#neon boudoir photoshoot | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

activatingaggro · 9 months

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what’s your typical process for these huge art pieces? your posing is so nice and weighty and casual w such lovely interaction and I struggle to imagine how to even begin putting that together. ur ball pieces this year are epic

Aw! That's very sweet of you, and I appreciate that they look nice to people outside of my niche, haha. :] I stopped posting fantroll art for a bit, because it seemed a touch silly to post them on tumblr when.. I haven't even updated profiles here in literally years! But I'm glad that it still has some appeal even without larger context, lol.

My process is pretty straightforward! Part of it is just - take pictures, get references, get up and do the shit that you're about to draw! I would share pictures for examples here, but they're all vastly unflattering and I'm pretty sure I would be rightfully slaughtered by my helpful volunteers if I did that. But basically, I take pictures for everything if I can't find a good reference, and I'll frequently set up my phone to record myself when I'm doing an action pose!

This is because a lot of the weightiness of a picture, for me, is just.. how a person adjusts their weight and holds their body while in motion! The art I make where I'm referencing myself is generally pretty obvious, for example, because I use a cane, and keep 90% of my weight on my right leg. But different heights, different weight, different fat and muscle distribution also all play a big part in how people hold themselves, and videos and photos are fantastic for actually seeing that. When it's something too complex to do myself, or to get some unfortunate volunteer to do it for me, I like looking at Youtube videos on slow motion.

So, for example: Riccin fights with a meteor hammer. There's a decent amount of footage of people using meteor hammers on Youtube!

youtube

So, I put this on slow motion! 0.25 speed, find a shot that I like at 1:00. With something like this, there's not much point to trying to act it out IRL and film it to get new angles - we have a much easier, and more viable route, in just using fucking 3D posers. There's a lot of them out there today! A lot of people like using the one built into Clip Studio, but I just found a random one on google that's free called PoseMy.Art to demonstrate the basic idea.

The goal for this is not to make an exact replica (because I am lazy and am not entirely sure how this poser works, lol). The goal is mostly to let you explore angles, and to get a better idea of what looks dynamic or interesting enough to work with! Because the main lure of these, for me, is to look at different angles, and then use those angles as a basis to make the pose more interesting. (Neon reds on the first are where I shrank/adjusted/moved the model to create a very lazy foreshortening!)

But what about for more casual or chill poses?

The answer is mostly the same, except with added social shit in, in that - first off, I make my friends help me find poses. I have a channel in one of my discord servers that's just there for reference, and I'll ask, say, @rebatrolls if she can find me a good pose for so-and-so picture. "I want something cozy!" She will then go off into the mines of pinterest like my faithful canary ready to be strangled by cave gas or something, and emerge with pictures. Sometimes these are great pictures! Each individual entity in our godsforsaken world has their own individual preferences, which shows in the sort of pictures that they pick.

Sometimes it's helpful! sometimes it is not. An example: I asked for obnoxious cheesecake photos for Liable! Reba brought out boudoir photos. Cal brought out NSFW anime figurines. There are two weebs inside of all of us, and one of those weebs is marginally less terrible than the other. uwu

But references, finding pictures you like, and then recreating them and changing up the angle helps a lot! Because there's a lot of gorgeous, very casual, very affectionate photoshoots out there:

And my last bit is just. Looking at all of these photoshoots and candids, and looking at my own personal preferences, as well as my friends'! I am a nosy fuck and I like to ask people, like: what gestures stand out to you? what things feel the most affectionate to you? when you're close to someone, what is your body language? when you want to be an asshole, what do you do?

That gives me an easy little mental library to build off of to add in intimacy when I'm making poses. I am a grade A lemur when it comes to being physically affectionate, so I rely on that a lot in my poses - people have looped arms, people just casually finding a way to make physical contact through an arm or a foot or leaning, there's a lot of people sprawling out on top of their friends / otherwise being in close contact, because I know how that looks, basically. All the little squidgy details, like "how do people curl their fingers when they're holding hands and their arms are looped together" are already in my brain from years of experience, haha.

And the good part of plumbing my friends' brains for their own references is - some people are very fond of, like, people resting their chins on their heads, and they can say exactly how arms usually rest in that pose. Someone might have grown up with bumping noses with people as a kiss, or kissing everyone's cheeks. Some people might say: oh, I've always had taller people walk between the sidewalk and I, or else they've always sat with their shoulders parallel to their friends knees from years of braiding hair, or or or --

It makes it useful to pull off the little affectionate details! I used to struggle more with just.. casual, fond poses between characters, until I realised: oh, wait, just draw it from life. Because even if you don't have friends that are comfortable sharing that sort of info, or else you don't personally pay attention to it much in your own life - because some people don't, and that's fine! - I've also just occasionally sat down at some busy locale, brought a notebook, and wrote down the gestures, and movements, and little actions of the couples, or families, or friends that wander by. It's all about building up a library, essentially, and once you have, you'll find you'll just start plugging it into pictures automatically.

#thank you for the ask!

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