#ive been wanting to practice inking on my new ipad anyway

[kellerybird]

POSSESSED by the idea of drawing astarion in 70's shoujo manga style

[rattsin]

So just a little check in. I won't... no this is for me I will ramble.

You know, or may not know, that I have been drawing my way through alanna: the first adventure book for a few years doing a couple of pieces each year. Originally that started in part as a way to practice my drawing but mostly really it was a way to try and trick myself into reading again. I still don't enjoy sitting still and reading for more than a short while but the drawing keeps coming along, slowly, but I can feel a difference in my confidence, especially with traditional mediums.

Anyway an unexpected consequence of doing these alanna drawings is I have solid punctuation marks all across the years now documenting how I'm progressing with my art most notably making a real effort to learn to make work traditionally.

You see I learnt to draw digitally first, sort of, i did go to art school but made some poor choices and didnt make the most out of it. So i leaent to draw digitally before i learnt to draw normally and i got okay at it and digital art is still fun, I still like my first alanna drawing and I think it is technically better than my last one I just did buuuut... i really like making traditional art.

I cannot straight up draw on paper as well as i can digitally becuase of course i cant. I dont have my much used warp tools and layers and shit; fixing every micro mistake, but god traditional art is so fun.

And I can see that enjoyment grow over the alanna drawings as I learn something new or push myself to draw something outside of what I feel I can because that's what the scene calls for.

Once I was very embarrassed to show what the first image actually looked like. It's my first traditional piece in my collection and one of my very first serious tries at traditional drawing maybe since even before uni and I really hated it. I'm showing how the sausage is made but I've put what the picture actually looks like next to what I've put together on the computer as the finished works and... God I remember being so down about the first one, I'd laboured over it as I always do, wanting to make something nice to do the story justice, and I just... could not match traditionally what I knew I could do digitally and that pissed me off so much ahaa I didn't even know where to begin polishing this turd I'd made so I just stripped all the colour out of it and called it finished so I could stop thinking about it.

I did kept practising though obviously and as I said I've got these paintings of alanna to demonstrate to myself how I'm growing.

This latest one one, now this is a sausage. So I can't draw straight down onto paper as well as I can digitally but I don't like to paint digitally but I want a nice drawing I can splash my watercolours onto what do I do? Well for a while on things I care about being finished nicely I've been drawing the big complex thing digitally, warping what ever the hell I want, as many layers as desired, flip flop that file until I get something mostly polished and then I can get my light box or my projector and trace the thing out and ink it or maybe use coloured pencils but right now I'm inking.

And that's what I did here, it's an A3 hot press most expensive bit of paper I've used since printing class and boy I was determined to do right by the materials.

Had so. Much. Fun. with my watercolours once I got there after the ink. This is probably my second most big complex watercolour ive tried and i loved painting it. Loved it. Made a huge mess of my carefully planned out line work. Ah well, no worries, I can just draw them again on the ipad i thought, too easy.

Yeah nah I hated that. Took the photo, popped it into procreate, got to drawing over the little washed out ink lines to sure everything up. Ugly, felt wrong, hated it, not doing that.

So I sat with it for a bit. I knew I did want to bring the lines back an not leave it washed out and I knew that meant going in with a pen or a brush or pencils but I really didn't want to fuck it after I'd been so happy with where I'd gotten with it. But I did go in, with a brush pen, and I did fuck it. I fucked it so bad, in so many places. I fucked vital bits of the drawing that i had done so prettily in the first pass. I fucked with bits I had already fucked with splashing paint water too enthusiastically and fucked it some more. And then, boy, then I tried to unfuck my fuck ups with gouache and fuck me that was the biggest fuckshit mistake. It was fucked. I had fucked up and fucked it. In my defence, I'd had a chest/sinus thing and covid for 6 weeks. But actually, i... did care i fucked it but it wasnt crippling, so i probably dont even care to have a defence, i didnt fuck up that badly, actually.

That's a really revolutionary thought for me.

So I took another photo of my fucked but now much better defined painting, slapped an orange filter over it, ironed out the gouache situation, pushed a couple of the faces around so they werent so soulless and called it finished because... it was. It was really a very easy thing to clean up, I had not fucked anything up beyond the scope of my ability to repair a little and the worst fucks well... I couldn't really see them for all the good I had done.

Rev-o-lutionary.

When I got out the first picture to have a look at tonight I was surprised by how neutral I was to see it. I had hated it but, by extension and more worryingly, i had felt resentment towards my own fumbling hands for this thing I thought was ugly being the limits of their ability to create.

I don't see what I was thinking in that picture now. It just is what it is. Something to practice my drawing and trick myself into reading. A punctuation mark showing my first steps into a new medium. Making it i should have just allowed it to be time spent recovering from what i remember being a pretty shit time, a respite. I didn't need to be so cruel to myself.

And, gladly, doing this latest picture I didn't feel any dissatisfaction with my hands. I made plenty of mistakes, pleeeeeenty. But i can see what ive done and how i might avoid shitting things in the future. That's enough. I did good things in the painting too

And it's time to sleep. I just was pondering over this. I don't reeeeally know what I've said but i felt it boiling in my chest, I mean outside of the infection that's mostly cleared, and I just felt like getting it out

Yep