#time to invest in an airbrush finally lol

[foreignobjecticus]

Blackjack kept climbing up onto my laptop, biting me, SCREAMING while I was trying to have an interview. She only ever goes clingy and LOUD as hell when I’m on voice calls. Baby.

[aragonlediagon]

OoMH (Re HRtP) drawing series update

Hi. I bring important news regarding my Touhou PC98 current drawing series, for those who followed it seriously. Initially I was working on making 2 per week on average (4 out of 11 done), but havent done anything since I posted the 4th one.

The reason is because since late march, ive been revisiting my basics seriously as I wish to improve the quality of my works. I will be honest, I am really unsatisfied of how I handle coloration/rendering, the shading especially. I had people telling me it looks fine, but I dont like it, and its a painful step for me to do each time. Drawing is my hobby, and I dont want it to feel like chores.

Even if ive been using digital tools since 2017, Im still unable to use most of it in any proper, efficient way. I dont find a good variety of tutorials for the software I use (SAI v1). Most of them guide you into having styles which I dont want to use (long story, I prefer traditional looking visuals especially watercolors & oil painting, but all I find are to achieve 3Dish airbrush-abuse results).

Looking back at most ive done these past monthes I also find what ive done lack balance and/or dynamism, so coupled with my rather poor rendering work, I end up disliking them fairly quickly. Theres a lot of them I want to revisit.

Staying hours facing my computer is also starting to really drain me. Until that Ive been drawing with a cheap xp pen without a screen + an old, big windows 7. So I finally invested in a tablet with screen + which doesnt require to be cabled to an other device. I just want to go draw outside before the crazy summer heat and be more comfortable in general lol

Im also following courses from japanese masters I like the works of to finally get to know how to properly use a software, since Ive always been going with blind processes.

Ive prepared already some sketches of the next parts of my pc98 drawing series, but I wont be posting any finished work until I get my new tablet. Im revisiting entirely my coloration style so that its technically better, and reflects more my actual inspirations (I BEG of you people, that my actual inspirations come from ukiyo-e & art nouveau, im hoping people will stop calling my art "old final fantasy")

Because I will have a new coloration style, Ill be redrawing the characters Ive already done so that it doesnt clash, having 4 pieces with old style next to the new style will bother me. I wont simply give them new colors, its going to be brand new posing in general.

Thank you for reading and understanding. This drawing series is very important to me so I want it to be my best effort, which I do solely out of love for the pc98 era. Ill be happy that ill be able to provide higher quality works.

Have a mr priest Shingyoku quick redraw for attention (hes a pretty boy worth 2.25$)

[archenemyintellegence]

Reflection (rant) on art...

Had a chance to look back at the progress I've made on art while making an art summary post for this year. I am so surprised to see the improvement I've made in this year!

The biggest outcome from this year is seeing myself developing an artstyle that I truly love, which can express myself and also combine ideas in my mind. Here is some rant about the artstyle...

Last year, I invested some period of time to draw fanart for Yuma Uchida with his photo as reference. It was cool to replicate the photo with my drawing, but I wasn't satisfied with just that. I wanted to add warmth into his portrait. So I started to go beyond drawing something that makes sense. I started to add colors that I see and can never explain where they come from. Maybe they're extensions of my emotions, or maybe they're illusions formed by my thoughts, or maybe my eyes are built different. A thing that I can be sure is I always see those colors, but I always pretend that they never exist so I won't be "weird", like the way I hide those unexplainable ideas from people. I really don't remember why I believed that adding those mysterious colors can help adding warmth to my drawing but it worked. My raw, intense emotions have been added into the drawings, and they give warmth to the drawings.

This year, I tried to use this method of coloring without the reference that is exactly the same thing that I am drawing. It was trickier than doing it when drawing with photo reference because things can get really really wrong. The biggest L this year is that I scrapped a drawing that I took 120+ hours to draw because I found it impossible to manage. But I learned a lot from that drawing, including the relationships of colors, which helped me to learn more when observing the colors in real life. I went back and forth with my style and finally settled on the style that I yeeted the airbrush and all those layers with different effects, and only use one side of the color "square". An inspiration of the artstyle is Julio Reyes, a god-tier artist that I saw on instagram. I really don't know how he draw his works as I have little knowledge on tradition art and I have zero idea on egg tempera. But in his drawing it looks like he is weaving the colors together to form a picture, and I want to do the same. Another major inspiration is glitch art, which kinda explains the saturated colors in my drawing. I used to make a lot of zepeto edits back in the day I wasn't comfortable with drawing (you can view them here). This kinda explains why my drawing works well with glitchy stuff lol. Also, something my father told me has inspired my coloring choices too. I probably distorted the words of what he said to me heavily because it's from a long time ago but what I remembered is don't use black to shade. With this idea in mind, I discovered that there are actually lots of colors in "black" that I don't believe there is real "black" in this world. So I pushed this idea to the extreme and even avoided grey. This makes coloring becomes a braincell-burning activity for me but I really enjoy the results as it can truly reflect my ideas on my drawings.

I really can't believe that I used so many words to talk about coloring but I did. Another part that makes my new artstyle is minimalistic background. A reason for this is to strike balance in my drawing. I used to do background but I believe that it'll be too much going on if I color the subject with crazy colors. So it needs to be blank or very minimalistic. Also, I believe that blank contains strong meanings. First, with the blank, the subject can fill it with their aura to make their presence stronger and own the drawing. It's very vague so I probably won't explain more lol. Another meaning that the blank contains is that it is the opposite of everything that has been drawn on the canvas. Instead of trying to fill the canvas with details, it is better to perfect the subject that contains the part of the message that I am able to convey, and let the blank finish the rest of the message. I believe this way I can produce a fuller drawing.

The new artstyle reminds me of fashion magazine, which inspires me to start learning more about fashion and accessories recently. I'm really new to this kind of things but I can feel that it's already giving me a lot of inspiration. I believe keep on learning more about them can help me enrich my drawings. Also as there's now less distraction on my drawing, I need to improve in my anatomy and especially perspectives. The sense of 3d is always a weakness for me that I have zero sense of direction or even struggles to tell left or right. I hope it can be improved by a little bit so my drawings can look cooler. And I hope my colors can be improved next year! I really have no idea how it can be improved for now but I believe that I can do it, just like how the colors improved throughout this year. I hope my drawings can be better that I have the confidence to earn a living with them! (And yeah the lack of confidence is a problem I want to solve too...)

So many ranting lol. Here's a full (digital) drawing lore of me. I started to focus on drawing seriously when I started doing digital drawing so you can actually take it as my full drawing lore haha. One is 2021 and the other one is 2020.