#Had a ton of fun painting this in procreate

[steftastan]

Carian Stroll

“Tell Blaidd, and Iji…I love them.”

Before this piece, I had been wanting for a long time to create my own piece of Elden Ring fanart featuring Ranni. I had tried several sketches unsuccessfully, just wasn’t particularly feeling the ideas I had sketched up until that point.

One day of usual internet scrolling, I stumbled upon this gorgeous piece of art by Shimomura Kanzan.

I knew immediately I wanted to do something like this for my Elden Ring fanart. In fact, if you look at this piece, there is tons of inspiration that I drew from the original artwork, such as the style of the yellow leaves and the main subject matter being a prominent silhouette of the brightest value, placed at approximately the bottom third of the image.

The main character is cleverly shrouded amidst various layers of trees and foliage, giving us the impression that we're peeking into candid moment of their life. In the case of the fox, we caught it during a mid-day snack. In the case of Ranni and her party, we caught them in a leisurely stroll, while Iji outfits the dreaded Fingercreepers with their iconic rings.

I wasn't sure if I wanted to capture a happy moment, but Ranni goes as far as to ask us to deliver to Iji and Blaidd the message that she loves them dearly as her quest draws near its end. I would imagine they all must have had fun moments together as a family. Hey, maybe even the hands liked to be around them?

The process

I started this on my iPad using the procreate app. Sadly the full process is not captured on video, as I switched to Photoshop for the rendering phase of the illustration. This video is a fun window into my chaotic process and how I iterate on the fly on the same canvas. I probably wouldn't do that in a professional setting where you often need to have color keys and iterations to be reviewed and analyzed. I like to I cut myself some slack when doing personal art to keep things fun.

Trying and failing some more

This illustration was not a straightforward path. I haven’t been very diligent about personal art, and at some point I started deviating too much from my reference by adding too many levels of depth to the background and suffocating the piece. I got into a weird loop where I would randomly open the PSD, play around with the values, pushing Iji to the back, then bringing him back, cranking all the levers on Ranni, etc., decide it would look horrible, then begrudgingly determine I’d never complete this image and go on with my life.

As artists we likely have unfinished work sitting everywhere, be it in our sketchbooks, canvases, or hard drives. But it’s a different kind of sting when you feel like you can’t even nail the fundamentals.

Anyway, so a couple weeks ago, I decided to give it another go, but this time I would get rid of all the unnecessary stuff, even stuff that I had been trying to render for ages. I would not hold on to anything, I would try and recapture what drew me to Kanzan's beautiful painting to begin with.

After it became a matter of pushing and pulling pixels until the image was finished!

That’s about it. I didn’t go crazy in depth but lately I’ve been enjoying reading into artists’ processes and I’d be remiss to not share my own thought process also.

Thank you for viewing!

[no-name-publishing]

Manacled by SenLinYu

My 8-month marathon on this project has finally come to a close, and I have a ton of pictures to share!

We’ve got a split-board binding with made-endpapers and a built-in tab for extra support. Hand-sewn endbands with silk-finish cotton sewing thread. Done in a millimeter binding style with black leather, and a hand-drawn and -painted floral motif across the middle. Final page count is just under 1.4k. I figure altogether this was around ~50 hours worth of work for the whole binding, from beginning to the typeset to pulling the final book out of the press.

More pictures of the binding and typeset under the cut! If you have any questions or want more info about the process don’t hesitate to ask!

In truth I over measured/estimated the needed length of my leather; this and my poor pare job is definitely visible through the cloth lol, but I’m still jazzed with the result since I’d never touched leather before this. I designed the spread digitally in Procreate, printed it, transferred it to my cloth using carbon transfer paper, then painted using Jacquard Lumiere Metallic gold paint and a refillable .75mm paint pen.

Printed:

Transferred:

Mid-painting:

From starting the drawing to finishing the painting I’d say this part took ~15 hours. Close up of the spine:

Each endband measures around 3 3/4″ (9.5cm) in length and took around 5 hours to complete. The core is 4-ply hemp cord that I coated with PVA glue. Wrapped with a single strand of red silk-finish cotton thread, and one strand of polyester yellow thread, since it’s kinda shiny. Last I counted it was something like 300+ wraps of thread for each band. The uh, cat hair here is just an added bonus I suppose. Like when you buy a new pair of jeans and get that free sticker.

Some progress shots:

The tie downs. I usually will try to tie down every other signature. With 68 signatures you can understand this ate up a metric shitton of thread.

Different angle. Also a good few of the top of the textblock, which was trimmed painstakingly by hand with a wood chisel.

Smooth as a shark etc.

And some shots of the innards!

Each chapter page when through four rounds of printing: 1st through an inkjet, for the floral; 2nd through a laser printer for the number; 3rd through a laminator for the gold toner-reactive foil; and 4thly for the rest of the text.

Half-title page:

One of the attempts to foil a crane. The toner may have been too thin a line for it to work, or perhaps not dense enough tonerly. I don’t have control over that setting on our Xerox unfortunately.

A second shot of a golden crane. This was slightly more successful but lord knows why. Luck.

Fun fact is that this Daily Prophet page ALONE was about 8 hours worth of typesetting. I do all my typesetting in Word, and this page was recreated line-by-line individually. A few of these elements I also had to redraw by hand since there were just no good alternatives online. Anywho though, good payoff.

Nextly, some in-progess shots I don’t have a good segway into lol. A detail you can’t see on the book but I know is there, is hand-dyed scarlet linen thread, drip drying on my shower curtain rod:

Freshly sewn. 68 signatures, no waiting:

Rounded and backed:

And a close up of the special tab/made-endpaper construction. Stupidly I didn’t take any shots of gluing the split boards on, but I think the idea is pretty easy to imagine. Just picture this tab getting glued in between the cover boards.

