#what was the thought process behind this art

[bloobydabloob]

Do you think being aware of the different elements in art or just ordinary objects can make the process of actually making art difficult? I get that it's about balance and unity of it all, but being introduced to so many concepts early on feels like too much. Almost feels like learning to make art digitally for the first time -> introduced to all these neat gadgets but no idea how to use them or where

This is a crazy good point anon & very important. YES I think it makes it exponentially harder

It’s just like everything else though where learning to pick your battles is pertinent - knowledge is a foundational aspect of your beliefs and your art is based on your beliefs regardless of how you frame it. Accruing relevant (and irrelevant tbh) info is always going to help you navigate more complex & unique themes. Obviously not everyone is going to get anywhere with it but I think the whole thing is pretty rewarding it motivates everything I do in my entire life so I think it’s worth it. Definitely doesn’t even just apply in theme as well it sounds like you’re talking here about practical technique too which you’re 100% right about again. I think things that I find helpful to remember are

1 - Identifying a comprehensive goal in my action helps me to slow my roll & stop trying to pull from too many sources at once

2 - On the contrary it’s also good to remember that difficult, arduous & thought provoking task is important to art. It doesn’t have to be important to you but don’t be afraid of it

But the good thing about knowing things is knowing things helps you to know more things and knowing more things helps you to make better decisions. These kinds of worries about art are just smaller picture effigies of bigger problems about growing up, it is hard & it’s exceedingly normal to feel lost especially if you’re young. If art is at its core a representation of the life behind the creator then it’s just that. All things are present even incidentally through every single thing you create, which is also why being informed is important ! If you have something to say about something then then your art will. Your art exclusively exists through the people who view it & their tastes. “What kind of people would you want to discuss your work? Whose admiration would flatter you? What figures do you admire? What occupies most of your thoughts?” Are what I’d consider pretty big standard starting points they might give you on a sheet if you were to ask someone about beginning a series of focused work.

Also the thing about purposeful art compared to direct description (e.g. in this context art discussion) is that visual art exceeds writing in a lot of areas including ease of ambiguity. It really is hard to talk about the place obscurity has in art especially factoring in where people might differ on it. But it’s easy to let its importance bypass you, especially as a figurative artist. It’s also easy to make ambiguity sound like an area of study, when really it is like the antilabel of artistic components, ambiguity is black ! It defines itself as a lack of presence & not as its own entity, which in my opinion makes it a lot easier to approach lol. It finds itself comfortably where you apply nothing else

There are one million things that could be / have been said on this subject. I’m sure you would probably get more solid ideas on how to approach an issue like this from someone who has taken a different approach to art themselves, I’ve never read any book approaching art performing from a seminary perspective just as I’ve never been taught or schooled. I’m still going through the throes of asking myself these same things & I think I will be for my entire life. It’s easy to believe that consensus is a trophy gained for putting enough time into something when the truth is that there is no guaranteed finality to art. Be afraid of stagnancy, not ephemerality. There is a lot to be said even for oblivion in character & impulse, so really just make art regardless. Even if it never gets good at least you were doing something

I think you’re already on the right track if this is something you’re thinking about though if you ask me or at least you’re doing something similar to me lol. The amount of “things there are” is genuinely intimidating & especially as such an uninformed, sheltered person as I am making any real decisions for something as longterm as an artistic identity without any real connections to a qualified community seems impossible. Keep thinking like this & hunting yourself down I like to do everything I can that makes something happen about this. It’s not easy ! I don’t think it needs to be

[hinamie]

sympathy for cain

[themetalhiro]

Wapeach?.. Wach? ….Weach???

