#he mostly uses darker colors but they are not afraid to throw in some brighter tones as well from time to time

[snarkylinda]

Spencer Reid had such an awful posture because he was carrying the men's fashion on his back.

[dusksmote]

How do you ink and color? Any tips? I love your art! 💜🖤

oh shit i got this ask months ago and forgot to answer

inking: god i hate lineart so much. the trick is to not do it 😂 unfortunately, i still find myself spending hours on lineart all the time @_@ 

the biggest thing i’ve found is making your lines varied in thickness. it adds to the interest. i also try to make my outside line thicker than my inside ones to break up the figure from the background. don’t be afraid to skips some lines and imply them with shading instead. i will color over my lines at the end to make them not as strong, but i’ve learned to still keep some lines black for extra emphasis. 

^ here’s one of my older pieces that i’ve been considering redoing. it has very little line variation, ALL the lines are colored so there’s no solid black, and there’s very little hard contrast in shading values. overall, it looks flat and uninteresting and if i had the time i’d redraw this one.

this is a more recent example of lineart that i think works a lot better. the characters are really well defined with a strong outline, but the inside lines aren’t harsh and distracting. you can see i recolored the lineart in kyle’s hair to be a dark red, and in some places it blends with the shadows to imply areas with more highlights. stan’s pants don’t have and lines in them, just the outside shape and pockets. 

you can see in this wip what the lineart looks like before i do all the shading and fancy stuff. stan’s pants look totally flat and straight until i start shading.

a lot of the time though i won’t even do lineart, especially if it’s a big scenic piece. the more zoomed out less detail you can convey, and lineart takes up a lot of space. 

^ this piece is an example where i do both, lineart and no lineart. the mirror image of kyle isn’t the focus, and i honestly didn’t feel like going in and drawing exact lines because they’d probably look fucked up anyway. i typically don’t put hard lines in backgrounds because it would take FOREVER and just be distracting.

the one thing you do have to be careful of with lineless art is contrast. hard lines are good contrast that show you what you’re looking at, and without them your image can blend together. 

here’s part of a painting i did last august, when i was first experimenting with lineless styles (full image on my NSFW twitter). can you tell what’s going on here? i sure as fuck can’t. there’s no contrast, and it makes all the skin tones blend together in an unintelligible mush.

contrast has always been one of my biggest weaknesses as an artist, so i’ve been trying to improve over time. here’s a more recent lineless drawing:

this one works because it had high contrast. the highlights are really bright and the shadows are really deep. you can still make out the facial features too, but there’s no ‘lineart’ layer’. everything was painted on in the same layer.

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coloring: oh my god i love coloring. it’s my favorite part of drawing and the reason why shit takes forever. a lot of the same stuff from before comes into play, like contrast. you can also portray some really interesting moods based on colors if you’re being stylistic, but also pay in mind to your environment.

i always color my background first. in fact, a lot of the time i’ll do the entire background before coloring a piece. the environment establishes your light levels and light source, and it’s typically easier for me to tweak colors on a figure than the ones in the background. in the above example with kenny, the background is a mostly solid black with a beam of light from the left. i picked kenny’s colors to fit in this environment. 

it’s also important to use references.  

you can see in this wip i’ve got a reference image for how light from a TV looks against figures and the way their shadows are cast across the wall. it also helped me figure out what colors to use in this situation.

a lot of coloring is just trial and error to see what works. i usually start with a flat base color and add value to it. if you put all your colors on different layers it’s really easy to change them quickly. 

here’s an example:

i got my base colors down and here i can see the skin tone is blending with the background, so i lightened it up for better contrast

i typically shade the skin first, then clothes. you can see here i did a dull skin tone with a bright colored shadow. this adds more contrast and interest. i always try to avoid doing dull shadows where you shift toward black. black shadows are really uninteresting and they can make your piece look muddy. i’ll typically shade with an orange, red, blue, or purple.

the final piece has a really bright highlight on it coming from behind. this just adds more visual interest and contrast. you can also see i’ve gone back into the pink shadows and added an even lighter, brighter peach value in places to show reflected light. this also gives the darker pink shadow an added outline effect, because it touches the base skin tone but looks lighter within. 