You can kind of see it here:

And finally, the behemoth on the shelf. This bad boy tips the scales at just over 4 pounds (about 1.8 grams). Glad to have it; more glad to move on with my life.

Thank you for reading!!

[genericpuff]

Alright, update on the tablet situation, I do NOT have good news but there are some silver linings.

First off, thank you all so much for your patience. That one week I took off to relax seemed to be an invitation for the universe to fuck with my shit because my tablet literally chose the worst time to get on my nerves ( This is totally not something I'm gonna bring up with my therapist as proof that I'm not allowed to rest /s) I've tried just about everything to get it working again, I got a replacement 3-in-1 cable and even that didn't do anything, so I've ordered in a new pen, but that's not due to show up for another week or two.

However, I do not want to wait a week or two on the off chance that a new pen even solves the problem.

So the GOOD NEWS in all this is that I do still have my iPad. It wasn't setup with Clip Studio Paint because I own a perpetual license for my PC, but seeing as how now I can't use it on my PC (at least not with my tablet pen) I've gone ahead and setup the mobile version on my tablet, thankfully I got a discount because I already own a perpetual license but it's still gonna cost me $10/month so that's yet another subscription to slap on the 'ole credit card.

Now that does mean I have to go through the painstaking efforts of moving everything from my PC onto my tablet, but thankfully that issue is easily solved with cloud backups and transferring. Really all I need to be able to do is draw, I can still do speech bubbles and text input and texture overlays and all that post-production stuff on my PC, but anything that requires actual drawing I'm gonna be using my iPad for. So please, don't mind if you notice some weird little art differences between Episode 30 and 29, I'm adjusting to a new workflow! It shouldn't be too bad because I'll still be using the exact same brushes and textures and all that fun stuff that I do on my PC, it just comes with the adjustment of drawing primarily on iPad, which I don't normally do (I usually only draw on my iPad for tattooing and that's in Procreate which I still suck at using outside of lineart LMAO)

This is a very stressful situation that I'm hoping will only be temporary until I get that new tablet pen, and if THAT doesn't solve the issue, then I'm gonna have to start shopping for a new tablet entirely, and that's not something I can do immediately because I'm already starting to struggle financially due to the slow season creeping in at work and I'm still paying off that new PC I put down on layaway (which I'm regretting already). All that said, if you want to help a pal out, please consider tossing a dollar or two at me on my Ko-Fi, it's all gonna go towards a new drawing tablet if I need it (and if the pen solves the issue, then you'll be helping me stay afloat so I can keep bringing you guys the good shit LOL)

What's wild is that in all my Google searching, I found a thread from two months ago with literally the EXACT same issue, under the exact same conditions, in which OP's tablet pen unexpectedly stopped registering with their Huion Kamvas 22 Plus that they had owned for two years. According to them, it did start working again, after resetting the PC and re-installing the driver over and over again, but I've already done that myself a ton of times and I'm tired of being let down and that doesn't seem like a "real" solution beyond luck, so I'm gonna take a break from doing that while I get my iPad set up. I have the sneaking suspicion this might have to do with some recent Windows updates that just rolled out, my PC had definitely gone through a couple leading up to the malfunction. This wouldn't be the first time Microsoft has fucked with my tablet functionality so I literally wouldn't be surprised if it was something like that. Either that, or the '2' in Kamvas 22 stands for "will only last for 2 years before stopping entirely" LOL

Anyways, that's all for now. Thank you all so much for your patience and understanding through all this. While I don't want to have to reduce the quality or frequency of what I put out for you guys due to technical issues, I also don't want the comic to stop entirely, so if this turns into one of those desperate situations where I'm delivering you guys episodes of Rekindled drawn on a Nintendo DS, so be it. I'm not gonna let this beat me.

[sleepy-timaeus]

drawtober day 3! rhys strongfork from tales from the borderlands 😏

EDIT: noticed a month later that i spelt his name wrong after playing scrabble with the letters when trying to get the typography as close the the album as possible! *deep breath* ahhhhhHHHH. i did reblog the corrected version, but i dont think enough people will see that, so im just gonna edit my og post!

ramblings, playlist link, & alternate version under the cut :)

i have so many thoughts and feelings about this!! i got the idea for this bc of the attached playlist (love it a lot btw. good job), and i was so excited to do a piece referencing album art. ive like never done any art that does a reinterpretation of another piece of art (theres another word for it that i believe starts with R but im having a brain fart and can't remember, bleh), so this was tons of fun!

u can bet ur bottom dollar i was listening to touch tone telephone for a while as i drew this 💀 it truly gets me hype. and for those unaware, this replication (theres the word!) was based off of the album spirit phone by lemon demon! at some point while going though this playlist i had a Vision ™ for today's drawtober (aka tuesday's, but ive been busy working so) and HAD to execute it 😎

uh, i used a brush i havent really used before for this as well! i tried to be painterly and it was quite fun :3c it's called spectra and it's on procreate for all my ipad babies out there. 10/10 i recommend it. i think i'll be painting with it more when im in the mood for those vibes tbh

so yeah, this is basically my fav so far. like, i enjoy this piece an unreasonable amount. i made it my wallpaper 😭

oct. 6th edit:

​I said id add the alternate version under cut and then never did 😭 my bad yall. here it is, actually under a cut

[corrodedparadox]

wow looking at your rat king thing, you improved SO MUCH in the last two years. what did you feel helped you improve?

