#now I just have to do the lineart for the background...

[assassin-artist]

her lord

[onetwothree-moved]

my art summary of 2023 :3 this year was the year i started digital art (which is why the first three drawings are traditional) and im really proud of how far ive come!

please ignore the fucking pokefic blog drawing i genuinely couldn't find anything else for february

the last two drawings aren't that interesting because ive just been doing reference drawings of my ocs lately but that's OK :3

ive learned so much and while i still have a LOT to learn i think im pretty happy with how my art currently looks.. i hope i will keep improving in 2024!!

[kinos-fortress-2]

i just woke up and realized my art did developed holy crap

[xamaxenta]

Bc i never plan my art unless its for a zine idk how to further proceed w that gym piece i never intended for it to have a background but i felt called out by the post that mentioned the things artists who dont draw bgs/dont often draw bgs do and i didnt wanna just post another Ace art of him standing in a void but now i have to adjust the colours and most modern gyms are like greyscale with one highlight colour and its driving me insaneeeee

[watery-melon-baller]

GUESS WHOS WORKING ON THE TOH ANIMATIC AGAIN

i have aprox 11 frames left to lineart and my goal is to get them all done before the end of june! please hold me accountable for my actions thank you <3

[ants-personal]

i hate drawing but man do i love coloring

[lorillee]

im really normal about them <- lie

[periwinkla]

Random banter from the comic that may seem nonsensical but I promise it makes sense in context. Maybe. And I promise it's actually very sappy. But you need comic relief (ha!) sometimes. And of course, I'm experimenting at painting these panels before I have even finished the 'lineart' of the other pages, why do you ask- ...Under the cut, stuff.

This is with and without color:

...Can you tell I haven't even attempted at comic-making in like, a decade? I have no clue what I'm doing. There's also the problem that I'm strangely adverse at using BW. I love using color too much... so that's why I chose light yellow for whites and purples for gray/black. (I mean there's also the fact that I get eyestrain fairly easily so I prefer not to use white backgrounds... while drawing I would need to stare at them too much) What do you think about the medium tones? I'm not sure if they're too warm, or too cold, or just right. My eyes are very confused right now. So much so they hit themselves in their confusion (I know, I have the worst humor in existence).

[dontlookforme00]

Tridental regicide,

I won't hesitate to kill my Heart and Mind.

MY 300 FOLLOWER DTIYS IS FINALLY HERE!! Info and alt versions below the cut!!

Helloo!! I hit 300 followers a good while ago now but I'm only getting to the DTIYS now lmao. About half of those were ninjago followers, and the other half were chonny jash followers, so I was gonna do a sort of mix between the two fandoms, but just decided on plain old HMS, sorry!!

If anybody at all entered I'd be honoured :] because last time I did this I only got one (admittedly amazing) entry lol.

> also this took me thirteen hours jfc. I haven't spent this long on a drawing for monthssss.

Here's some notes if you plan to join!!:

You can use any iteration of any HMS designs, it doesn't have to be my ones.

But by all means, if you do wanna use mine/my colour schemes, there's some clearer images below.

The text in the background says "Tridential Regicide". It'd be nice if you included it!!

What the entry does have to have is Heart, Mind, and Soul, with Soul threatening the other two.

I once saw someone enter a dtiys by making a plushie lmao??? So just gonna put down that ur entry can be whatever

If you have any questions or wanna extend the deadline, send me an ask.

Feel free to change any details not mentioned, or the poses that they're in.

Tag me in any submission!

Use the tag #donniesDTIYS300

Prizes (??) and deadline:

The deadline will be (checks watch) two months from now, so, the 14th of July.

Again, if anyone needs more time for an entry they wanna do just send an ask.

Uhhh I have no idea how many people will actually enter, and I've never actually drawn DTIYS prizes.

So I suppose I'll go with the standard??

1st (chosen by me) fully rendered drawing of any character or OC.

2nd, just coloured in drawing of any character or OC.

3rd, doodle or lineart of any character or OC.

(Keep in mind the characters have gotta be sfw though!)

Here are some other versions of the image:

Thanks for reading!! :D

[kapitein-oranghien-29]

Come one, come all!

Everyone, big and small!