^ this one’s a good example of light and shadow (full image on my NSFW twitter lmao). there’s not a lot of color because it’s dark out, so everything had to be conveyed in values. there’s hard light across the stomach and then a shadow over the chest, but there’s still light being reflected up into stan’s face that lets us make him out. the rest is deep shadow and unimportant, so it’s all black.

that’s the other part, color and value determine where your eye is gonna look, so consider that when drawing. 

^ consider this piece i drew like a year ago. it has a lot of blues and reds, and originally i was going to make stan’s guitar blue. i don’t have the wips anymore, but it didn’t stand out and it didn’t look right with the image. after a lot of playing around i went with yellow because it’s bright, it breaks up the image, and it adds another color to the piece to balance it out.

the same thing happened when i was working on the cover image for What They Say About Us. 

you can see in this really early wip that i’d blocked in the colors and butters is totally naked. for one, i was like “damn that kid is WAY too naked in this image” and he also blended in with stan and cartman. additionally, there was a lot of warm colors on the left, a lack of color on the right, and an overall lack of blue.

first change i made was throwing a shirt on him and it made a huge improvement. the image looks much more balanced now and he’s not super distracting with his naked-ness.

other than that, coloring is just picking your base colors, blocking in shadows, adding highlight, and cleaning it up. if you wanna improve, look at photo references. look at other people’s art and examine how they use color and value. practice practice practice. have fun with it. the most fun i have coloring comes from figuring out interesting textures like the pharaoh headdress or kenny’s leather jacket. 

i find stock photos like this and study them to see how the light works

other than that, the rest is just playing around, seeing what works, and making things up as i go!

[fromthedeskpile]

From The Desk Pile #9 - Venom In Vision

From The Desk Pile intends to be a place for my more off-beat writings, allowing for people to become more aware of my work and giving this Tumblr more relevance regarding the theme.

In the city of Scanton (where everyone is bizarre in some manner), we follow Charlotte Driefer, a near-human assassin, is after the mysterious Detective Smith and seeks the help of a mystic to find him after the chase has gone cold. Her visit results in the killing of the mystic and obtaining the location of Smith. However, as she continues on her chase, she finds that her reality, her sense of normal, begins to collide with our own.

In the city of freaks, no one is peculiar. Not the homeless unhinged loner nor the billionaire celebrity mogul. For everyone has their oddities in the city of Scanton; a city whose population varies from transdimensional beings, to robots made of scrap metal, to monsters made of slime. Even those most human have certain abnormal features, for some people have eyeballs for heads, others heads for eyeballs. The closest one can find to mirror our image is those like Charlotte Driefer.

On this afternoon, Driefer was in the waiting room of Ößbuten, a famous mystic who resides in the west of the city. There, she read a book by Luke Rhinehart, glancing at the number after each page turn that was given to her by the clerk at the front. When a number was called, she would look at the others shaking in anticipation and then go back to her book, turning the next page. Despite Driefer’s mostly natural appearance and black cocktail dress invoking the standard we know, she was very much a citizen of Scanton. Her eyes, the left crimson red and the right royal blue, were piercing and uninviting. As was the revolver strapped to her leg to be drawn quickly at any sign of conflict. There was far more trouble in her being with her pincers clutching the book harder with each number and her scorpion tail looming over her like a vulture biding its time.

She was known in the underground of Scanton as someone that could take care of business. Lately though, that assumption has been challenged with the emergence of Detective Smith. Smith, who barely had any presence of humanity, evaded Driefer at every turn, leaving no trace behind that she could use. Ever so often his appearance would reappear on her monitor, and his blank visage grew a mouth that cackled at her failure. Now at this moment she sees nothing, and only a third eye could provide her the information that can allow her own eyes to rest easy and leave it all behind.