There’s a handful of things I would say but the main one was switching from a screenless tablet to an iPad!! Obviously iPads are kinda pricey so I can’t recommend it for everyone, but I genuinely feel like switching from a screenless tablet (I used to use Huion) to screened one REALLY helped me get a better grasp of everything, along with procreate just having an easier layout to use compared to the other programs I used (SAI and CSP) which made me less afraid to mess around with brushes and other fun things like halftone textures and chromatic abbreviations, ect ect . Definitely play around with brushes!! While a different brush won’t suddenly make you the Best Artist Ever, finding a brush that works well with your style/art process can help a TON (almost all my brushes are from @/thedawner brush packs, I highly recommend their brushes!! Lots of free packs too, I use the bonobo chalk as my main painting brush)

The other big thing is references!! I rarely used any references until like last year, I’ve been taking my own pose/expression/ect references (yes that means looking at a weird picture of you for like an hour to get the pose right but you get used to it) and going on walks to get nice landscape shots for my work (all my giant ass floating fish drawings are based on images I personally took), but if you don’t wanna do that websites like unsplash, Pexels, and pixabay are great for royalty free (VERY IMPORTANT, I have seen LOTS of artists end up in legal battles because they just used a random photo they got off Google that ended up being copyrighted) pictures and vectors to help get ya started.

The last major big thing is my drawing process in general!! I was hardwired to believe you HAD to do art in the steps of sketch, lineart, color, then shading all on separate layers. Don’t be afraid to use what process works for you! When I threw lineart out the window and started painting all on one layer it became WAY easier for me to block out shapes (highly recommend doing greyscale paint studies, it helps SOO much with more coherent color pallets and lighting) and really helps the entire work fell connected rather than a character that feels poorly overlaid on a separately drawn background.

Don’t be afraid to fuck around! Its art! It’s supposed to be messy and weird! Merge your layers! Use 30 different brushes because you feel like it!! Have fun and mess around with the process and see where it takes you!!!

[cqtlatte]

hiii your art always make my day better, so hope u had a good day too. But can I ask what brushes you usually use in your arts? Like the way you use brushes and colors are so good TuT I can't fathom it sometimes. How do u make those kinds of textures. I'm new in this tumbler, so apologies if it's already been answered before. <33

Heyo anon, thanks for asking and no problem! I've answered this a couple of times before across all my platforms, but ig this is a good opportunity to answer and add to my carrd FAQ! <3 Let me break down what I use them for a bit too. (lots of blabbing below so I'll but a read-more tab)

Main:

 (sketching) Design pencil (default in CSP, you can probably find it on the assets store because it was from the earlier version of CSP)

(sketching/coloring/general use) G-pen

(sketching/coloring/general use) Dense watercolor (same case as the design pencil)

As for brushes that I use for texturing and painting, I use the Daub brush pack for CSP. My favorites come from the aenigma, pigmento, and basiliscus sets. You can find them on gumroad, or just google! I believe they have brushes for procreate and photoshop too but I think the brush packs aren't the same across platforms. 

For making the texture itself, it's kind of a random process that idk how to explain properly lmao. Let me link my Kokomi timelapse so you can see how much I jump around the canvas to carve out the textures:

 I like to use different blending modes and layer tons of different colors. The color jitter function is super amazing too for that purpose, but probably shouldn't be overused for the sake of balance. (personally still trying to avoid over-saturating my works with textures tbh)

To be 100000% honest though, I tend to jump around a lot, and I certainly don't use all of those brushes in every piece.

I used to lurk around a lot myself and hoard tons of brushes other artists were using, until I saw a comment of an artist I admire: "sometimes the brush you use really isn't important. Without practice the painting will be ugly."(not the most accurate translation probably because it was written in another language)

After that I had like… an epiphany moment where I really believed them, and drew a Bonanus fanart in June. I made the lineart with a g-pen (which I never used cuz I always thought I'd be somehow inhibiting my creative power using default brushes or something), and the piece ended up blowing up on twt much to my surprise.. LOL. After that, I started to care less about other's brushes and instead of looking for more, try to figure out how I could make cool textures and strokes with the ones I currently had at my disposal.

(said bonanus art)

This isn't a statement to say "stop looking for other artist's brushes, copying brushes bad, etc" because there is a LOT that you can learn from using other artist's brush inventory.

But you can also have a lot of fun drawing when you focus less about what other's use, and more about what brushes YOU are comfortable using + feels right to you. Sometimes you may even need to tweak them a bit in their brush settings instead of using their default form before they feel comfy for you! It's a matter of exploring and figuring out what works and what doesn't in your workflow, hehe.

Anyways I hope this answer helps as we all continue our art journey together. Sending positive vibes your way anon! <3

[tangy-soup]

Hii lookie! Even though I only made like 4 fully rendered pieces this year, I'm happy with what I've done this year!

(For months where I dont't have fully rendered finished pieces I put in the next closest thing I have that month.)

Ramble under the cut where I try to go over each month

General overview:

Funny thing I've noticed is how often I used cool tones this year bc my older art (that ive never shown from like 2 years ago) was characterized by warm tones

Even though I work through fully rendered pieces super slowly and barely come out of the year with any, I'm super proud of my progress this year! I've learnt and grown a lot as an artist and have also realized my potential. With that though also comes my fear of not being able to top what I've done, which I'm trying to work on! My issue is I tend to produce a lot of art when feeling highly inspired by a media, and right now I don't exactly feel the same kind of spontaneous and passionate inspiration as I did during the year. I'm definitely dealing with some sort of mental block right now when it comes to digital art and I'm hoping to get through that soon because I miss the process of making something I love through drawing!!

January:

honestly thought the boatem piece was done last year so I was surprised to find it in my January files! This piece was kind of a turning point for my art as it was my first more complex pieces (i had not previously done a piece w more than 1 character in it really). It was a lot of work and I was very nervous about it but I'm quite proud of what I was able to do!