Commissions will open yet again [10 aug]

Don't be shy, tell your friends

I will be accepting new commissions on August 10th with a keen eye for anyone wanting to have a pair of fine fellows facilitate their fellicitous friendship! But obiously singles ill still accept too. As usual, there are options for doodles, cleaner lineart, colored pieces, and fully shaded and colored pieces that you can choose. Comics, one offs, reference sheets, backgrounds, and even a customizable* blurb are all available as additions to your possible order as well!

As any circus would have, there are multiple choices for you! Maybe you prefer something cute to go with the silly clowns, something serious and daring to go with our blade bearing performers, or maybe something sultry to go with the adults only shows. Whatever itch you're looking to scratch can be selected without problem!

If you're intrigued by art you've seen already or maybe you've had an eye on the next available slot, now's your chance to go for it! All you need to do is reach out to me on discord, telegram, or my dms and we can get to talking!

*as the editor and common blurb writer, if you want something more specific to your idea then I recommend giving Kap a tip and an outline of your story snippet.

price sheet and dm info below cut

Prices are all still the same dw, i got chu (｡•̀ᴗ-)✧

Discord: KapiteinOranghien

Telegram: @ KapiteinOranghien

Didn't know what to tell ya, it's the same everywhere... if you need tumblr, we'll you're alredy on here. Just shoot me a message ദ്ദി ˉ͈̀꒳ˉ͈́ )✧

[greenroze2]

your rendering is so good how do you do it

Thanks, I love your rendering too!! Gonna try and make a tutorial ^^

To start off, I'm on Clip Studio Paint and these are the brushes I use! First two for rendering characters (round brushes) and the other two for mostly backgrounds (square brushes)

I used to do lineart, but it takes too long >:( now I just make a sketch and sorta clean it up!

Next I fill it in with a gray color. For simpler pieces I just put in the flat colors, but for more paint-y pieces I do grayscale -> color! I'll be doing that here :)

Also, I make 3 clipped layers on top of the gray - two are multiply, and the top one is screen. On the first multiply, I do a soft gradient using an airbrush

On the next multiply layer, I fill everything in with either a cool-ish or warm-ish gray, depending on the mood ^^

I also determine a light source, and use the lasso tool on the screen layer to block out where (I think) the light hits! Tbh I just do wherever feels right lmao, but I recommend having a reference! I like doing it in triangle patterns

Then adjust the opacity of each layer to whatever feels right, and merge everything (I don't merge the sketch/lineart yet, I do it before adding colors in!)

Now... rendering. Some tips I have are color pick (greys) off of the canvas and use them to paint! Clean up the sketch more, erase edges, but I save details (like Galaxia's red gem, his eyes, etc.) for the end, or during coloring.

After I'm sorta happy with it, I merge the sketch layer, then duplicate it, and add a gradient map! I did this sunset-y one but changed the hue to yellow-ish, then lowered the layer's opacity ^^

Play around with the hue-saturation-luminosity setting!

Now go crazy with blending modes! Multiply, overlay, color, glow/color dodge, etc. Feel free to layer them up on top of each other too, and this is to add the character/piece's actual colors in. For example, I used a white-blueish overlay layer for his mask and glove, blue for his cape, blah blah

Now I clean the sketch up/refine it more. Also, to "harmonize" the color palette, you can add a colored gradient on top. Then set it to multiply, and add overlay/glow dodge layers with any colors you see fit! I like using teal and light/warm orange! Here is an example of a colored gradient:

Another tip is to add saturated colors on the edges of both lighting and darker shadows, before blending it:

Also I usually add in a light blue/grey in shadowy areas, and lower the opacity for reflective light:

Also! You can lasso + use an airbush with a light blue to block out parts of the background (his cape here, for example). It helps with more depth!

Finally, I like adding sparkles on low opacity :3 And gaussian blur to certain areas! I'm using radial blur on this piece though ^^

For the background, I like doing blocky shapes!! I use my square brush on 90% ish opacity, to color pick different hues from the piece. For lighting I use a glow dodge layer, here's a mini timelapse as well as the finished art!

At the very end, play around with the hue/saturation and contrast tools to change the colors :)

[genericpuff]

Hello! I’m just here bc I’m a little confused on what you meant by Smythe drawing out “each individual asset” when she was making comics? Now, granted, I can see that it made her file ginormous, but me personally as someone who knows nothing about making online comics but is really wanting to get into it (and also as someone who has a ‘too many layers’ problem myself), is there a way to avoid using too many layers?