Two hours passed and then her number was called. An old lady with serpentine features directed her to the hall to Ößbuten, which extended far longer than the building could allow. Her heels echoed with each step, punctuating the eerie stillness of the institution. The hall grew darker as she ventured forward, becoming illuminated further down with a blue and violet aura surrounding the door at the end. On it was a plaque, which read in hieroglyphics:

Ößbuten is the man with the dice of the circumstances that befall all those in the universe. His soul is filled with the danger of probability. His suit is of cards, his eyes of roulettes. Do not be worried, for he is merely knowing of the world in its chaos.

“Come in, Ms. Driver,” a voice reverberated. Driefer entered, seeing the mystic in front of her. His spectral body, oozing with clouds of dark celestial matter filled the space around and inside his suit. Driefer stood there, staring at the mystic’s jellyfish-like movements. “Take a seat right over there,” he pointed to a violet chair in between of two others, spinning his eyes, analyzing Driefer.

“You’re not much of a mystic if you can’t get my name right.”

“Trust me, Ms. Driver. I may have difficulty with names, but I know of your intentions.”

“And what might they be?” she said with a bemused chuckle.

“You’re in search of a target, a detective.”

“Precisely.”

“A detective by the name of Smith, correct?”

“Of course,” she replied, comforted in Ößbuten’s ability but nervous of what he had in store. “His name is John P.I Smith. A surprisingly elusive fellow. With a name like that I expected to catch him sooner. But he’s evaded me at every turn. It’s getting to be humiliating at work.”

“I see,” Ößbuten pulled out a jar from underneath the table by surrounding it with a cloud and moving it to the top. “You are aware such requests are not cheap, Ms. Driver.”

“Believe me, I’ve done all sorts of things to afford your services,” she pinched a heavy wad of bills from her purse and tossed it onto the middle of the table. The dollar bills sunk into the table, swallowed whole. Ößbuten unscrewed the top of the jar and dimmed the lights in his room. The same auras from before now appeared behind him and a woodwind instrument began to play. The instrument became muffled by the sounds of the walls pulsating and the floor creaking, with spirits crawling out.

“I must advise you to not touch the stones which I throw. They are imbued with power that only one who mastered the mystical arts is able to handle. Their power is so great that if you touch them, they will cause a great instability not only in your being, but in mine as well.” Driefer nodded, putting her pincers on her lap.

He began to chant as part of his spiritual ritual and the auras grew brighter as they mixed together. Out of the jar came a fistful of dice, insofar as a celestial being has hands. The hums of his voice made Driefer dizzy as he rose the dice into the air and had them float there for a while with the spirits taking charge of them. His eyes spun clockwise and then counter at ridiculous speeds. She held her breath as the woodwind instrument formed strings, the walls closed in, the floors cracked and his chants enveloped the room, closing in on her. Then, with a mighty strike down, the dice fell to the table and scattered about.

Ößbuten telepathically gathered the dice and leered over them as Driefer awaited his observation. She couldn’t help but notice the variety in the dice, ranging from their colors, to their materials, to the symbols engraved on them and the amount of sides each had. With every die that he observed, he moved it back into the jar, and acknowledged the result grimly. Meanwhile, Driefer tapped her pincer each time, knowing that each second that went by gave Smith more chance to disappear completely. When he dropped the last one in, Driefer leaned in as his eyes stopped spinning, remaining hauntingly static.

“I’m afraid I can not help you.”

“Why not?! You clearly saw something in those results, didn’t you?”

“That is true. But nonetheless, I can not help you. It would not be of any benefit.”

“Are you serious?”

“Ms. Driver, I would not say something so dire without good reason.”

“Well, I don’t know,” she reached for her gun, “maybe you have a dark sense of humor.”

“A mystic has no time for humor. They also don’t have time to be assaulted.”

“Well, I guess I’ll have to waste your time like you wasted mine,” she slyly remarked as she drew her gun and pointed it between Ößbuten’s eyes. With his psychic force, he snatched the weapon away and slammed against the wall. He directed his force towards her, but his reflexes weren’t fast enough from preventing her grabbing the jar and reaching in. The magical energy from the dice rattled the jar and shook the room with its might. In all her fury, Driefer threw a couple at Ößbuten’s eyes, with the power knocking her back into her chair. The dice broke his eyes, having his suit of cards fall apart and his celestial matter dissipate into the room. Driefer took a deep breath after what had happened.

