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treebeard and the hobbits

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another one thank you

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From the earth.

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Twitter / Shop / INPRNT / Patreon

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Art by Justine Thibault

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Boar and boar babies

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Makas from whenever, i never posted here

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"Proud as a peacock, but... my little love."

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“The people believe in you Arthur, but it counts for nothing if you don’t believe in yourself” — Merlin

“Merlin should take some of the credit, turns out he’s not always entirely stupid.” — Arthur

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it's not that I need a quiet day or a day off exactly; it's that I need a pocket of time that exists entirely outside of linear time as we know it that would allow me to get things done without time passing in the real world, and frankly, I don't think that's too much to ask.

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pssssst hey. hey. free and expansive database of folk and fairy tales. you can thank me later

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hi, i ireally love your work and i don't know if you've answered this before but, what kinds of studies do you do or how did you learn color theory? i wanna get better at rendering and anatomy but im having trouble TT TT

Hi! Long answer alert. Once a chatterbox, always a chatterbox.

When I started actively learning how to draw about 10 1/2 years ago, I exclusively did graphite studies in sketchbooks. Here's a few examples—I mostly stuck to doing line drawings to drill basic shapes/contours and proportions into my brain. The more rendered sketches helped me practice edge control & basic values, and they were REALLY good for learning the actual 3D structure behind what I was drawing.

I'd use reference images that I grabbed from fitness forums, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, and some NSFW places, but you could find adequate ref material from figure drawing sites like Line of Action. LoA has refs for people (you can filter by clothed/unclothed, age, & gender), animals, expressions, hands/feet, and a few other useful things as well. Love them.

Learning how to render digitally was a similar story; it helped a lot that I had a pretty strong foundation for value/anatomy going in. I basically didn't touch color at all for ~2 years (except for a few attempts at bad digital or acrylic paint studies), which may not have been the best idea. I learned color from a lot of trial and error, honestly, and I'm pretty sure this process involved a lot of imitation—there were a number of digital/traditional painters whose styles I really wanted to emulate (notably their edge control, color choices, value distributions, and shape design), so I kiiind of did a mixture of that + my own experimentation.

For example, I really found Benjamin Björklund's style appealing, especially his softened/lost edges & vibrant pops of saturated color, so here's a study I did from some photograph that I'm *pretty* sure was painted with him in mind.

Learning how to detail was definitely a slow process, and like all the aforementioned things (anatomy/color/edge control/values/etc.) I'm still figuring it out. Focusing on edge control first (that is, deciding on where to place hard/soft edges for emphasizing/de-emphasizing certain areas of the image) is super useful, because you can honestly fool a viewer into thinking there's more detail in a piece than there actually is if you're very economical about where you place your hard edges.

The most important part, to me, is probably just doing this stuff over and over again. You're likely not going to see improvement in a few weeks or even a few months, so don't fret about not getting the exact results you want and just keep studying + making art. I like to think about learning art as a process where you *need* to fail and make crappy art/studies—there's literally no way around it—so you might as well fail right now. See, by making bad art you're actually moving forward—isn't that a fun prospect!!

It's useful to have a folder with art you admire, especially if you can dissect the pieces and understand why you like them so much. You can study those aspects (like, you can redraw or repaint that person's work) and break down whether this is art that you just like to look at, or if it's the kind of art that you want to *make.* There's a LOT of art out there that I love looking at, probably tens of thousands of styles/mediums, but there's a very narrow range that I want to make myself.

I've mentioned it in some ask reply in the past, but I really do think looking at other artist's work is such a cheat code for improving your own skills—the other artist does the work to filter reality/ideas for you, and this sort of allows you to contact the subject matter more directly. I can think of so many examples where an artist I admired exaggerated, like, the way sunlight rested on a face and created that orange fringe around its edge, or the greys/dull blues in a wheat field, or the bright indigo in a cast shadow, or the red along the outside of a person's eye, and it just clicked for me that this was a very available & observable aspect of reality, which had up until that point gone completely unnoticed! If you're really perceptive about the art you look at, it's shocking how much it can teach you about how to see the world (in this particular case I mean this literally, in that the art I looked at fully changed the way I visually processed the world, but of course it has had a strong effect on my worldviews/relationships/beliefs).

Thanks so much for sending in a question (& for reading, if you got this far)! I read every single ask I receive, including the kind words & compliments, which I genuinely always appreciate. Best of luck with learning, my friend :)

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A small explorer has arrived, with flowers!

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Everything that could’ve been in the masquerade ball episode ✨

Had the most amazing chance to paint Dorian for the Masquarade Ball project from ExandriaArtists on 🐦

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lighthouse ghosties

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false prophet

closeup and wolfwood Thoughts™ under the cut

i have many thoughts on wolfwood and duality.. the caption was inspired by the bible verse that originated the idea of "wolf in sheep's clothing", and this is one side to him- the judas character. but when he joins vash's side he becomes a different kind of false prophet by betraying the eye of michael

as for the wolf/sheep part, i think the idea of ww as a wolf is a valid one in Some ways, but mostly in that i think its how he sees himself/how he thinks he should be- the hunter, the lone wolf- with the irony ofc being that wolves are pack animals. and so are sheep! the lamb as innocence, the lost lamb, the lamb brought back by the shepherd, the lamb led to slaughter- all his life, he is the lamb. all this to say i feel like wolfwood is the complete opposite of the verse, which is what inspired this drawing- sheep in wolf's clothing