#like. it's easier to show movement and emotion for me when it's messy? idk

[milf-harrington]

mcr, the witcher, and that specific style of art where it's clearly like a 20 minute doodle for the artist but it still manages to somehow be really good and full of life, y'know, like burdge

an amazing list honestly, i'm delighed - also i was literally just thinking about that last night, that my art style mostly boils down to "quickly outlined sketch with maybe some colour" and that sometimes if we're really lucky, i will manage to produce a clean + coloured drawing jfsjkf

[lethendralis-paints]

Artist Meme

Was tagged to answer this set of interesting questions by @kourvo​

(original post is here: https://kourvo.tumblr.com/post/621355098110640128/artist-meme

Thank you so much for that!

Let’s see....

1) What is the character you've drawn the most (Can be original or fanart)

This precious boy. I can never get enough of him. One of the most compelling characters I have ever come across. Love everything about Fenris and can relate to him on so many levels!

2. What colour do you often use? 

Gray and brown are my faves. And all other colours have the same chance of appearing in my artwork :D

3. Any colour you are bad at using?

I don’t think so...I love them all, even the pinks and yellows people usually find hard to incorporate into a colour palette. Tell me in the comments if I’m wrong :)

4. When drawing people, where do you start? 

Funnily enough - either with the front of the hairline or with the left eyebrow. Don’t ask me, why - I don’t know myself.

5. What is a character only your eraser will love?

Hmmmm...any sort of villainous character. I can’t draw evil people convincingly. I’m a huge softy at heart.

6. Which of your works took the longest time? 

Big scale commission I did for @pikapeppa​, featuring all the Inquisition companions, along with Fenris, Rynne and Carver Hawke. That one took almost 3 weeks, due to its sheer scope and my relative lack of experience in such large works. Pika was extremely patient with me though, for that I am eternally thankful!

7. What techniques do you use when you want to improve in drawing? 

Classical art studies. Varying my technique, themes I choose and software I use. I try to experiment and go outside my comfort zone often.

8. What do you think of the art of the person who gave you this ask meme? 

I adore Lillymon’s technical skill, refined style and limited colours! She is a huge inspiration for me!

9. What art tools/media are you good with? 

DrawPile, Photoshop, graphite pencils and liners. That’s about it :)

10. Art tools/media you are bad at? 

Traditional paints. I have no formal artistic education and my lack of knowledge comes to the forefront whenever I have to paint on a real canvas. It’s so much trial and error, you can’t even imagine....

11. What do you think about your own art? 

Lately it’s one of the last few things that were bringing me joy. I hope I won’t lose the passion for it. Because at this point I’m not sure I’ll be able to find some occupation I will be genuinely interested in and good at it. I don’t know if me gravitating towards moody fantasy art speaks about my fear of facing reality. If so, idk what to do with that. I do hope to develop my skills and being able to support myself financially as an artist.

12. Do you consult references for your drawings? 

Yes. A lot of them. Anatomical atlases, schemes for both academic and manga art, photographs found online and taken on my own, copying colour palettes from classical art - anything goes. I think it’s essential to develop your technical skill.

13. What do you like about your art? 

Lately - consistency, both in terms of produced results and in sticking to the timelines I set to myself. I hope this lasts. I would also like to branch out to other themes and not confine myself to quirky fantasy characters, so I’m working on developing my own story behind the scenes (spoilers) :P

14. What habits do you have while drawing?

Only the bad ones, lol. Hunching forward in front of the screen, forgetting to eat, drink and letting my eyes rest. Tilting my head to the side instead of rotating the canvas....I’m an idiot XD

15. Are you good at drawing faces facing right? 

I think that’s the thing I’m good at!

16. How frequently do you draw? 

For the last 1,5 years - almost every day without fail, for good or ill.

17. What do you do when you have artist's block? 

Change occupation and work myself into a depressed state. I changed work places in the last few years a lot, working as an interior designer, draftsman, textile designer, a cook, a bartender to name a few.

18. What must you have when you draw? 

No commotion around me and a cup of some hot beverage.

