#it just looks different if you compare people with different skin tones beacuse of COLOR THEORY

[machiavelli]

It’s beyond me how people don’t know that pH adjusting products actually show up on everyone almost the same. Beacuse no, a different skin tone doesn’t have a different pH level. Every human adult skin has a pH level between 4.7 and 5.75.

They are scamming you when they say that I’ll give you “the perfect shade”. It’s just color theory.

[freakypumpkin]

heya, it's the anon from the other day!! thank you so much for replying and i must say, your answer was so fucking interesting and i must've read it like 5 times or so by now. everything you explained about your creative process and personal history with drawing was fascinating and i think i can say that you truly inspired me to try and perseverate, so thanks again! i have another question i forgot to ask, about colors, and again it's about how you visualize them. i find it pretty hard -(1)

-(2) when i look around me to differenciate which color is what; by that, i mean that i can’t really put a name on colors, especially if it’s sort of gray, to me it will look gray even though it’s actually dark blue if you were to pick it out with the eyedropper tool. and i just can’t imagine how you color and shadow things without a reference, like how do you figure out the exact hue you should put there ? i’m kinda rambling here but it just blows my mind how you can make realistic looking -

-(3) drawings and get the textures and shadows and tones all great?? like, for instance, your mermen malec piece; the tails are so beautiful? how do you manage to get the darkest and the lightest parts right, it’s so hard to imagine the scene and reproduce it?? i’m just in love with what you do at this point. about drawing from pictures, i feel like i can do it alright but i can’t help but feel like i’m not a “real artist” because of that, because i don’t exactly “create” something from scratch-

-(4) i’ve even been told by people that if i wasn’t drawing things without ref, it was because i wasn’t confident enough (love it when people think they know how you work and who you are and feel free to pass judgement upon it!). i’ve seen that you useddifferent papers for the rough sketches and the lineart pieces that come after, so i was also wondering what kind of paper you used for the first sketches? does the paper quality matter for them since they’re not final product? and i think that’s-

-(5? or 6) that’s it ! again, i hope you’re having a great day and i wish you the best ! love ya

Hey there :D 

I’m glad I managed a answer of some quality :3 and reading, that it made you want to keep going totally made my morning. <3 

You do create things from scratch, my friend. You start with a blank page and have a drawing in end, right? There you go. Wether or not you have a reference, you still have to draw the picture yourself, it’s not that with having a picture to copy from, the lines suddenly start appearing on the page. ;3

And when people say, you lack confidence because you draw from reference, I would say, that you simply find beauty in the things, that exist in the world around you and you want to capture that. And I would say, in terms of bravery, it is pretty brave to draw something people can compare to the original. Taking on reality is brave. Also, on that same note, I personally decided, that you will always be the only one to completely understand your art. You create art for yourself, it’s a part of you and a form of expression, that will never be completely open to others, and is surprisingly intimate in certain aspects, I think. So, who cares? (If they offer constructive criticism, great, if their comments are harmful to you, don’t listen.)

Sidenote: Classmates used to mock me for drawing non-realistically, with the big eyes and the non-natural colored hair and my mother was always like ‘do they have to have this pointed chins?’. Somebody is always going to be ‘Oh, that’s not real art’. But at some point, I decided, that there are so many different kinds of art and art forms, why shouldn’t what I create not be found somewhere on that spectrum?

About the colors … it’s a learning curve. xD One of the reasons I started working with grey tones is, that this way, I only have to look for the shading and not the color combination, because I am not good at that. I have like a few color combinations, that I know will work and I tend to use them whenever I use colors at all. I have a few cheating strategies, like combining colors with black or grey, or only using grey tones and then you can put in a pop of any color you want to create a certain ‘dramatic effect’. In general, I would say, just try it out. Like, I have papers filled with random patches of colors, where I drew one marker over another and just looked at what happened. So yeah, there’s a lot of experimenting in it on my part. And I think, being able to see colors is a question of training, too. 

By now i have a collection of all different kinds of paper, I just like paper and trying out different kinds of paper. The yellowish one I usually make my sketches on is a bit thinner (90g or 61 lb) than the white one I use for the clean linearts (185 g) and the difference is just that. Both are labeled as sketch paper and I can use markers on both of them, but on the sketch-paper, I feel less pressured to make a perfect drawing and I just don’t like pencil marks from erased lines on the white one. I did some lineart on the yellowish paper, too, and if i needed thinner paper for tracing of a sketch via lightbox, I wouldn’t have an issue with taking the yellowish one. :) 

Specifically about that mermaid-drawing I have to add, that I have no real experience with water colors at this point. Whatever you see turned out good on the picture in the end is often a case of me going ‘Let’s see, what happens when I do this’ and stuff turning out semi-successful. For the tails I had references at the start. I mean, not for that particular picture, but in general. They are based on the tails of tropical fish. So, when talking about the shading, It’s a lot about looking at pictures of fish and adapting the shades from there. Where fins overlap, there are shadows, etc. (Pinterest is awesome for that, btw)And I also usually wet the area I want to paint first and then dip the brush in paint and put it at a point in a corner, where I know will be a shadow and due to the formerly applied water, the color spreads out itself and I just help a bit with the brush, I think. I mostly follow the form of whatever I’m coloring; going from one side of the tail to the other with a slight curve and the farther I get, the more the brush will run out of color and there’s the effect. I usually put shadows at the edges and where fins overlap the tail to add depth, but there’s really not any kind of detailed plan behind it, especially with water colors. 

When it’s with skin, there are just some general areas where I like adding shadows, which is around the eyes, under the eyebrows, wherever the hair falls, underneath the chin and on the lips and nose. I saw that kind of shading in a lot of other drawings, and kind of just adapted it. If you would look closer, I’m pretty sure, that most of them would not be as they are if you’d be going for natural lighting. But I like it and therefore I will keep putting them there. :3Shadows with water colors for me work the way of using more or less of the same color and with copics I have the advantage of them being numbered according to their hue of a certain color. So, light grey is C-1 and it goes darker through C-2, C-3, C-5, and so on, and this way, when I use C-2 as a base color, I will use C-3 for the shadows and C-5 for the darkest parts of those shadows. 

But all in all it’s a process. When you draw a lot fishes, for example from reference you start learning where shadows will most likely be and this way, you don’t need the reference material that close by if you’re not interested in copying it in detail. I think, you subconsciously learn how shadows work on a certain object at some point. It’s like learning a new form of math and in the beginning you will have to write down every little step you take, but when you’re secure enough in the method, you will start to skip them. Just give yourself time. 

As for textures it’s again about looking at reference material. To learn about how shadows work on different kinds of material, working on how to translate that with whatever material you’re using. Also, youtube tutorials are great as well. Just keep in mind, that you don’t have to do things exactly as shown on the video, just look if you can learn something new from it, that feels like it could work for you. 

And I tell you, copying from nature and life is one the most useful things you can do. Writers work with research material and rerference material is the research of artists. Never let yourself get talked down for doing that. You wouldn’t call a writer ‘not a real writer’ just because they wrote something about a real story, right? :) It’s simply another genre. And they don’t write about things, that really happened beacuse they aren’t confident enough, it’s just, that they like what they write about and they also have to start with a blank page and therefore from scratch. Just the same way, you are a real artist. :)

Creating art is constant work and practice. Something will always be a challenge and somebody will always be better than you. The most important thing is, that you don’t give up if you really want to do it and that at some point you reach that feeling of ‘I like my art’. That should be your goal :)

I hope this helped, feel free to ask if anything was left unclear. :) Have a great day!