miloneuman - Tumblr blog

[miloneuman]

A couple of fashion studies from a couple years back

[miloneuman]

The saga continues… 🌲🌲🌲

[miloneuman]

And this has been the first of many installments in the “I should probably develop a better shorthand for drawing thousands of trees” saga. Spoiler alert: I haven’t learned my lesson yet. 

[miloneuman]

Page 2! Originally this was the second part of a 3-page waterfall kind of thing but um… it’s not anymore. Soooo yeah.

[miloneuman]

Hi, I’m Milo, this is my comic. I haven’t made any comics in a long while, so I hope you like this one. This used to be on smackjeeves but now it’s here! My new plan is to put out one new page every monday, so stay tuned! 

[miloneuman]

Daisy and Peach, Peach and Daisy!

[miloneuman]

Reblog for Tears of the Kingdom day, let’s gooooo

Thunder lady go boom.

[miloneuman]

how do you consistently draw the same character without it looking weird or off every different time?? also how do i coordinate faces, i always make the eyes too far apart or too big or too small or make the mouth too close to the nose or chin edge. If you have any advice I'd really appreciate it since it looks like you have your art shit figured out 🙏

Oh man SO so much of it is just practice, and you're not alone! I honestly think everyone struggles with a sort of "generification" of their characters' features the more they draw them, even seasoned professionals. There's a tendency to just sort of average everything out into an unrecognizable mush over time, and it takes a lot of conscious effort to push back against that.

Here are a couple tips and tricks that I've found to be helpful over the years:

Make turnarounds and model sheets. There's a reason animation/game studios do this, and it is because we are all still bad at drawing a consistent face. Despite being gainfully employed. What are we, graphic novelists?? We wish. Anyway it's a great way to familiarize yourself with your character's face from multiple angles, and it gives you a single source of truth to return to anytime you need a refresher:

Gather real-life reference. Anytime I'm designing a character I'm pulling together a ton of reference of actual people who look, to some degree, like the character in my head. It's always a collection of analogues, never just a single person, but it can be a great cheat sheet for understanding how your character might move, emote, etc:

Make a 3D model. I know it seems daunting, but with the advent of programs like Blender and Nomad Sculpt it's becoming remarkably more accessible. Heck, even James Gurney was sculpting maquettes out of clay for Dinotopia back in the day! It doesn't have to be particularly detailed—just a sort of proportionate lump will do—but it's another great way to have dynamic reference that you can rotate and light accordingly:

Practice, practice, practice. Make expression sheets for your character! Either right there on the spot, just start drawin' expressions, or you can slowly collect drawings of your character that you like, as you draw them, and compile them all in one place for your own reference. Need to draw your character's head from a weird angle? Maybe you've already drawn it before and you can copy your own homework! Doesn't count as stealing when the call's coming from inside the house 😎

I'd love to pretend there's a magical point where you can just immediately rotate your character's head in your brain like some sort of photorealistic apple in a twitter meme, but a lot of the time it's reference, hard work, and whole lotta repetition. 😐👍🏼

[miloneuman]

What's it like being with/married to a fellow artist? (I have never even dated another artist, it seems really cool though)

It's cool! I've never dated anyone else and never plan to. It helps to be with someone who understands what you are doing and will respect when you just have to sit down and focus, even if that focus time is at some absurd hour of the night. It's also nice to have someone off of whom you can bounce ideas if you are stuck in a rut. She helps me with my stories, and I'd like to believe I've contributed at least one or two useful ideas to hers. We encourage each other, and push each other, and soothe each others' egos when one or the other of us is in a moment of doubt or crisis. It's good, I recommend.

[miloneuman]

"Advantages, contacts, ability - none of that is distributed equally. But if you can, make art because it is something that means something to you, and it gives you joy." Beautifully said.

An answer

I'm not going to post the question because I don't want the person who asked it to get piled on.

The magical art fairy did not give me a great and grand education that my mommy and daddy paid for.

My parents were poor and at one point homeless. They lived in a pigeon coop. With pigeons.