19. Do you have a lot of stray lines (messy lineart)? 

In the starting stage of my work process - yes, like you wouldn’t believe! If it’s a personal doodle, I sometimes just leave in as am under layer and draw clean lines on top of that mess. It looks cool in a way.

20. What is drawing to you?

An essential part of what helped me to retain my sanity in the last year and a half. Hopefully a lasting profession that will help me pay bills and survive on my own, if my life falls apart entirely later.

21. Your art goal from now on? 

Broaden the themes I depict, improve my technical skill, work on personal creative project and not only fan arts. And most of all - not giving up on it this time.

22. Artists you've had influence from? 

To name a few: @kallielef​ @kourvo​ @shayafury​ @fairsparrow​ who I met here on Tumblr, and many others who I follow and zealously study their works for clues on how to improve my own work.

23. Artists you like? 

I am following them all either here or on Instagram, I also do my best to share their works on my side blog!

24. Which is easier to draw, humans or animals? 

It was animals earlier. But now that I started to diligently study human anatomy, I would say it evened out! I’m quite confident drawing humans/humanoids now!

25. Show us an old drawing 

My first digital drawing from 2010 when I first bought my tablet!

26. What is the charm-point of your art?

I ummm....I don’t really get the question? Is that like the the strongest suit of me as an artist? Intense expressions maybe? Idk. Let me know in the comments :D

27. What is the first thing you would draw if we're talking about fantasy? 

Broody warriors, he-he

28. Please draw your most beloved character:

Here’s a sneak-peek of me drawing him right now! :D

29. When thinking of characters is it mostly female? male? or androgynous/no sex? 

I usually gravitate towards depicting strong-willed, caring, passionate, brave, honest men and women.

30. What did you draw yesterday? 

Started cleaning up that sketch from the last question, actually!

31. What is the funnest part to draw? 

A circle. Mostly because you’d die laughing seeing my struggle to draw a believable one XD

32. What part of other people's drawings do you notice first? 

colours, mood, eyes, hands.

33. Regarding backgrounds, what is your method of making it easier to draw? 

pick your favourite textured brush, find a good reference for mood and colour scheme, zoom out, squint your eyes and start slapping colours like mad. You’d be amazed at how much you’ll be able to achieve in 30 minutes with this approach. Bare white background is the enemy - destroy it! >:)

34. What colour coordinations do you like? 

Gray or brown as a main colour and then deep, earthy, saturated colours to complement the main one. Pink and orange is the combination I strangely enjoy using lately too.

35. What character did you last draw? Fenris and Eris :)

36. Does your style change easily? 

I don’t think so. More like it’s evolving slowly into something more serious and deliberate.

37. What part of drawing do you pay most attention to? 

Facial expression, body movement, mood and light effects. Not so much the composition and framing, he he.

38. How do you feel about drawing adult art? 

Tbh, I don’t consider straight up porn to be ‘adult’ exactly. To me adult art means aiming towards serious topics, exploring complex emotions and ideas, being honest with your viewer. I did doodle a few more steamy sketches of my OTP just to see if I could, but it was definitely a tongue-in-cheek kind of a artwork that I don’t take seriously.

39. Do you like criticism from others? 

If it’s friendly and in done in private - I welcome it always.

40. How many people do you normally draw per artwork? 

1 or 2. Rarely more. Crowded battle scenes are definitely not my thing :D

This was fun! Tagging forward to @shayafury​ @schoute​ @stella-minerva​ @nug-juggler​ @kallielef​ and anyone else wishing to go through such a long questionnaire!