My current way of making comics has been to draw the panels individually and then format them (which I know is terrible management wise and also messes with the quality) but I honestly have no other idea of how to do it properly, and seeing how stunning Lore Rekindled looks, I don’t know how you would manage to put all that lighting effects and little details on the same layers. (But also I may be thinking of it wrong so I’ll let you talk qwq)

Ah I can actually give you a visual breakdown of what I meant by that!

So in this you can see there are a TON of layers, and not even all of them are visible because some of them are stuffed into FOLDERS that have been left closed. BUT if you look REEEEALLY carefully-

^^^ These layers right here? That's specifically Minthe from this panel in Episode 61:

(the unique pose here makes it real easy to tell that this is the corresponding panel, you can see the matching body shape with the dark shading that's clipped to the base layer below it!)

So what this means is that Rachel didn't draw all her characters on one base layer, she drew every single character in every single panel separately. Now of course, she could merge all these layers together as working on separate layers helps make it easier to work on elements that collide separately (like one character being 'underneath' another character like Hades is here) but because she has all of those clipping layers with the shading already added in, she likely didn't merge them afterwards because that would actually create MORE problems (because if she merged the Minthe layer in with Hades, then the shading for Minthe that she painted outside of the lines would show up on Hades and then she'd have to erase it which is just a bunch of extra work).

You can also tell all these characters are on their own layer because the layer thumbnail EXCLUSIVELY shows those characters. A layer will show as much canvas length as it needs to cover what's in that layer, so if the thumbnail is only showing one character, that means there's NOTHING ELSE on that layer. If there were more elements on this layer than just Minthe, the layer thumbnail would look more like this:

Now let's compare it to Rekindled's layers! I'll use a completed page to make it fair as we use a lot of extra layers in the post-production phase where we add the texture effects and glow and all that fun stuff, plus I'll even make it a more complicated page like that big nymph explanation spread from Episode 51:

So I'll break it down to make this make more sense:

BG 2 Copy (technically this is supposed to be BG 1) - Basically the panel shapes, what I'll do is mark out the panels with flat blocks and through that we'll add background elements in a clipping layer (usually done by Banshriek). Often times they'll do multiple layers to make the process easier and then merge them all together in the end. With these shapes operating as panels, it means I can just auto select the whole layer, invert the selection, and easily erase whatever's outside of it (such as the lineart and base colors that I put down afterwards). I could just use masking layers like I did in [AFTERBIRTH] but I find this way works better for the process of making Rekindled.

BG 2 - This is where we add objects / foreground elements. So stuff like furniture, interactables, anything that needs to be kept separate from the larger background to make it easier to work with. This can also include "floating" panels that need to be above other panels, such as this:

All of the backgrounds are then nested in a folder for organization purposes (we also sometimes use clipping layers on top of those folders to apply extra effects over anything contained within that folder without affecting other folders, that's a common technique that Banshriek applies)

Then we get into our Characters folder:

BASE - This is where I do the majority of my work, all the characters in every panel on a page are flatted into this layer. Sometimes I do have to create separate layers to, again, make it easier to work with overlapping characters, but usually those layers will be merged before I go into the shading process. I simply shade on a single layer by using the lasso / magic wand tool to select my area for painting, the flat colors make it really easy to do that. Sometimes I need to create a secondary shading layer if I've put down dark colors that start to bleed into the lighter colors, but again, I merge when I'm done into a single shading layer. We also sometimes employ an Add (Glow) layer into the clipping set if we need a glow effect that's exclusive to the characters and doesn't travel outside of their base colors.

There's a (leaves) layer here that I used for the dryad because I needed the leaves to be above the base layer, after that I selected the leaves elements so that I could erase the lineart in the layer above it where needed.

LINEART - It's lineart, enough said haha That said, I do think Rachel actually uses clipping layers for her lineart in places, it seems to be visible in some of her process videos where you can see the lineart present in a clipping layer, and that would explain why there are panels where the lineart suddenly 'cuts off' and doesn't travel outside of the base layer, like so:

GLOW - This is where we do an Add (Glow) layer that isn't restricted to the base layer, it's where we add all the fun lil' glow and sparkle effects over the characters !

The CLOUDS layer is, like the leaves, a background element that needs to be above the base layers rather than constricted to the background.

Above the Characters folder you can see what I mentioned earlier where Banshriek has added more post-production effects that are exclusively clipped to the contents of the Characters folder. This means the effects / blend modes do NOT affect the background layers or anything above it.