Late january is also when i started sketching out the ethubs piece actually (i work slow)!

February:

I didn't actually do a ton of art this month, as I tend to take a break and slow down right after finishing a piece. At this point I was very keen on doing pose studies traditionally. I posted some of these and most of them were desert duo.

This month i started to really figure out my dnd character Ethe's main design as our campaign was starting. So, i did a portrait of her for that. The rest of February was working on ethubs and studying how to paint grass and clouds and just sketching here and there. I think desert duo brain rot was strongest this month

March:

March was also a mix of pose studies and random sketches and FINALLY FINISHING ETHUBS. I was also doing some art for dnd ^_^

April:

I finished the dragonborn npc centered dnd piece this month, and also began sketching out the cleo piece. In between working on cleo I did some joe art including an animatic featuring the wordle boarder and the sketch for biblically accurate joe :D

May:

Pretty much anytime i had procreate open in may I was working on Cleo. This is the most ambitious art project I have taken on and I wasn't sure if I was able to make it how I wanted, so I was kind of slow and on and off with it. I ended up putting it down towards the end of the month and did some more personal illustrations

June:

Big month for my dnd blorbos tbh! I introduced a sister for Ethe and was working on her design and their interactions. I also got a bigger sketchbook this month and did a bunch of traditional studies. I finished the flats for cleo this month and took a break so most of the art I did were sketches

July:

I was in the home stretch for cleo and with the help of my friends telling me to finish it i finally pushed through and finished it. I couldnt be happier w the results!! it's one of my proudest pieces this year and I put in so much work for it. But after I finished it i took a huge break from mcyt art and focused on dnd art yet again.

August:

My work for the multidimensional big bang started this month!! I worked out the character design early august and had a sketch for the full piece by the end of the month. In the meantime I was actually working on a cat painting I never posted... maybe I'll post it in an end of year art dump

September:

This month was all about the big bang piece. I had so much fun doing it and am super proud of the finished product. Im especially happy with the composition and inclusion of the background characters!!

October:

Again. Major break from making full pieces after finishing a huge one last month. I think I spent more of my creative energy elsewhere like my writing. Also school started again and I had moved apartments and there was a lot of irl stuff preventing me from drawing. I did try to do traditional studies if I could

November:

Kind of a dead month for drawing. Super busy w school, chugging my way through Ethe's ref sheet i started months ago.

December:

Literally haven't drawn anything new besides a new years illustration for greeting cards. I picked up crocheting again and have been spending a lot of creative energy on that instead, but to keep my drawing going I've been doing more figure studies in my sketch book i guess!

[kettleghost]

tips for people that are extremely used to traditional art that wanna go to digital?

every one of your digital works is just so... ...

thank u!! at the time i started doing digital art, my art was like. really not good (i was around 11 years old) so my transition from traditional to digital wasn’t all that hard, since i was basically still starting out with art either way. but what i can say is:

digital art is a big medium, there are a shit-ton of programs, and each program offers differing brushes, layout etc. i’m only really used to/aware of the ins and outs of Procreate, so i can’t provide concrete advice on any other drawing apps. but what i can say is, tutorials can! undoubtedly for whatever drawing app you use, there’ll be a video on youtube explaining what each button does and all the other intricacies of your app of choice. i was lucky enough that when i started digital art, i had a friend who showed me how everything worked on procreate, so if you have any digital artist friends/mutuals that are used to the drawing program you wanna use, maybe ask them for some tips and tricks!

once you know how to use the app and what everything does, i suggest you play around with brushes and colours! maybe do some sketches with different brushes, and play around with the colours! in terms of colour, digital art is a lot more vast than traditional (unless you have a bunch of different pencils or markers or paint etc)! i draw on my ipad using my finger, so my first digital pieces were TERRIBLE as i wasn’t used to that at all (and i was terrible at using colours that worked well together at the time). so if your first digital pieces or sketches aren’t as good as you’d like them to be, please don’t panic and drop digital art! i promise you that practice will improve your art, just like with traditional art!

digital art can be daunting and scary to start off with since there’s a lot going on, especially if you’re using a more advanced art program. but! keep at it and you’ll be able to see the improvement! i know ‘practice makes perfect’ is something everyone and their fuckifn grandma has said before, but unironically, it’s true. just play around with it and have fun, ask some friends and watch some tutorials on how to use the program, and you should be off to a great start! good luck :D

[void-botanist]

My Year of Writing

After reading @theskeletonprior's review, I thought I would write one of my own. Original prompt by @maguayans (whose blog theme on desktop is excellent for writeblr and might be something I borrow).

Part 1: Spotify Wrapped version

This year was all about The Fourth Android and bringing it from a half-baked rewrite of an older story to something edible. To that end, I wrote 158,587 words:

30,000 for Camp NaNo in April

30,209 for Camp NaNo in July

50,363 for NaNo 2022, plus

18,013 for a May goal and

30,002 for a June goal.

I archived a lot of those words as I iterated, though, and my current draft is sitting at 43,278 words right now.

Obviously Dez was on my mind the whole time but I also invented a ton of new characters as I fleshed out species concepts and the cultural geography of the world. I also frequently got distracted with other stories in this world and started writing extra scenes about characters who had captured my attention, several of whom are on Dez's future space crew.

My Spotify Wrapped was boring. It pretty much just said "hey you got real into pop this year. We probably classed all the 80s rock and 00s indie you listened to as 'nostalgia', which is silly. Also you still listen to a ton of Approaching Nirvana, like you're in the top 0.5% of listeners". If you want my recommendations, go listen to Wreck of the Day (the song or the album or both) by Anna Nalick, and literally anything by Approaching Nirvana (but I have probably listened to the albums Cinematic Soundscapes Vol. 1 and Illusions the most). Also go (re)appreciate that 38 Special and Fitz and the Tantrums are bands that exist.