[shrimphearted]

teru compilation from before i remade + some stuff i never posted…. Happy to say that I’m still obsessed with him

[yamishika]

Jellal & Erza : Lilium / Death Of Innocence

Pure white lilies once untouched by scare and sin

Now bathe in blood and are soaked from within

Their fragile petals have become bruised and worn 

Marking the place where innocence has been trampled and torn

Sweet laughter no longer lingers here 

Just the looming shadows that speak of fear 

The scarlet stains, an unmoving mark 

Forever reminding of the chains that kept them bound in the dark 

The lilies scream their silent cries 

Of dreams undone beneath lightless skies 

Each drop of red, a memory slain 

And haunting reminders of a past that never lets them break from their chains

Once soft as dawn, their beauty has bled

But neither are they allowed to rest amongst those forgotten or dead 

Yet the blood stained lilies continue to bow in grief 

Whilst watching the promise of innocence being swept away like a falling leaf

Darkness still surrounds yet they stand, though bent and torn 

Eternally mourning the life that could have once been born 

With each scarlet stained petal, and through every lamenting sigh

The death of our innocence only continues to pass on by..

[crabsnpersimmons]

CRAB IS YOUR MOON OKAY WITH HUGS?

PLEASE THIS GUYS NEED SOME AFFECTION

LET ME JUST-

GHHHHHH-/pos

[spoiledmilks]

I drew this instead of sleeping like a normal person

[crystalleoi]

MISSION: DATA TRANSFER

[waspgrave]

me being nb and feeling bad that I think Taash’s whole story is a mess. I want to like them. I do like them as long as I’m ignoring The Family Friendly pirates, the irl modern words for sexuality right down to a codex entry, ‘anyone can leave the qun’ despite you complaining about it and your mother who is clearly a victim of it enough to smuggle you out, the forced binary choice to choose either embrace Rivaini culture or the Qun like ?? The cringe growling….. What is happening? Did they really need to be written in the whitest queer person way possible?

[bloominglegumes]

Err just letting you know someone posted you art in Twitter without credit:

Name: Gabsnow191010

https://x.com/Gabsnow191010/status/1840527176090714205?t=tzL_raHloMiIlXdC7N9azg&s=19

I think you are also not the only one they've been taking from.

yepp thanks so much! my friend told me about it as well :,,)

i owe big thanks to tooter for asking them to take it down,, from what i could tell they didn't have malicious intent but i hope they.learn more about online art sharing etiquette fjskdsj

[pointyfruit]

I asked myself, "How do I make the red Among Us crewmate as colorful, zesty, and shapes as possible while still being just red and keeping the core essence of a biblically accurate crewmate? It's design is simple and I'd like to keep it that way, so turning it 'rainbow' might bring up some challenges." (It didn't. Rainbow neuron activation.)

[bellamyroselia]

I was looking through some stuff and apparently Silver is called Tsubaki in some side manga? And as I've been playing FE14 recently, I can't help but find it extremely amusing, the idea that these two share their names:

It's honestly made even funnier by the fact that these two are the de facto shipping partners for the two of them.

... You know what, this would make some absolutely adorable cosplay art for both couples now when I'm thinking of it

[fictionadventurer]

Well, I didn't get any writing done, but I did watch the Wiggles documentary.

[stargirlsuicide]

i hate the 'i could have made that painting too' crowd. no u couldnt have

[quirinah]

how do you get your colors to look so nice and your lineart so red and vibrant? i love it

omg anon thank you!! 😭 im going 2 be honest I am Not Great with color theory... but i like having my sketch pages look cohesive to me...

BUCKLE UP this is going to need a readmore bc i like talking.

I always sketch in neon colors it's a habit i picked up from an old teacher but I'll think of a color usually on a whim and draw with that. and then if i want to draw something else ill pick another color that i think goes well with the page. usually most of my color schemes r analogous (colors right next to each other on the wheel)

yanked this from recent dunmesh post; i kept most of my colors within the pink/red/orange range.

i wouldn't recommend doing everything in monochrome or analogous palettes though because it's sort of a guilty crutch of mine XD.

sometimes when im coloring ill change the layer mode of the sketch. color burn gets you either very very bright or very very deep colors depending on the color of the flats underneath. multiply and linear burn do the same thing but they're a lot tamer and generally always return darker colors. im sure there's some technical bits behind this though. ill either color my lineart afterward to compliment the color of the flats, leave it as is, or mess with layer modes if i feel like it. my favorite trick is color burn + linear burn + some combination of two lineart layers and just fiddling until i get a nice burn effect.