[illfoandillfie]

hey actual queen of roger taylor smut, can i ask for some advice ? i’m trying to write something and i just can not get it sounding how i want. can’t get it past that kind of awkward, cliche phase if you know what i mean. do you have any tips for smut writing or anything you do yourself ? would be very much appreciated :)) xx

ksjgdhjs well idk if i deserve that title but I’ll try and help! 

so when i write, the first draft is just about getting the basic ideas down. I have an outline of the main things I want to happen and I follow that and try to fill in the blanks/inbetween parts. This means the first draft is often littered with cliches and poor word choice because I’m more focused on making sure I know where everyone’s hands are and that if they start in position A they can get to position B in a way that makes sense. If I can’t think of anything better than “their tongues battled for dominance.” then I put it down and move along.

when I go back to edit I try to fix that sort of stuff. Cliches can be good, and you don’t have to get rid of all of them, but you don’t want there to be too many of them too close together either, and the trick is knowing which is the good kind and which is the bad kind. I wish I had some of my drafts so I could take some screencaps for examples but I write in word online so it gets saved over when I make a change, I’ll try and pull some stuff from memory though. 

So, theres this bit in I’ll Make It Up To You

I’m pretty sure this was a ‘tongues battle for dominance’ bad cliche moment in draft 1. I knew I wanted a kiss in there but I didn’t know how to describe it so I used the cliche. When I came back to it once I’d finished writing I had a better understanding of the characters and their emotions and also just a better idea of how to write than when I’d started. I realised I needed this kiss to demonstrate how much the two characters had missed each other so I tried to focus on that. It was easy with the reader character cause I could just flat out say “god you’d missed this” and it works but I wasn’t writing Roger’s POV so I had to try and get it across through describing his movements and expressions and stuff that reader would be able to see and feel - “pulling you as close to him as you could possibly get.” 

I think I also tried to describe the kiss in more detail when I was editing - I definitely remember trying to work in something about teeth clashing or something like that. I was really trying to make it obvious how much they missed/needed each other but it ended up sounding just as bad and cliched as what I originally had. So I simplified it, cut out excess description and just said it was messy and needy and figured whoever was reading it would know what I meant, or at least be able to picture what they see as a messy and needy kiss. Sometimes you have to trust that your audience can picture something without you giving a beat by beat description.

Then theres this from QITL 2

Taken on its own, out of the context of the rest of the story, thats a fairly standard line. It could have come from any number of smut fics and could easily be described as somewhat cliche. But its a different type of cliche to the ‘tongues battling’ one above. Plus, when it’s in the context of the rest of the fic it’s not as noticeable. 

I find that a lot of smut writing (or just writing in general i guess) is just about balance. It’s walking a thin line between too much and not enough. To much description gets in the way of the story and the characters. Not enough leaves your audience confused. Cliched language can be good, especially if you havent experienced what you’re writing about so don’t know exactly how it’d feel, you can use cliches like ‘gasping for air’ and ‘back arching off the bed’ and ‘hard enough to bruise’ because you’re audience will understand what you’re saying with them. But cliches like ‘tongues battling’ and describing his ‘blue orbs’ should probably be reworded because they’re so ubiquitous now that it pulls your audience out of the rhythm of story. 

It’s something you get better at the more you write, but heres a couple of things I do when I’m trying to fix awkward phrasing:

1. Edit multiple times - something might hit you as particularly clumsy or awkward on your second or third read through that you completely missed on your first. But likewise, if you read over something a few times the way to fix it becomes clearer

2. Look at the sentences around the one your trying to fix - sometimes the problem isn’t so much with the one sentence you’ve noticed. sometimes its the way the previous sentence leads into it. or the way the next sentence starts. sometimes its some clumsy dialogue from earlier in the paragraph thats throwing the whole thing off.

3. Think about what your characters want and what they feel and try to get that across in your word choice. If Character A feels touch starved and needy choose words that emphasise those feelings - mention how their fingers twitch at the thought of touching Character B, things like that. If Character A is eager to please, use words like enthusiastically or without hesitation. Mix emotive phrases in with the standard smut phrases - they balance each other out and make cliched language appear less cliched.

4. Take a break! Sometimes you just look at something for too long and everything starts sounding bad! I always try to take a break in between finishing my first draft and starting to edit. Do something away from your writing, make a cup of tea or watch an episode of a tv show or read a chapter of a book or put on a load of laundry, anything that will make your mind focus on something else. Then you can come back with fresh eyes and properly evaluate what you’ve written. 