Part 2: A More Detailed Review

General

This year I continued working toward improvement, in both my writing and art.

With writing, that looked like getting more invested in planning and analyzing my own work. I finally accepted that the typical plot charts I find don't make sense to me when I try to use them, and not because I'm trying to make my stories Special (TM). Something just doesn't connect for me, and that's okay. That's not the only way to get plot structure. Instead I spent a while figuring out how to use Scrivener to outline in a way that works for me. I also tried to apply my own media analyses and those of YouTubers like Princess Weekes, La'Ron Readus, Jessie Gender, NerdSync, and James Somerton to my own work, to consider what works and what might not.

With art, that looked like learning more tools and tricks in Clip Studio Paint and Procreate, changing my settings to help me not mess up my arm constantly (adjusting my pressure curve!), and drawing at a higher resolution. I cannot stress enough how much of a difference that has made in the way my work looks and how it feels to edit it. I tend to draw small, so I'd never thought about it much, but wow everything is so smooth now. I've also been working on accepting that the imperfections in my work don't make it bad, and that being a slow and indecisive artist is also fine. angrymikko, Nadiaxel, and Chroma Moma on YouTube have been super helpful to me as I try new styles and ways of working and just having fun with my art. ronillust also makes delightful art memes and some tutorials.

P.S. if you're on desktop and you despise the format of YouTube's Shorts page, you can play Shorts as regular videos by changing the "shorts" portion of the URL to "watch". You can also set up Redirector to do this automatically (I wrote a tutorial for this on my main blog).

Writeblr

I was so much more active on writeblr this year, especially during the last few months. I followed a ton of other writers (I won't list them all here but I've been trying to reblog from them to make sure people are also aware of them) and started posting some excerpts of my own work and participating in ask/tag games. I'm having a very good time so far. Please feel free to tag me liberally in future games and prompts!

WIPs

I started working on The Fourth Android after I lost NaNoWriMo 2021, where I was working on Triad and I ran out of steam after about 28k words. On the last day of NaNo I just sprinted some stuff about Zel and Anni and a fledgling form of TFA in which Zel is a journalist and Anni teams up with her to locate Dez, who has absconded over some misunderstanding. Then I thought, what if I just worked on this? So I did. Triad is still going to happen, but it needs a lot of restructuring to work properly.

As always, my writing went from high angst to low angst as I developed that first TFA concept further, which I think speaks to how I just like stories about people being friends. Which is, you know, a pretty broad qualifier, but I find that even in stories with high stakes and high drama the thing I find most delightful is friendship dynamics (can you tell I'm thinking about Hunter x Hunter as I write this? I got kinda into that too). A lot of my thinking about character arcs has been related to "how is this friendship interesting?" and the cultural worldbuilding I've been doing is going to help me explore some of those dynamics. (This also applies to romantic couples, not least because friends to lovers is the only thing that seems to work for me in my writing.)

Books and Other Things I Consumed

I read a fair bit this year, especially compared to the last couple years (I'm actually pretty proud of this because I read maybe 2 books in all of 2019 and 2020 and only got back into reading last year). Like Harrowben, I've starred my favorites.

*The Expanse series 4-7 by James S. A. Corey (4, Cibola Burn, was a particular favorite just because I love stories set on alien planets. Overall I think The Expanse could use more theys and gays, but I'm pretty happy with it)

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov (I enjoyed how clever this one was, and also it has robots. For some strange reason I have become incredibly interested in robot stories)

Artemis by Andy Weir (honestly I think about this one a lot. I think it had some of Weir's character writing flaws as seen in The Martian but the worldbuilding was pretty compelling and I'm a sucker for epistolary bits)

*Fearless by Shira Glassman (a wonderful quick read about snowstorms and lesbian moms. I also bought several of Shira's other books but haven't read them yet)

*Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao (I rarely buy books in physical form anymore but I did buy this one after I read it. Superb. Waiting for the sequel)

Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki (I enjoyed this one a lot. I can definitely understand the criticisms, and the formatting was kinda weird. But on some level I felt like I was reading something that was in my own genre)

Currently reading

The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes by Cat Sebastian (the sequel to The Queer Principles of Kit Webb. It's just a super fun read)

Finlay Donovan Knocks 'Em Dead by Elle Cosimano (the sequel to Finlay Donovan is Killing It. Honestly disappointed in this one, especially compared to the first book. There are some excellent moments but there are also a lot of things that don't really seem to make sense, and I'm very frustrated with the romance part of it)

Tiamat's Wrath (The Expanse book 8) by James S. A. Corey

Books I started and plan to finish (I often put down books because they're not what I want right at that moment)

Xeni by Rebekah Weatherspoon

Mrs. Martin's Incomparable Adventure by Courtney Milan

The Doctor's Discretion by E. E. Ottoman

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Prelude to Foundation by Isaac Asimov

Murmuration by T. J. Klune

I won't list out all the shows I watched but I do think that Hunter x Hunter, Exception (the Netflix anime), Mob Psycho 100, and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners have all influenced the way I think about my writing and to some extent my art (seriously the color and visual storytelling choices of Edgerunners are so interesting and cool). In video games, the environment design of Hades, Risk of Rain 2's Survivors of the Void expansion, and Slime Rancher 2 really fascinated me, and I spent a ton of time using Sims 4 to build places that exist in TFA to better visualize them. (I really want a game that is just Sims 4 build mode, but with more detailed building capabilities and endless building space. I just installed Sweet Home 3D, which might do it for me.)

Here's to another year of writeblring and creating. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the stuff I mentioned above (especially Exception if you've seen it), and/or your recommendations for anything but especially cool stories about robots/androids/gays/theys.