The BLUR (Overlay) layer is something we just started doing over the past several episodes, it's a technique I actually picked up from 66 of City of Blank where I merge all the layers into a new visible layer which I then apply a Gaussian Blur to at around 60% and then set to Overlay (and then I adjust the layer opacity until it looks right, usually around 25-35%), it gives it a bit of a softer "dreamier" vibe in the final colors and really helps unify everything!

CANVAS - This is an Overlay layer which is also set to an opacity of 25-35% where I go over the panels with the Add Canvas brush from the Kyle Webster set, unlike the Canvas overlay texture in CSP I can actually choose the colors I want to use which means I can match the canvas texture color to the mood and environment of the scene (ex. I'll use a very light blue for scenes in the Underworld). Not only does it give it that signature texture from S1 of LO, but it also helps balance out the effects of the BLUR layer.

The SKETCH layer sits on top of everything and gets turned off once all the base layers and lineart are down, and ofc the SPEECH folder is just where all the text is kept.

I know everything I just laid out is a LOT but ultimately it's how we operate, it works for us! But it also begs the question of why Rachel operates the way she does because a lot of it seems extremely unnecessary and more likely to bite her in the ass (the more layers there are, the bigger your file size gets, the risk of drawing on the wrong layer increases as well as the risk of posting a panel that's missing elements because the layer was left turned off by mistake, etc.) And it's more so concerning with how she operates with her assistants because if she's still using this many layers when collaborating with other people, hooo boy. Though based on what I've observed of what her assistants contribute, I get a lot more of the sense that she circumvents this by having the artists do the flats separately and then importing them in as separate assets that she then just imports into the page and places them where they need to be. Still not a great workflow IMO because it's what's led to a lot of the issues of characters "floating" rather than feeling like they're actually in the environment-

-but that's still an issue that could be solved by Rachel just taking more time to actually flesh out the backgrounds and lighting to give more of an impression of the characters actually existing in the space. Like that Hestia panel could easily be fixed by just giving the background a bit more detail and putting actual shading underneath her (and lighting from whatever direction it's coming from).

Either way, regardless of whether or not Rachel's process is productive or not, I hope that breakdown helps explain how we do it in Rekindled! Learning how to manage layers is definitely a skill that can be tricky to harness, but once it "clicks" there's a lot you can get away with. Ultimately how you do it is up to you, but my best piece of advice to offer is to just be open to other types of workflows because you don't know how much you might be shooting yourself in the foot doing things the hard way when there are often way easier and more efficient ways to get the same job done. That's basically the vibe I get from observing Rachel's workflow, it seems like she's still using methods that she thinks are working for her (and probably did work just fine for her when it was JUST her) but could be vastly improved for her and her team if she'd just get over the initial hump of stepping outside of her comfort zone. Would probably make for a better comic too LOL

I hope that helps! Good luck! ( ´ ∀ `)ノ～ ♡

[chriskotiesen]

How do you think of your wonderful beasts?

Usually I start with really vague ideas for shapes or colour schemes and just make the creatures up as I go along. Most of the time I'm aiming to make something that has personality but isn't too easy to compare to any existing animal. If it's too boring then I'll weird it up a bit by rearranging parts or throwing on extra shapes. If it's too abstract then I'll swap in some more realistic animal features.

I saved some in-progress pics of yesterday's creature to step through the process:

I started by giving myself the very open-ended task of drawing a creature with a mouth in an unusual place. When sketching digitally I often like to forgo lineart and just play with blocks of colour.

Why is it crescent shaped? Why is it orange? I dunno. But I think that I can turn this into a body with the mouth at the centre of the mass. There are certainly weirder and more interesting places to put a mouth then in the belly, but I don't really know how this sketch is going to go from here. Maybe I'll put more mouths on the feet or something. Finding out is part of the fun.

Let's start simple. I figure that it should have arms to pick up food, as well as eyes and a nose to clearly define a 'head' somewhere away from the mouth. Okay now it looks like a creature, but not one that I particularly like. Also there's nothing between the nose and the mouth so it looks less like it has a mouth in its stomach and more like it just has a really big, weirdly-shaped head. I can fix that if I move the arms above the mouth. And I'll give it a tail and another bend in the torso to balance it out and make it less front-heavy.