5. Read things out loud. It’s not always easy to do, especially if you live with other people and you don’t want them to know what you’re writing, but it does help. Even just whispering it to yourself. It forces you to pay attention to what you’ve written which makes it easier to pick up on mistakes you’ve made (both grammatical and things like how your characters are positioned), and also pick up on clumsy/awkward/bad word choice. It’s the thing I do most when something feels off  but I can’t work out what, it helps narrow down where the issues lie which makes them easier to fix.

This got longer than I meant it to be so hopefully something in here helps you! Let me know if you have any other questions or want more details about something I mentioned in here!!

[minycrdjcsten-blog]

i’m posting it now because i’ve no self control! this is some soft renison greek mythology au for @the-ocean-burned for the tfcfemslash exchange, i hope you enjoy it! this goes with a playlist too because i love renison too much? i loved writing this so much idk idk im excited.

AO3 link

Renee hadn’t always been alone. In fact, at the beginning she had a family. It was a touchy subject still but she was a goddess, she had her own lands, but that wasn’t enough. She was lonely and Renee was too kind of a soul to be so alone in such a dark world. She was the queen of the Underworld, a kind one who made sure every soul got to where they belonged. She guided the lost children and the heroes but that wasn’t enough for her.

Sometimes she’d sit next to Charon waiting for yet more souls to arrive but it got too repetitive.

She couldn’t stand there waiting forever. They’d promised her the Underworld wouldn’t be like this and she’d trusted them. She always trusted everyone and maybe that’d been her mistake, maybe that was why she felt so lost despite knowing she could claim a wife whenever she wanted, except she wasn’t the other gods. She despised how messy it all was up there, how they got distracted by humans and constantly betrayed each other because of Eros’ influences. It was stupid.

Renee, Hades, wanted to fall in love even though every single soul she encountered kept telling her death would never truly be able to feel as humans did.

She’d never really payed that much attention to humans, after all she knew what each of them had done and where they deserved to go after their death, whether that was Tartaros, the Asphodel Meadows, the Mourning Fields or Elysium itself. She’d never liked having to face heroes nor the kind of people who got a place in the Isles, they reminded her how far away she was from the ones who were supposed to be her people, though they’d never felt like they were truly connected.

Olympians were very different from her, not only because of who they were, but because of which side of humanity and creation they chose to see. Renee had to see the worst of it, she had to judge them and see how the Olympians themselves had made those souls lose their paths. She wasn’t fond of dragging souls to Tartaros but sometimes she just had to let go of her hopes and emotions because she wasn’t there to take care of them, she was there to condemn them.

She wasn’t like the rest of them, cold and ambitious. She was gentle and kind, much like the only Olympian who caught her attention.

Allison was the goddess of spring growth and like every flower she made grow she was breathtakingly beautiful. There was something ethereal about her movements that no other goddess had. But she gave life, and Renee took it.

Renee’d look at her from afar, waiting for her to say something. Allison knew she was being observed, but she was never bothered by the attention. Allison, incredibly fond of beauty and life felt conflicted and confused by her reaction to Renee, though. Perhaps it was because she only knew half the story and everyone said she was too sombre of a goddess to let herself even reach for someone who wasn’t Charon or the dead, but Allison didn’t see the shadows on her face everyone else saw. She saw beauty.

Seeing beauty in death was something Renee wasn’t used to. She despised touching corpses and seeing decaying flesh, but she’d never thought of how nature died the same way people did. Allison had to see all her work undone every autumn. Flowers wilting and leaves falling made it impossible for Renee to see her often. She kept to herself during the cold months and Renee kept herself locked in her land, waiting until spring time came.

Right before Anthesphoria Renee decided she'd be the brave goddess she'd always been even in a land that wasn't hers. She’d leave the Underworld and prepare something for Allison even if it meant being out in the cold. At least during the winter there weren’t many people outside and no one acted like seeing her was horrifying. She was the goddess of death and people were often shocked because of how alive she looked. Perhaps it was the soft blush on her cheeks, or her red lips. Maybe it was the way the soft and flowy fabric clung to her body. She was supposed to be a spirit, all horror and destruction and destruction she was, but she wasn’t fond of the dark appearance, she left that to Charon.