[napsaps-archive]

oooo about digital art!! as someone who was also majorly traditional only who had to teach themselves the digital part i can tell you its a real journey! lots of fun though. I too use ibispaint for free on mobile, but i hear procreate is a good deal for $5 and clip studio paint is popular for computers? if you plan to draw on mobile and dont have a stylus i suggest getting one because finger-art is difficult until you get used to it haha some advice for techniques in general that i wish i knew starting out is that texture in digital art comes like entirely from brush types-- like you want to use softer and larger brushes for shading etc. the feeling of sketching on paper depends on line weight which depends pen pressure, so if you dont have that you might have to compensate (usually i turn the opacity of the brush down so multiple strokes make it darker and mimic line weight) also the nuances of layer types and lasso tool are LIFESAVERS (plenty of guides out there teaching the mechanics of them) and also to just mess around a bit and experiment! there's tons of things to learn and play with. digital art is a lot of fun once you get the hang of it, godspeed my friend

thank you!! i actually was wondering on how shading would work and where the texture comes from so this helps so much

[voidthewanderer]

Am I late for WIP Wednesday? Yes. Do I care? No. Here’s six of my most current ones and a little blurb about each one and why it’s taking so long for me to finish them.

This is my lighting digital painting practice of Hancock from the censored nude that Danny posted on his Instagram a few months back. I had waited to get permission to use it as a reference, since he did post it on a feed that ‘deletes’ after 24 hours. I’m focusing less on a completely polished piece and focusing more on form and how light hits the form; as well as learning other techniques for shading and lighting. I’ve never tried this style before where you start in greyscale and then add color after the fact, so it’s a fun new experiment for me. Final piece will also be censored, as the conversation that I had with Danny did give off a “Please keep this censored” vibe without outright saying it. Started 11/15/22 with approximately three hours of work on Procreate.

Scene with Hancock and Viorel from a later chapter of Chemical Love. The entire premise of the story is that Viorel helps Hancock get into Diamond City to get Nukashine to the Bobrov Brothers, as his supplier (Arsenic) isn’t going to be travelling back through Appalachia for some time. They pose as a married couple, giving both of them the means to get into the city without (much) harassment. They do share a full on kiss later on, which is what this scene depicts. I may go back to the lighting on this one as I further my lighting practices. Started 7/2/22 with approximately five hours of work between traditional art and Procreate.

A couple piece of Crow and Arsenic because those two deserve the world and are the absolutely loves of my life. I am most likely going to completely rework this piece, however, as I do not like how I did the lighting, nor am I a particular fan of the line art with this coloring style from me. Started 7/14/22 with approximately eleven hours of work on Procreate.

The original concept for my character Teddy, who is a slight antagonist in my upcoming fic A Different Life. He’s an incredibly misguided ghoul who gets attached to the wrong people, getting to the point of making the ones he gets attached to uncomfortable. However, when pointed out that “hey, this person isn’t available to be like that with” he takes it as a personal attack. He absolutely can be steered into the right direction, but it’s a matter of finding someone who’s willing to actually work with him. I’m most likely going to rework this one because I now actually have a decent reference book for plus sized people, of which he is. Started ??? with approximately nineteen hours of work on Procreate.

A header piece for Arsenic’s RefSheet.Net page. Just him working in the kitchen they set up in The Slog for him. Trying a ton of different styles and working on a smaller canvas is extremely difficult. Started ??? with approximately thirteen hours of work on Procreate.

Full body reference for Arsenic started two years ago. Gotta rework some stuff, as I originally started this on my old tablet, which was a lot smaller than my current one with less layer capabilities. 

[carlmancarlmanart]

Drawing of an a little adventurer - decided to play with something a little more stylized than I usually do. Had a ton of fun working on this one, and I hope you enjoy it! 🙂 #instaart #illustration #characterdesign #design #artwork #adventure #cartoon #procreate #sketch #painting (at Portland Oregon) https://www.instagram.com/p/ChbCrIEvBVw/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[elluvseggos]

QnA to know about me.

Why do you love Stranger Things?

On my 15th birthday (before the 2020 quarantine), my older brother bought his Netflix and we created our profiles, including me and my younger sister. It's was fun at first, I watched some animes and cartoons, then 2 days later (I remembered), I'm extremely bored during the COVID-19 quarantine, scrolling through Netflix, until I found the one and only, Stranger Things! I love how this show changed my life because of how great it is. Especially Eleven, Mike and Steve (both of my favourite characters). After I watched from season 1 to 3, I started to think about, Finn Wolfhard is kinda cute, and Millie. And when i sleep, every time I had a dream is Mike comforting Eleven, Will is getting lost again and etc. So that's is my story about my ST addiction!

What program do you use for drawing?

Ibis Paint in my old days. I use Procreate. Not just because I'm not like "OoOo I hAvE aN iPaD" kinda person, it's because how "comfortable" the program usage is. Medibang and Autodesk Sketchbook are OK in my opinion, these are the programs i used back in 2016 - 2018. Change is a good thing.

Have you ever got cyberbullied?