With that inhale, a strand of Ößbuten’s matter entered her body and she immediately ran from the mystic’s room, now aware of where her target resided.

**

At the Grand Scanton Hotel, she sat at the bar, ordering cocktail after cocktail. She thought about her deed, about Ößbuten’s warning, how him and Detective Smith were connected. Everyday, Smith contradicted himself, as she previously assumed that he was a man of logic. Yet what logic would lead her to the mystic? She figured that following logic would lead him there, but clearly logic is but a word with no concrete meaning in this chase. Now she could hear the cackles of Ößbuten, whose laughter was drowned out by an ominous hum.

That was what was most irritating about it all. The tedium of her pursuit. Smith was a blank slate with no real drive. His investigations do nothing but create trouble in Scanton, particularly the underground. Reality was constantly changing with him and he seems to have no response to such chaos. It was that empty profile of his made him so dangerous. It was what infuriated Driefer the most, since her other associates couldn’t stop to remind her of him and what he had done.

After her fifth drink, she saw him through the corner of her eye, walking out of the bar after talking to a slime monster. She wondered how she hadn’t spot him before, but quickly went to follow him. Without hesitation, she paid her tab and shadowed Smith. Smith turned around and was unable to see Driefer. His lack of sight didn’t stop him from investigating further as he closed in on her hiding spot. She maintained her silence, which turned him away towards the elevators.

Smith entered an elevator, pressing the close button rapidly. She saw that it stopped at the fourth floor and rushed upstairs. With luck she was able to see Detective Smith going into his room. She walked silently towards it, pulling out the gun from underneath her dress and adding the silencer she kept in her purse. The hall was empty – it was perfect.

Getting closer to his door, her head started to feel light. Her vision was out of sync, a VHS tape with off tracking. Static fuzz formed in the corner of her eyes. An array of colors flashed frantically in front of her. Her balance deteriorated, but her energy did not. She got closer and closer to the door, struggling harder with each step. She saw the number on his door, 404. The door was open and she went in, aiming her gun at the window and an empty bed. She tried to turn to the bathroom, but by then her vision was out of control, blinding in its confusion. She ended up turning to the other side and tripping over a suitcase, later landing on the bed where darkness took over her sight.

There in the darkness, she found herself chasing the detective. The detective who continued to burden her career. The detective who was so completely void of anything yet was the most persistent thing on her mind. The detective that made her feel as empty as he was. She wanted to rid herself of this detective who poisoned her sight every chance he could get and never seemed to go away no matter how much she chased.

She awoke with the sun piercing through her eyelids. The night’s events took their toll with her vision blurry and a massive headache lingering. Going to the bathroom sink, she washed up and looked at the mirror. Horror struck her as her eyes were now green, her pincers now hands, her tail now gone and her cocktail dress and heels now a white tank top, brown shorts and green sandals. She burst out of the room, aghast at how weird everything was. What was normal to us became abominations to her and they stared at her. To her, it meant death, but to them, it was just crazy. She couldn’t let this nightmarish reality distract her from finding Smith, so she headed down the stairs in search of the receptionist.

The receptionist was talking on the phone to a friend of his, telling him to be safe when visiting the west city. Charlotte came around as soon as he cautioned him, and was startled by the red diamond pin on his lapel. He hung up and then addressed the fraught Charlotte. “Hello, welcome to the Grand Scanton Hotel. How may I help you?”

“Yeah, hi…I have a question to ask…”

“I’m sure you do, ma’am!” he chirped.

“Heh, uh…you see I was wondering if you’ve seen my...uh…husband, John. He was the one who booked our room.”

“What room are you?”

“Room 404.”

“Alright, I’ll check,” the receptionist began typing on his computer to look at some information. The sound of the keys began reminding Charlotte of the mystic’s chants and she began to feel restless as the receptionist dragged out his research. “Hmm…this is odd. Says here that you were the one who booked the room. There’s no record of a John there.”

