Thanqol Learns To Draw!

[SiuiS]

Posted what? O_o

Sorry. Solipsistic time magic.
Specifically, about a week ago I started playing with your hair, complimenting you. It caught up to you yesterday.

Day 358: Legendary

Took an attempt at drawing Amy Acre, a NPC from my Waiting For Rain game (don't worry about spoilers). Succeeded in a big way - I'm very happy with this and the form I used to draw this. It's a deliberate avoidance of detail perfectionism. Will almost certainly colour this.

Ignore that one hand, it'll be covered by SFX

Links

Time: 1 hour
Music: Party With Pinkie [VIP]

Holy ****.

With any luck!

Day 359: Learning The Ropes

This picture was a revelation. In terms of style, in terms of basic technique. I finally learned a new method for doing linework that's amazing. I finally learned to stop sweating the small stuff and trying to get my pictures pixel-perfect. I broke a whole bunch of time consuming and useless habits. And I made something cool along the way.

Today was a success.

Links

Time: 1 hour
Music: Learning The Ropes

[Buy Some Apples].
My consolation prize is in knowing this thread will still be here, full of resources, when I get the equipment for this.

A couple of tiny little monster psycho juvenile felines have been taking up all my time recently, because there are very few things harder than leaving two purring kittens who look at you with big sad eyes and start mewing for you to come back whenever you start to leave. Here, have a picture:

Spoiler

Show

There's an hour OC my life gone. Kittiiiiieeee~

Oh man, I remember when I realized how much easier everything was for me to just have all the coloring in a single layer, except for maybe the background. It's different for every artist, but I found that everything became so much easier and less rigid.

Remarkably valid. Even thinking about how that would work tangibly relaxed me.
Art isn't in perfection. It's in bull****ting. So long as the end result is art, Thanqol, the minutia don't matter. [/hypocrisy]

On the topic of not fussing over every line and trying to make them all smooth and perfect . . . I certainly consider that to be a very important artistic breakthrough. That's what the sketching I was talking about a while back is all about, actually. Not caring if the lines are pretty or perfect, just getting them down on paper, getting the shape and movement in.

On the topic of sketching, there's another method of sketching that I use in digital art that you might find useful, if you don't use it already. I've heard it called "lineless sketching" or "colored sketching," and it's basically where you take a fairly big brush in your art program of choice, and just start slapping down color. You figure out where the light hits and what the shapes are with the colors and the form of your brushstrokes, rather than with lines. Usually, I use a gradient that matches the general colors that I want the background to be and put that on a background layer, and then make a new layer for the main subject(s), and just start trying to get the shape and color of it down. Then I work at refining those shapes in the same way that I refine the lines of a sketch, only I take this all the way to completion. I use a rectangular brush for this because it makes sharp lines easier, but round brushes work as well.

Could you maybe do a picture, and take a bunch of screen captures on the way? This sounds very good, but done of it eludes me without examples.