Now we're getting somewhere. I'm starting to like this for reasons entirely unrelated to the mouth, so I'll just remove it completely. It's getting in the way of the rest of the anatomy. There's no client or art director dictating what I need to make here. The initial premise is just a jumping-off point and I can ditch it entirely if the design works better without it. I like this bug-eyed, cobra-hooded aardvark-centaur-dragon-thing. That seems like enough of a creature without throwing on extra features.

I try to keep my palette organized and only add more colours when they feel necessary. The countershading here helps to define the creature's shape a bit better and break up all of that orange, as well as just making it a little more realistic. I made the tail bigger just because I like what that does for the 2d composition of the picture.

Cleaning up the shadows also helps to make the volume read a bit better. The stripes help too, but I mostly added them to break up the orange some more and make the creature more interesting. I also started laying in some blobs of colour for a background. Now that all of the basics are in place it's just a matter of adjusting colours and polishing out details until I'm either happy with it or just sick of looking at it!

Done!

[kozachenko]

(Click the image for better quality)

Yipeeee that Keiki and Mayumi fanart I posted the WIP of is finally done woooo- This piece was a very experimental one that I'm kind of OK on. Maybe because I've just gone insane looking at it for so long and I'm my own worst critic lol.

Artist's Notes;

So I've once again been playing around with my rendering style, mainly because I have been wanting to improve my lighting for a while now and as I was just scrolling through Tumblr, I saw some of the official art for that one webcomic-turned-animated-TV-Show Lackadaisy and was immediately inspired. I also have seen a technique a few times in the past where the lineart and shading are merged together, so I've been meaning to try that for a little while.

I did some experimentation on this one sketch of Keiki I posted in my sketch dump and I really liked the results of it, so I carried those over to this piece.

I ended up scaling up Keiki and Mayumi from the original WIP because I felt like they were both getting lost in the composition, and I'm glad for that because I think it works a lot better. I'm not a fan of how Mayumi's sword turned out at all, but it's not really meant to be the focus of the piece so eh. Overall, I think I could do better with my colours, probably because with Keiki and Mayumi's colours, I did them flat in greyscale and then used a brush on the overlay blend mode to colour all of them over, after which I changed the base layer for their colours from white to yellow and then lowered the opacity so it all went together better. I also decided to use gradient maps for a lot of the background elements, mainly to experiment with getting in my values first to make them pop out more. I ended up finding a really nice sky gradient on Clip Studio Paint that I really liked, and that kinda helped to establish the colour scheme of the background a lot. I think the whole "start in greyscale then colour" thing really works better with painterly styles rather than more illustrative ones, and while it is good at making sure your values are more readable, I honestly don't think I have the skill level to pull that off yet. Honestly, I think I've been looking at this drawing too long or maybe I added too much to it, but I wish I could've made the colours less monochromatic, but I'll just save that for the next piece I do.

I do love how the flame (...well it's more of a weird space rift than anything in this piece) and the lighting turned out, those were fun to do. I was initially struggling with the flame and how Mayumi is positioned in front of it before realizing "Oh wait! This is a weird abstraction of a weird creature! I don't have to follow the laws of anatomy!" and just dislocated it's flamey bottom jaw from the main body. I also changed the colours of it since I was really not liking how incredibly bright it was when it had lighter colours. Again, the gradient maps served the more painterly style of the flames well.

I also love how Mayumi turned out. I could do her sleeves better but that's more of just me needing to study how those types of sleeves fold in that position more. I'm also very happy with the posing, the technique I used for that was taking photos of myself in the positions I wanted, blocking in the silhouette and then modifying that by adjusting it to my lines of action that I drew on top of the original photos, and then sketching over the silhouettes and drawing in the shapes of the hands overtop of the photo if I needed to get the fine details right. As for what I do to take the pictures myself, I use a tall chair I have, prop up my phone with a phone stand, put on a ten second timer and scramble to get in position. Yes, I did have to use a bunch of thin markers I had to try and get the hand positioning on Keiki's pose right, yes I do have a fake sword that I used to get the positioning of Mayumi's arms and hand right, the sword was for an old Halloween costume from several years ago. I really like how both Keiki and Mayumi turned out in this drawing, I'll have to play around with these designs for them more in future drawings.

Also, if you wanna know why I draw buildings like that, when I watched Fantasia 2000 as a kid (One of the Disney movies where they make really beautiful animations to classical music) the way they drew the buildings in the first few sections Rhapsody in Blue segment (the jazz one with the cities) changed my brain chemistry and now whenever I need to draw buildings really quickly, I refer back to that. Since the buildings aren't really the main subject, I didn't put much thought into them.