“You’re joking, right?”

“Seems like the only one who’s joking is you!” he laughed. She reached for her gun out of reflex, wishing that it was there. Swallowing her anger, she maintained her act.

“That bastard! He just ran off on me.”

“Oh, what a shame. If I were you, I’d drop him.”

“I’d love to, but I’ve got to keep my eye on him.”

“Well it seems like you’re not doing a good job of that.”

“I’m aware of that, thank you.”

“I’m not sure you are. You seem out of it. Maybe you should just let it go.”

“Let it go?”, she cocked an eyebrow.

“Yeah,” the receptionist said smarmily, “Just let it go.”

“…Is there anything else for me?”

“Yes. There’s a package here for you,” he went to a shelf behind him and pulled out a tiny box from the 404 slot. He handed it over to her and then left to the backroom with a half-smile and a chuckle. She opened the box and found a small cube inside. In place of numbers were colored circles, red and blue. On one side there was the logo of the Scanton Art Gallery. It was hard to tell if it was taunting her or just helping, but it certainly felt more like the former.

**    

Over in the east of Scanton, Charlotte wandered around the art gallery feigning interest in the postmodernist works. A part of her had adjusted to the abnormally normal world she was now in, finding solace in no longer seeing Detective Smith. Things looked clearer and calmer. However, her anger towards Smith was still aggressively pulsating in her mind, motivating every step she took. She wanted to return to her normally abnormal reality with his death assured. She couldn’t stand to be looked as deranged. Derangement was something that was so foreign a concept in her Scanton. Even those unhinged were not deranged. There were seen as sane, and treated as such too. Being in this Scanton just didn’t reflect that.

Minutes passed on and she had already looked over most of the exhibits. There were two remaining, and she found that one of them was under construction, which left the one that was farthest away from her. As she walked towards the exhibit, she could feel her head going limp again, her vision poisoned once more by the interference of static and colors switching rapidly. She fought harder against its warping, refusing to let it weaken her. Its intensity grew, with the images spinning like a loose film reel. She marched on, entering back to the familiar reality of hers which returned her scorpion features and let her feel the weight of the gun pressing against her leg once more.

She rushed to the exhibit’s entrance and saw Smith at the far end. As fast as she could, she went after him, witnessing his vacant face passing through the wall with his body fading into it. The wall was solid when she attempted to do the same – her head now bruised by the force of her desperation to catch him. As she recovered, she looked at a short junkyard android standing right next to the wall, trying to hide its snickering by turning its volume knob lower.

“Hey, you!”

“Yes?”

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

“Do you know how he walked through that wall?”

“Nah. I wouldn’t know anything about it.”

“Sure you don’t,” she said suspiciously, walking towards the android who looked at her with a dirty smile.

“Listen, lady, I know nothing about how that guy did that. Far as I’m concerned, it’s just part of the exhibit.”

“You’re such a filthy liar, it’s deplorable,” Driefer sneered, stiffening her tail and pointing the stinger directly at it. “Now, I’m going to ask you again…how did he walk through the wall?”

“Lady, I don’t know how he walked through the wall,” its voice shook. The stinger reached closer to it, quickly scraping its chest. “I swear to Gott-I mean God!”

“Ohohoho, now you’re really just trying to get on my nerves,” she went to pull out her gun and aimed it at the android. Her vision broke once again and she shook her head as it toyed with her mind. A wave of different images (some not even relevant to the place she was in) were spliced together into a collage that could very well hang in this gallery. It brought her away from the android, making her pace backwards. She broke free from its chaos and aimed her gun at the android only to find instead a hand pointing an invisible firearm at a trash can, and others witnessing her crazy.

Her reality was absent once again, with our reality imposing on her and Scanton. The faces of passersby creeped her out as she couldn’t bear to see her green eyes reflecting on the window, drowning in emotion. She forcefully sat down on the bench, covering her quivering expression.

All that could pass through her mind was how Smith slipped away yet again. If her perceptional abilities were damaged or the world was changing irrationally then so be it. What was more haunting was knowing that she couldn’t capture this so-called detective, this white space of a being.