I was not super popular in school. I was a nerd in the dark days before being a nerd was something people aspired to. I had braces, glasses, bad acne and was a bit chubby. When I no longer had any of these things (well, I still wear glasses, I prefer them to contacts,) people acted like I always looked that way and sailed the seas of success on a wave of appearance advantages.

My parents did not pay for my education. I went to regular school like everyone else. I had one year of college which I attended on academic scholarship, and I majored in business. I had an art class with a professor who almost never showed up. When the scholarship money ran out after one year, I left.

After I'd been a professional artist for more than twenty years, I took an online digital art class at one of those for profit art schools, which was quite a trick on dial up speed, I must say. Shortly after, I realized it was a scam, I contacted the administration to demand my money back. I got it. The school was eventually sued into oblivion and went out of business.

I did manual field labor as a kid, worked in a veterinarian hospital, parked cars, and ran a roller coaster. I picked up dog poop and did volunteer work at the U.S.O. and the AIDS Housing and Education Fund. I worked as a condo association attendant.

I don't know where people get the impression that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. And it's not like I don't have some advantages. But money and status weren't among them.

Most of the people in comics from my generation come from poverty. Some didn't. But most did.

I am self taught and most of what I learned was from the Famous Artist Course books my mom got as a kid. I was very grateful that my dad invested in a set of encyclopedias for the family when we were still quite poor. I devoured them.

I started sending out portfolio work, story ideas, and resumes at age 12. My first rejection letter was from Random House. I got my first advertising gig when I was about 14-15. The woman who hired me was Linda Wesley Salake.

I met artist Frank Kelly Freas at a science fiction convention I found out about from an advertisement. He was very kind and mentored me. He didn't teach me much about art, but he did teach me a lot about the realities of the art centered life.

I cooked and cleaned house for him after his wife Polly died.

My average income for my first ten years as a professional artist was less than $10,000. And for part of that time, I was not living with my parents. So I supported myself on less than $10,000.

Eventually, I lasted long enough in the arts that I started making some money. Then things got worse. Then they got better. Then they got worse. Then they got better.

Advantages, contacts, ability - none of that is distributed equally. But if you can, make art because it is something that means something to you, and it gives you joy.

And we all deserve some joy.

If it was just about the money, I'd have ditched this bug bin long ago.

That's all.

[miloneuman]

Dimitra and the Silver Mask, Prologue: Page 68

sixty-eight pages down, one to go!

[miloneuman]

Are you making Dimitra because you like drawing dragons and needed lore excuses for it? Or was this just the right time for one of the greatest nightmare dragons I've ever seen?

Yes

[miloneuman]

Dimitra and the Silver Mask, Prologue: Page 65

Who had dragons on their 2023 bingo card?

[miloneuman]

We are speeding towards the conclusion here, hang on tight!

Dimitra and the Silver Mask, Prologue: Page 64

This bodes well. 

Hope y’all are enjoying the comic! If you wanna hang out and chat about it we do have a discord channel, feel free to poke your head in and say hi, we’d love to have you: https://discord.gg/278PhwR 

[miloneuman]

Dimitra and the Silver Mask, Prologue: Page 63

Getting close to the end here. I’ve got the next two pages penciled (an unheard of situation for me) and another about 3/5ths done. After those, just three pages to go!

[miloneuman]

New week, new page!

Dimitra and the Silver Mask, Prologue: Page 62

I dunno man, things seem to be going great over here. 

[miloneuman]

Dimitra and the Silver Mask, Prologue: Page 61

Well, there you have it, the moment we’ve been building up to. I had originally planned for all of this to happen in a much shorter number of pages, but I kept asking myself logistical questions, and those questions led to new scenes and set pieces, which led to new questions that I felt I needed to answer, and the whole thing just kind of snowballed. Thankfully we’re on the home stretch, and I have some more time off from work coming up and I plan to use that to crank through the rest of the chapter as quickly as possible. 

As always, thanks for your patience, and please pop by the Dimitra discord if you want to chat about the comic or get updates on the next page’s progress:  https://discord.gg/278PhwR