mithrun was done with crimson red on color burn.

coloring... like 999% of this is relative color which is like. kind of the idea that colors look different when placed next to each other. if you eyeball it a bit it's pretty noticeable.

what i used to do a bit ago was i would fill in the area i wanted to color with one big mask of color, make a new layer that has a clipping mask down to the flat layer of color, and then draw my actual flat colors. the color of the mask helped me pick my flat colors bc if I picked a color i think stood out too much next to the mask i could kind of just adjust it until it looked a little more cohesive.

old ish drawing next 2 a canon reference. i ignore local color a lot...mea culpa....but my overall color palette here was a light pink, so the shirt here is actually a desaturated pink? or violet i believe. if you shift sort of that purple color far enough into the gray area of your color wheel it can take on a blueish or even greenish hue. it being next to a lot of warm pinks/fuschias helps.

a neat thing that kind of helps is that if you desaturate or saturate certain colors they can kind of take on a certain hue? not sure if this makes sense. sort of how orange here turns tealish blue the grayer it gets. so if im drawing something that's predominantly orange and i have a blue color i can just take an orange color and desaturate it until i get a color that sort of looks like blue. and that way it kind of looks more harmonious? at least to me XD

shading. i don't apply serious lighting to a lot of my drawings, but a helpful bit is that the shadows tend to be the opposite of whatever color the lighting is? i try to think first about the "mood" or the main color i want to go for in the drawing and then i pick a shadow color opposite of that. so for here, i wanted the lighting to be a coolish magenta so the shadows r lime green. if there's anything off i fiddle around until i get something i like. the shadows on the skin here were too green initially so i shifted them a little more orange.

there's a "band" of color going on between the transition of the shadows to the light. generally this could be for a lot of reasons and i tend to use it differently (core shadow? overexposure? etc etc). but this is a color post so ill try not to go too off track.

but generally digital doesn't "mix" colors the same way traditional colors do if you use RGB (cmyk is a bit better with this but is kind of a pain to get used to), so to make blending a little less muddy, i sometimes add an intermediate color to smooth things out a little. for example, mixing digitally blue n yellow tends to get you gray, but generally, blue + yellow makes green, so if im making a blue->yellow transition ill slap some green color in the middle so it flows a little better.

I do a lot more cel shading nowadays. if you've been on here for a while earlier this year i have another style of coloring but it's not really accurate to how shadows really work so i wouldn't recommend looking at it. it's mostly to add zest and texture to the underlying flat colors.

coloring your lineart does a TON to helping your colors look vibrant, though its like the garnish on a dish to me (same with shadows). i think it's good to try and play with your flat colors and try to make sure those look in order first before adding flourishes. usually ill leave it a dark, saturated color that again matches my overall palette but sometimes i go in and color them by alpha locking my lineart layer and picking a color that matches the flat colors underneath? not sure how to explain it properly.

i used a darkish purple for shuro's ponytail to match the dull red of the flat colors (more relative color! trying to simulate a black/brown while keeping the pink palette there) but a lighter crimson for laios's blond. the light was this super intense like blush pink so i thought it might be cool to add this neon salmon red in the areas of that light to really give off that vibe of a very bright intense rim light.

sometimes you could also tweak with gradient maps or color balance, which adjusts hue based on how light or dark a color is. these r fun to mess with as a final touch but i need to watch using them because they can become crutches real fast XD but those are also just tools to help you. in the end just developing a good sense of how color works and how you want to use it is the best place to start.

LONGASS ramble but yeah. tldr just kind of train ur eye for color and look at what you like best. which is unhelpful and a little sucky but it really is just observation and practice and maybe some personal zest.

happy drawing!

[remnantglow]

wait hold on i'm just at the beginning of ASR but i flipped through to AC just to see and it looks like the translation uses he pronouns for ART though??? girl what 😭