The absence of vegetation made it that much easier to make her gift clear. Much like her siblings she could create, but she wasn’t particularly interested in making the mess in Zeus’ land was even worse.

Allison wasn’t there to see the narcissus flower grow or bloom, but it was clear it was a gift from the goddess who’d been shyly waiting for her to speak up for months. They didn’t need words, Allison didn’t need to say yes because as soon as she pulled the flower from the earth she heard Renee’s breathing hitch behind her.

“There’s no need to hide” She said, tangling the stem of the narcissus in her blond curls. She turned around to look at Renee, her colourless hair made it obvious she didn’t belong there in comparison to Allison's appearance.

“I’m not hiding, I’m letting you decide” She responded, voice low and almost shy.

“I made my decision” Allison affirmed, getting closer to Renee, “Will you let me?” She asked next, reaching for Renee’s hair to tuck a strand behind her ear. Renee nodded before she did so. As soon as she touched her hair the strand turned a light pink under the tips of her fingers and Renee let out a shaky breath.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to”

“It’s okay, it felt good” Renee answered and bit her lower lip. Right then and there she realised she needed Allison’s touch. She made her feel warm, something she’d never felt as the goddess of death. She was surrounded by putrefaction and cold and darkness but Allison was life herself, she was the warmth of the sun in spring, she was the smell of flowers and the colours of all of them running through her veins and giving Renee a taste.

It was intoxicating.

“It’s almost spring time” She added, looking down at her feet, “Will you let me show you my land before we part?”

Allison nodded and smiled softly. It wasn’t that Renee was scared, she was the goddess of death, for fuck’s sake, people were terrified of her, but Allison’s brightness was making her feel so soft inside it was overwhelming. She didn’t expect to make Allison feel the same though, but when Allison took her cold hand in hers on their way to the Underworld in her chariot, she felt like she was finally having the chance to give something meaningful back.

“I can’t stay all year long, I have a job to do” Allison whispered, playing with Renee’s fingers.

“When you’re in my land you shall be the mistress of everything which lives and moves. We’ll be equal rulers” Renee whispered back, her head resting on Allison’s shoulder. She felt so warm.

“I’ll be back, I promise”

“You can have my chariot”

“I know”

Allison accepted the pomegranate seeds and thus became queen of the Underworld, wife to the goddess of death and bringer of death. It was astonishing for Renee to see how different things were with Allison around, probably because she enjoyed doing the dirty work. She was soft with her, always peppering her face with kisses and colouring random strands of her hair with delicate touches, laughing in the dark of the Underworld and making flowers grow specially for Renee to keep. But as death she was fearsome.

Renee knew they had to be separated again so she enjoyed every moment they got together. It was hard because time meant nothing for them, but when she was alone it seemed as if Charon's words meant nothing and her throne was even colder and darker. She wasn't supposed to leave or interrupt her wife's work but she liked making a narcissus grow the first day of spring to make her smile.

And then Allison came back.

"Will you take the seeds?" Renee asked like every time she came back. Allison was sitting on her lap, running her fingers through her hair and pressing her warm cheek to her collarbone.

"They think flowers wilt and everything dies because I'm here and I've forgotten them. It's not like that. It all dies because I'm your half, because you gave that to me and I accepted it. It dies not because I'm not there to keep it alive, it dies because I make it die and choose to grow our own garden here every year" She said, her lips grazing Renee's cold skin.

Renee let her hands fall on Allison's lap. She sighed when Allison pressed the palm of her hand against her chest.

"You're my other half, you're not only death, you're so much more than that. I'll take those seeds, savour them or carry them with me next spring and make something beautiful grow from them only for you. It'll be a secret" She continued, smiling brightly at Renee's curious look.

There was something about Renee that the others didn't see. She could look soft sometimes, but the power of death never left her eyes. There was a certain strength of hers that always managed to impress Allison, not because she used it against souls, but because of how well she was able to control that and keep it buried underneath the rivers that crossed her land. Those pomegranate seeds were a promise, they were secrets and eternity. Those eyes were full of love.