#or oh shit i'm experimenting with my style and this drawing is wonky because the proportions r off

[furbyobsessedpup]

normalize posting absolute ass art because not all art is stereotypical pinterest worthy well colored fully rendered art

[mandoposting]

1, 9, 25 for art asks?

1. Compare your first and last pieces from this year! Where do you think you improved?

Oh wow. Yeah, definitely got more confident in my style and pushed myself to finish more pieces. So many of my previous works just sit unfinished, but I finished SO Many this year I honestly struggle to believe it sometimes. Also became more confident in my ability to draw from memory! Wolffe was drawn 100% from memory, whereas the Mandos were all referenced in some way. And while my recall isn't great, I'm happy with where it is.

9. Explain the process behind one of your pieces, if you remember!

Putting this under a cut because it ended up getting quite long :')

Whoof, OK. Let's give this a shot! So this piece is one that isn't perfect by any means, but definitely had the most planning put into it!

I knew exactly how I wanted it to look, but I knew it would be trickey to execute because of how tied to background elements it is, which I struggle to integrate with the main characters a lot. So I thumbnailed several variations on the pose and placement and ended up combining the results of two into the final piece.

Obviously these look like uhhh shit, but I just wanted to rough out the basic elements.

Then I gathered some references of the Havoc Marauder's interior and this Black Series set of props!

Then I basically traced over the traditional sketch, adjusting any wonky anatomy that I saw and tried to make it as readable as possible while maintaining a kinda sketchy look that I like.

Then I generally like to have a looser approach to how I drew backgrounds so I basically freehanded the rest without line art, just kinda blocking in color and refining them until they look right. With this one however I did end up going over the panels with lines because of how geometric they are. I remember constantly checking references to make sure I was getting all the buttons, all the little details, all the right shapes. What was also fun to experiment with was how to make the buttons glow! I ended up going with an airbrush layer of colours with an Add (Glow) layer on top that I slightly motion blurred. I really like how it came out!

I then colored in The Fellas. What's quite fun about Bad Batch armor is that it has a bit more texture to it than reg armor, so I gave the armor its own noise layer to emphasise that, as well as just generally scuffing it up.

After that it was pretty much just messing around with blending layers and such to get the nice darks and glow effects in the ship. I did play around with giving each character their own glowing rim, but it ended up being more distracting than anything, so I just outlined the lineart in white where the highlights should be.

And that's it! I hope that was interesting.

25. Did you have any art goals coming into the year? How far did you achieve them?

I did indeed have art goals this year! As with most years, my goal is to complete more pieces. Lineart, color, shading backgrounds, the whole lot. And this year it the first year I've really done it! Which I'm super happy about. Another goal was to do more non-fandom art, but between university work and the stuff I made for here, I didn't really have time! While I am happy with the pieces I made for university, I wish I had done more non-fandom art outside of it. But doing fandom art makes me happy, so I'm still glad I did it! Balancing I guess.

Thanks so much for the ask!

End of Year Artist Asks

[stirlingstitch]

I am in awe of your blackwork, and you've inspired me to finally give it a try, haha. I've done cross stitch for a while, so I'm familiar with back-stitching. Do you have any advice or recommendations for best practices and getting started? How important is it to use double running stitches? Thank you!

Oh my goodness! ❀.(*´◡`*)❀.

I am mostly self-taught at blackwork, I was inspired by gatchastitch and went, “well how hard could it be” and cobbled together an easy design for practice and then, uh, continued cobbling together designs. I’ve since read up on blackwork/general embroidery techniques and, gonna be honest, not much of my personal technique has changed. I hardly ever use double running stitches (double running stitches are vital if your work is going to be reversible, such as on clothing, I have no experience in that, my work is never reversible so I never bother doing it), I usually stitch the fill patterns before any outlines (pretty sure doing the outlines first is very important if you’re doing flowing/freeform rather than a pixelated look like I do), I use way too long strands of thread/floss, I don’t do mini test runs...

I’m not gonna say my technique is perfect, because it’s not. If you look at the close-up on dragonite here you’ll see some of the diamonds and squares are wonky, look closely at the xs on snorlax here and you’ll see they’re not uniform, some are longer on the right and some are longer on the left (and you can see similar things in the close-ups on my pokemon sampler) because I haven’t stitched in a uniform manner, because the angle you turn the thread at impacts how it sits and looks and you don’t have the uniformity and density of cross stitch to hide any weird things like that, so you gotta learn what stitching order looks best, or just not care (I don’t care and neither will 99% of the people who see it! :D it’s a personalised handicraft; if you wanted perfection you’d do it on a machine). 

You can also see on the dragonite that you can texture your stitches as well, weaving and jumping over multiple holes instead making a chain of one-length stitches if you want to, but you don’t need to do that if you don’t want to. Do whatever you feel like, copy styles you’re inspired by and see what you prefer the look of. You can mix colours if you like, this is an example of

There’s a lot of good guides and help for beginners online! You can google “introduction to blackwork embroidery” for websites and videos, there’s guides for materials, stitching, how to create your own fill patterns and whole designs, and there’s beginner’s kits as well if you’re more comfortable with that! If you can follow a cross stitch pattern then following a blackwork pattern’s easy, and you can do samplers or small projects to get a feel for how it works. You might need to change the way you deal with starting/ending a thread since the back of a blackwork project won’t be as secure to tuck under compared to a cross stitch one, but I very rarely need to use knots.

Supplies are the same, but if you want to play with weight beyond just using a single strand vs two strands then you’ll need to buy additional thread from your normal 6-ply floss, here are some good suggestions and additionally there’s DMC Coton a Broder (or Broder Special) and Floche (comparison here).

The good news is that blackwork is usually quicker to stitch, since there are physically fewer stitches, though sometimes you do need more concentration, so if you’d prefer to start out with a boring sampler to get your bearings it won’t take very long at all! (Creating your own designs can take a loooot longer than creating a cross stitch design though, sometimes I’ll spend a few hours just interchanging fill patterns to see which look better.)

I like to google image search and look on etsy for blackwork embroidery inspiration, for new styles and samplers and combinations and fill patterns.

If you’re interested in creating your own patterns like I do then I can talk a bit more about that, but like, I draw up fill patterns in PCStitch and then screencap them to use in Photoshop and that is a highly irregular way of doing things and probably not anyone else’s cup of tea but it’s what I’m comfortable with.

Also you’ve seen that I tend towards simplistic designs, blackwork embroidery can create absolutely stunning works of sheer art and I don’t know shit about accomplishing anything like that and cannot tell you where to begin moving past my style towards that, idk I guess you just run a photo through a cross stitch program and then replace colours with patterns???

TLDR, IN ALL HONESTY, just grab a simple pattern online and try it out, it’s really easy with a background in cross stitch, you will improve quickly. This is the first blackwork I ever stitched, and this is the second, you can see they’re both simple, I’d say the most important things I learned from those is see whether you prefer the look of one strand or two strands, the fill pattern inside the circle in the first piece looks quite bloated because it’s two strands, whereas the fill patterns in my Pokemon sampler are all crisp because they’re one strand. You’ll learn what the best way of stitching for you personally in time is. :)

P.S. Don’t worry about making mistakes, everyone will be too busy going “holy shit this is incredible you are literally a witch” to notice.

Let me know if there’s anything specific I can talk about, but once again, I’m mostly self-taught with lazy technique, there are many good guides and patterns available for free online to get you started!