first). moreover, the actual solution to the problem of bad bi rep is just more rep in general. lestat being bad bisexual representation wouldn't be a problem if representation for bi men wasn't so borderline non-existent. iwtv is probably the show I've seen with the most bi dudes in it ever (3, Armand, lestat, and Daniel) but excluding iwtv I'm aware of maybe 3 other current shows that have bi guy characters just living normal lives. My point is I don't need to take a hacksaw to the homophobia/biphobia of a character like lestat because, thankfully, we have other bi dude characters. Not many but they're around, thank the lord. We even have them in the show itself. like. I desperately want to arrive at a point in lgbt representation where lgbt people can be pieces of shit and it isn't marked as a symptom of their identity and I actually think iwtv is the closest I've ever gotten to a show like that. I truly believe that Anne Rice harboured deeply homophobic/biphobic sentiments that are very obvious in her books in the way her characters are written. However, I don't think the show is written that way. I genuinely think the show goes to great pains to show that the issues with these characters aren't their sexualities, it's that their flawed and shitty people. But I'm also aware those bigoted sentiments will never be fully exorcised from the story because they're so baked in because Anne Rice was weird about gay people. It's unfixable and honestly I don't want to fix it and I don't need to because last time I checked Lestat De Lyingcunt wasn't the only bisexual guy ever in all of media. let's celebrate that <3
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