Yes. Really. When i was 14 years old, I started my Instagram fan account. I thought it would be a good idea. You know, I was interested. My fan account is dedicated to Jace Norman. Yes! I loved this guy, I constantly thought about him. So I thought maybe I should meet online friends who support Jace. Fan groups, private messages, whatever we can do on Instagram. In 7th and 8th grade after school, people on my Instagram feed are talking about me! They repost my edits. I got 200+ subscribers which is a lot for me. That's all I can say about my positive points, but things are getting worse... Fan groups and Instagram directs are little scary to me, it feels like I'm talking to strangers. Sometimes it's hard to make friends. I woke up, had breakfast, opened Instagram and had fun in Jace's fan groups. I'm going crazy. Then I was accidentally being rude to the fans. People are shocked by my mistake. I thought, what? They said I annoy the fans and Jace. People send each other evidences and chat dialogues about me. Then one person tries to report me for harassment. I told my online friend to beg her to unblock me. Then I apologized on Instagram stories every time I get sad. The next day, most of my fan group friends block me. The other person is trying to intimidate me, like "You're so stupid", "You shouldn't be a Jace Norman fan" and "STFU". I'm crying quietly under my pillow, I think I've done it. So I blocked him (or her), left fangroups, and took a break from social media. But it doesn't work. Every day they talk about me, how terrible I am. I apologized again and again and again like a "precious kitten" begging to accept my apology and unblock me. I'm sick of this torture, that In November 2019, I said goodbye to my Instagram account. Now I'm 17, I learned my mistakes and I won't do this again with you (you guys are the best!), this is like my "im14andthisisdeep" situation.

Moral of this section is to not be a suck-up person, even on the fandom of Nickelodeon shows.

Why you should view my Telegram channel?

Some of my close folks don't use it. If you are interested, my russian Telegram channel presents to my tons of arts, montages, my life updates and even mashups. My Tumblr blog is for art only.

Without social media, what's your free time?

Improving my English and going to the shopping centre, parks and cafés with my best friend and sometimes with my mother. Typical.

[sanctus-ingenium]

u guys wanna see more WIPs... similar to the last post, here are Some WIPs

all of these were started in sai before going on to procreate. before going back to sai again in the case of the strength card

so Blue Sky/Out Of Time... yeah it’s extremely self-explanatory, it’s very obvious what this scene depicts and i’m sure everyone gets it (this is a joke i’ve had multiple people dm me asking wtf this even is). the one element that absolutely NEEDED to be there was the LED digital clock with a bullshit time on it, and i decided to replace it with an AIRE warning sign instead and put the LED readouts in the bg. the warning sign in this setting serves the purpose of informing ppl when there are hostile faeries around. i knew what the colours would be from the beginning, but it took a bit for me to realise what sort of shading style i wanted (it took forever). but i did know i wanted to contrast the very sketchy black void against the cleaner and almost cartoony/comic book style rest of the drawing, to emphasise the fact that the foreground sky and background void are made of two very different things. again i used a colour shifting brush to quickly make all the shards of sky different colours, but originally i planned to have some of the shards be dark or night time (with stars or the moon etc). unfortunately it didn’t work, it was too dark and pascal got lost against it.

My Eyes Are Up Here is pretty obviously the exact same scene with the same character, in the same field, but with a different sort of atmosphere. i sketched this in sai then did the final in procreate. originally it was going to have a black background

i really like this version tbh but the blue works better. i think he looks good against dark backgrounds where it’s kind of hard to see wtf is even happening there

so about the neon signs..... i’m well aware that the sketch has way more promise than what the final ultimately was, and that’s because i found that i didn’t have the technical or artistic ability to pull off the complex neon signs like i wanted to. i couldn’t get it looking good enough so i had to scrap them. but these signs will be back, i want to draw them properly and do them justice. the gif was unplanned too but i thought it would be fun to have the flicker be very intermittent so that if you scrolled past it you might not even realise, or you’d have to stick with it just to catch it looping. i used GIMP to make the gif and change the frame rate, and this actually took a very long time because i had to preview it over and over. anyway if you WERE to get lost in the púca’s field, in this story, you would see neon signs like this encouraging you to follow them.

Strength is actually the last drawing i ever made that ended with a paint-over in sai, and the oldest drawing here. as such i actually don’t think it’s representative of my current ability but i do have a soft spot for it for sentimental reasons lol. the reason for the paint-over in sai was because i drew this at a time when i still did not trust procreate to be able to place the level of finish on it that i wanted

the background took me a thousand years to figure out. literally it was so annoying that i considered scrapping it for something simpler. but the idea was for it to be a kind of fairytale-ish lost in the woods sort of look while also appearing like the blood vessels around the human heart. the branches were also supposed to be heart-shaped in cross-section but i spent so long zoomed in painting them that i forgot to zoom out to see if all those fine details were actually visible, and it turned out they weren’t. i was disappointed that i couldn’t get félix’s tattoos to look right but that’s what i get for making a character with shit tons of both tattoos and body hair. i also got rid of the foreground branches really soon because they weren’t adding anything and muddied up the readability of his pose

the swan is from a daemon au and bears no relation to my other swan characters. i just like swans a lot

[frenzyarts]

What hardware and software do you use for digital art? I’m a semicasual artist considering finally upgrading from a trackpad and photoshop, and I want to know about potential options.

First of all mad props for drawing with a track pad, my first digital art was made with a mouse and a track pad just sounds even harder. I’ll go over some hardware options first and then software options!

If you’re looking for a small upgrade, I recommend a tablet. Wacom makes some excellent ones but there’s plenty on the market that are good! They’re basically giant track pads with pens. I used them for some of my early digital art pieces and many professional artists still swear by them. You can get them at most Best Buy’s (well in the USA at least idk where you live) and some of the smaller ones are like $50

If you’re looking for something way more expensive you could get a Wacom cintiq, which you plug into your computer. You can set it up so that it acts as a second screen so that you can draw right on your screen with a pen and then have reference images open on your main computer screen. Super useful. I’ve used that a lot but had to stop for a long time because I didn’t have a good way to set it up, I recently moved so I set it up again and can’t wait to use it :D

A third option, and what I use the most, is an iPad and apple pen. Get a newer iPad if you can so that you can charge the pen by magnetically sticking it to the side to charge instead of plugging it into the iPad, that way both can charge at the same time. I loooove the Apple pen because it lets me angle it so I can get the nice angled strokes I would get from like charcoal or something. Super sensitive and the way colors look on an iPad are STUNNING.