As you can tell I am very tired of this piece, mainly because I made things harder for myself by overcomplicating the process compared to what I usually do, mainly with the whole "starting in grayscale then adding colour." I'd honestly just prefer having a black layer set to colour that I can just toggle on and off when I need to see the values, but it was good to experiment. And that was mainly the point of this whole drawing, to experiment. I'm definitely going to have to play around with this new style I'm going for, mainly because I liked how it turned out a lot in the augmented Keiki sketch, and also because I want to find ways of making it suit my style more. I also really want to keep experimenting with my lighting like this, it's very fun. Last but not least I am never starting in greyscale again because dear god I do not like the workflow it forced me into. I don't have a problem with the method itself it's mainly just a skill issue lol.

If you wanna read my headcanons for these two, I put them in my WIP post, so you can read them there if you want to. The more I look at this the more I prefer the simplicity of my WIP. I might go back to this and just take away the fancy colours and effects to see what it looks like without all of that stuff and reblog this post with that drawing, but for now, I don't think I can look at this drawing again for a while.

[randomspagetti]

{Commissions!}

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Base Prices:

(Depending on the character's complexity these may vary. Additionally these prices apply to both characters, meaning if you commission an extra character you only have to pay the Character Length price)

Sketch: 5$ USD

Lineart: 10$ USD

Base coloring: 15$ USD

Shading: 20$ USD

Comic Page: 100$ USD

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Character Length:

Headshot (Head to Shoulder): 1$ USD

Waistshot: (Head to Waist): 2$

Full body: 3$

(Adding a character in will be the same price as the first character minus 5$ USD)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Background Prices:

One color/low detail: Free

Medium detail: 5$ USD

A lot of detail: 10$ USD

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

What I will draw:

Characters, OCS, legal ships, and mild gore (nothing too serious)

What I will NOT draw:

Nsfw, Proship, intense gore, furry characters, mechs, and animals

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Some Examples of What You'll Be Getting:

Sketch:

Lineart:

Coloring (I usually shade so no good examples)

Shaded:

Extra:

-I will give you a rough estimate of how long it will take me to finish a peice when you request it

-I only have CashApp right now

-Payment should be half once you approve the sketch I give and the rest after it's done. If you wish to pay all upfront I won't stop you but it's just insurance so you know I'll do your commission.

-If you just request a sketch it should be all upfront given the pricing

-I will give updates along my process and make sure you are well informed

-No refunds, given the way my pricing works if you decide you don't want the price anymore you can cancel the peice after the first payment

-You can ask me to revise or fix the sketch as many times as you'd like

-I have three base styles: Realistic, Chibi, and Lineart Chibi, so please specify which one you want! ^^

Feel Free to DM Me for More Info!

[tulipsie-art]

a handful of my favourite drawings this year

gonna just bury a personal post in here too, give it a read if you fancy:

as i've said a few times, this is the first year in a long time where art has had no monetary component for me, and it still took a little while, but i feel like this is the year where i've actually managed to de-program myself from years of being a Twitter Artist, and switch over my mentality from drawing what i think people want to see, to what i want to make, and also learn not to force myself not to draw if i don't want to, and on that note i dunno if i'm just feeling residual burnout from the years of grinding out for twitter or what, but i was kinda surprised how small my appetite for drawing actually was

that said, when i do draw now, i know it's because i'm actually really excited to be doing it and i feel like it's shown in the results tbh, there's way less drawings this year where i felt like i'm just going through the motions and drawing for the sake of getting something out there, and i look back at basically everything i've drawn like "yeah, that was cool, and i had a lot of fun making it"

part of that is that i've also discovered just how important it is to actually enjoy every part of my art process, i've sorta just cut out parts i don't enjoy - i'm way more willing to just leave things looking slightly wonky, and i haven't done any fuckin lineart this year at all, i've cut that shit out entirely because i don't like doing it, instead i just spend 10 minutes cleaning up my sketches and go straight to colouring and it feels like nobody's even noticed, it rules lol, and i've put a bit more focus on making things that feel like "scenes" rather than just "pretty girl in white void (with optional background circle)", not that all my art needs to be that, but it's been satisfying taking the time to just draw little simple backgrounds or focus on building an overall vibe, rather than just the character

tl;dr dumbass girl learns to have fun drawing again by not giving a fuck

love u lot <3