She revealed her face once more and sighed, seeing the painting in front of her. It was by William Shayer. There, a group of Victorian men were staring tentatively at three cubes that were on the table, thrown by one of them. The cubes shared a striking resemblance to the stones that the mystic had used. It was those stones that had brought her here. More specifically, it was a stone. And if this stone and the stones before had led her down this path, then surely the stones in front of her would lead somewhere else. Her sadness channeled to rage and determination as she went to see the name of the exhibit, which was on a sign at the end of the hall. There, in bold lettering read SPONSORED BY SCANTON FINANCIAL.

**

It took her a while to find the office of Scanton Financial, with her search taking hour upon hour. She missed the accessibility of her reality, how she didn’t have to be so frantic in locating places. All of this felt so tedious. Eventually it led her to the west of the city where the tower eclipsed the sun with its might. It was said to have the tallest floors of any building. What purpose that served didn’t matter to her. She knew there was no way to escape this time.

She began to open the doors, but her vision problems came again, aggressively striking her. They snapped her back to her reality, whereupon the building was filled with creatures of all sorts and sizes menacingly looming over her. Detective Smith was at the far end of the building, his gaze still as vacant as ever. Driefer lunged forward but the others pushed back on her, trying to cloud her. She didn’t take their abuse and used her scorpion features to get them away so she could get to Smith. Charlotte however found herself fighting the air, unable to see where John went. She had not seen the threats that she had seen before. Though Driefer would come back and encounter the monsters and the abstract characters that kept getting in her way.

Her vision grew worse in its distortion, and Smith furthered away. Driefer drew her gun and fired in the air to disperse the crowd that blocked her. The shots seemed to have worked in her favor as Charlotte saw that they disappeared from her sight. She got closer to Smith, who had now gone up the elevator. She didn’t need to wait to see where the elevator would go. She went in the other one, having successfully passed through the turmoil of the first floor.

The elevator slowly rose up each floor, getting closer to her destination and her target. In the faint distance, she could hear Kay Starr crooning about fortune and fame from a radio above. Charlotte couldn’t maintain her composure, and neither could Driefer. Each ding from the elevator exacerbated the madness of her sight. “Just get to the floor already,” she growled on the 3rd floor. It seemed there that it took far longer than necessary to get to the fourth.

With no time to waste, Driefer immediately burst through when the doors gave her enough space. Charlotte looked around to find room 404 but instead was succumbing further to the glitches and the static and the collage and the chaos. The music became muffled as Driefer shouted madly. The echoes slammed back at Charlotte and magnified the distortion even further. Driefer fired frantically, eventually running out of bullets. Everything was collapsing in front of Charlotte, yet she remained stable miraculously. Driefer tried as hard as she could to see past the visual noise and decipher the numbers on the doors that were around her. Finally, there it was. Room 404. The mess in Charlotte’s eyes were at a fever pitch, the music was now the only thing she could hear. With a loud scream, Driefer charged at the door and broke it down, collapsing on the floor.

Her vision returned and Smith was nowhere to be seen. She got up, now bruised and bloody from her attempt. He had evaded her once again. And in that evasion she could no longer muster the hate that she had for Smith. She cared no more that this man treated her like a top. That this man persistently appeared in the corner of her eye, eroding any joy she had left. Oh, she would have loved to see him squirm for all the venom that he pumped into her. But it was clear that the mystic was right. And she was tired.

Everything was hurting, not only physically but mentally. The building was empty, not a soul present. She must’ve imagined all that transpired. How else could she explain the detective, the mystic or anything really to anyone. It all seemed so odd. It was all over now, she was completely out of it and no longer felt it necessary to return to the underground. She felt that no one would accept her now in this Scanton. Not after all she’s done. All Charlotte Driefer could do was grab a cigarette from the desk and light it with a match she held in her pincers. Her crimson iris blended in with the broken vessels of her eyeball. Her tail now broken and limp, rested on the desk. Perhaps all of this now made her peculiar. But maybe it didn’t. For in the city of freaks, no one is peculiar.