There’s some other hardware options but that’s all I feel qualified to give recommendations on. Onto the software!

You already know photoshop which is great because a lot of buttons and shortcuts in photoshop are the same in other programs. I grew up learning digital art on photoshop, I would even download the old free versions when I couldn’t get my hands on a paid copy. But I don’t use photoshop anymore because it’s a subscription and I don’t wanna pay for that lol. Maybe someday 🤷‍♀️

There’s a TON of free programs that are great, like medibang and fire alpaca. I’ve played around with a few of these but I highly recommend looking up reviews on which one you’d like before getting one. A lot of people use Paint Tool Sai as well, I used to use it a lot, it was a long time ago so I don’t remember how much it cost, I think someone gifted it to me. Just bringing it up because it’s a good program.

I don’t have this yet, but I REALLY want Clip Studio Paint, aka CSP. You can find a ton of fun and free custom brushes people have made for CSP that I’m dying to try!! I’ve heard nothing but good reviews of it. It’s expensive but goes on sale four times a year, it’s going on sale next month and I’m going to get it!!! :D

The software that I use the most right now is Procreate for the iPad and I highly recommend it. Just like CSP people also make custom brushes for it and they’re so much fun. It’s nice to have a super robust art program that’s really portable, you can take it to a cafe and do sketches! If you get an iPad, I highly recommend it!! A lot of people also use heavy paint on iPads, and I haven’t used it, but it looks like it functions a bit differently than procreate. Eventually I’ll try it and can give a solid review of it then.

I hope this helped! Let me know if you have any more questions, and good luck on your art journey!! 🙌

[viva-la-topknot]

Oh My Gosh The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder Is So Pretty

Spoiler Warning: This review talks about and shows the art, story, and other details of all three of the first episode of The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder.

This is a snippet of a longer review I made mostly for my own entertainment, but I wanna share me geeking out about the way the show looks here on my Tumblr.

The show is really nice to look at. Pretty color pallets, interesting textures, consistent background style, and the shading. Oh my gosh the cell shading.

The show has lots of little stylistic flairs that are just fun to look at. Like how the line art of the backgrounds [and sometimes the foregrounds] don’t match the color that fills them in, like they’re on to layers that are slightly offset, but that the outlines are the thing that determines where that thing is in space.

Check out this scene of Oscar in his car here to see what I mean about the cell shading.

So the yellow circle is where the light source is coming from. If we just look at the cell shading Highlights, the lighter part of the left side of Oscar’s face, the top of his left arm and hand, those are all lit up from the cell shading. But his torso doesn't have a highlight because it’s below the window of the car, where the car door would be blocking it, and his right arm doesn't because the rest of his body is covering it. I’m trying to remember if I’ve ever seen cells shading like this in a cartoon. The highlights also change color depending on the lighting, it’s awesome!

Let’s take an example from Family Guy for comparison. All three characters are lit consistently from the moonlight coming in through the window, but Quagmire shouldn’t have any highlights on him below the neck, because that’s where the window stops. He’s lit on his left arm, leg, and foot. They're all highlighted but he should only be lit from the neck up because everything below that would be shadowed by the wall under the window.

Or how bout this shot from Kipo: Age of Wondersbeasts where Kipo’s left leg is lit as if the guitar wouldn’t be blocking the light, and how the shading is consistent from just before this bird shows up and there’s a big, sunny hole in the wall to after the bird shows up, where the bird should be blocking most of the light the scene is lit from.

I’m making a big deal of pointing this out because I can’t remember if I’ve ever seen lighting like this in a cartoon. It’s fantastic. It shows a really deep understanding of how light works and how to light a scene, and Proud Family: Louder and Prouder has tons of little details like this.

There’s this spray paint texture that keeps showing up throughout the show. They use it for depth, for texture, and for visual flair.

Here’s some dry brushstroke type paint to make Penny’s bonnet have a fabric texture.

Here’s a more textured paint look used to make Maya’s jeans look distressed.

Here’s some more dry brush style to show the curl texture of the girls’ natural hair.

There’s a couple different ones here, with the texture used on the trees being consistent from tree to tree and a different one for the roofs.

Look at how amazing Michael’s hair looks! The spray paint texture at the roots of his locs gives his hair texture and depth, they even gave him a lighter version of his base brown on the sides of his head to give all his hair some texture.

And here on Penny’s coat, they’ve used something chunky and multi colored with a splatter texture [reminds me of Procreate’s Splatter brush if it had a baby with the Flicks brush, Splatter’s color mix and Flicks’ texture and shape] to make glitter.

They sometimes also use texture for hair and don’t use an outline, which I’m partly pointing out so that we can appreciate the mix of lineless and lined styles in this show, and mostly because I had to show you Baby Penny because she is the cutest thing I’ve seen all week.

I really like all these textures they’ve put into the art, it gives the show a look that feels, approachable? Familiar? To a digital artist like myself. I can see myself emulating some of these techniques in my own art.

The fun and consistent characters carry over from what I remember of the original show [I re-watched most of the first season before the reboot came out so my memory on this count might be inaccurate], as does the fun and absurd cartoon sitcom writing. I’m glad they went for a chill cover of the OG theme song because trying to do better than it would probably have been impossible. Both the baby’s updated character designs are super cute, as are the main teens. Most of them aren’t /that/ different, other than Michal and Zoe most of the teen’s updates are in proportion and simple outfit changes.

The show is just super pretty and I look forward to getting to look at more episodes of it.

- Topknot