trungles - Tumblr blog

[trungles]

hot artists don't gatekeep

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.

Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.

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A Fish and a Bird Find a Way

Obligatory Patreon Link in case you wanna support my little doodles

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Another mermaid warmup drawing

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Left my house, spent time with a dear friend, and drew on paper on a coffee spot.

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Processing Process, and More Processing

I made this post free and publicly readable on Patreon, but I'm reposting the whole thing right here too because, well, it's a free post, and I don't want to make you click away from your dashboard if you don't need to. But also if you want to support my work, here's the link to the post.

It's a little bit about cartooning, a little bit about drawing, and then it turns into a eulogy for a chicken.

I wrote “process” more than once, and now the word looks funny and is beginning to lose its meaning to me.

This post is about a few things, and it’s a little bit on the sad end of things. Nothing dire! No worries. There’s just a little mention of death, just as a heads up.

Before we get to that, though, I’ve been doing some work and had some thoughts.

I’m often asked about how I draw the noodle hair on my characters, and the answer is typically that I draw each and every line with my hand. But there are considerations of movement and volume that go into it beyond its texturally decorative purposes. I love being able to convey shape and motion with it. It’s less evident, I think, in my illustration work, but I think it’s much more obvious when I do sequential work. In the above image, you can see me working out a sequence of Angelica having a series of thoughts. Her head sort of moves, and her eyes follow. You can see I’d planned out the general shape of the hair and how I’d like it to move.

I wound up moving the drawings a little bit so that the readers eyes will actually follow the character’s eyes as it moves gently rightward on the page. The hair is there to accentuate the movement, like so:

It’s a consideration I employ in all my drawings, but especially when I’m drawing hair and fabric. I don’t use a lot of action lines, so this becomes an important way to give the reader the information that someone is moving through a space. Resistance, gravity, and motion are all things I have to keep in the back of my head when I’m doing these little drawings. I think the planning actually takes more time than the inking, which can happen pretty quickly once I map it all out.

In other news, I’m starting to take my extracurricular artistic development a little more seriously in the silliest way possible.

You wouldn’t know it, but I studied painting college—a medium I switched to after the printmaking professor and head of the Art Department at the time told me I probably shouldn’t be an artist (he gave me a hard candy for my trouble). I recently bought a bunch of little dolls, dressed them up, and am returning to my painting roots. It feels really nice to work in big blobs of color instead of lines. It’s an exercise I came up with in response to a common lament from art students.

One of the more aggravating generational tensions described to me by art school students is when professors describe a student’s portfolio as “too anime” without much explanation. I know what the professor means. They’re trying to get at how referencing your favorite anime or cartoons means that your style becomes a simulacrum, an imperfect copy of a copy, and you never learn to develop your own sense of judgment about where a line or a shape needs to go. And we can tell. It’s a way of working that is perfectly fine for cartooning because cartooning is closer to hand-writing than it is to drawing. I always turn to Charles Schulz’s work for an example. Those figures aren’t literally depicting children—with their little chessboard-pawn proportions and bread-loaf feet—but we read them as endearing children because we’ve come to a consensus between us, the readers, and Charles Schulz, the author, that those shapes mean those things. There are no whiskers or paws in the shape of the word “CAT” but you look at those three letters together, and you know the thing to which it refers. That’s an aspect of cartooning, too. Of course, what elevates it from mere writing is, in part, due to the fact that those little figures do not lose their meaning the more you depict them.

To really draw well, though, you have to do those fundamentals. You have to draw from life. There’s no way around it. It helps you develop a stronger sense of where you like to lay down your lines and shapes, no matter how stylized you like to work. It grows your judgment, and every artist’s best tool is their own well-honed sense of artistic discernment about their own work.

But that doesn’t mean you have to surrender the stuff you like or the things that inspire you to make art! I tell students that if they want to hold fast to their anime style AND hone their fundamentals to develop their eye as an artist, they should buy little figurines and toys of their favorite characters, prop those up against a light source, and draw them as still life objects. Like, yes, do the vases and the figure drawings and all those, I still think those are important. But if this is what you need to keep you interested in drawing from life, having some toys around is a great way to do it! Also, bless those sculptors and toy designers. They’re the best.

I think there’s something to be said about remembering to imagine the physicality of the things we draw, in all its dimensions and in the way it catches the light or casts a shadow. It helps sentimentalize things, too. Makes them feel more real, even emotionally.

Edwina died on Tuesday night, after a few final snuggles, surrounded by her favorite treats. She was about five years old, which is old for a chicken, and she had a very comfortable life. We buried her this morning. She was a good hen, J’s personal favorite.

It really feels like the end of an era. She was the last surviving member of our very first flock. After the other hens died, she really seemed to prefer the company of people over other hens. She is survived by Snooki and Nelly, our two other young birds who get along quite well together, actually.

A baby chick costs between three and five American dollars, typically. An egg-laying hen could be between twenty and fifty bucks, depending on the breed. There are roughly 26 billion chickens living in the world today, about 518 million of them here in the United States. They come pretty cheap. And a part of me was moved to cynicism, entertaining the thought that it might be strange to feel sadly over a little animal that, at most, might be roughly equivalent to the price of a fancy lunch and a coffee.

I watched the 1974 musical version of The Little Prince recently, and I remember it mostly because Bob Fosse was in it and scared the crap out of me as a kid—he played the snake that would take the Little Prince back into the sky when his body gets too heavy to take with him. Gene Wilder plays the Fox whom the Little Prince befriends and tames among a garden of roses. The Fox explains that he is like any other fox in the world, but he is changed—made special and particular to the Little Prince—with time, effort, and patience. So, too, is the Prince’s little flower special to him. Out of all the flowers in the universe, she was the one he watered and protected under a little glass jar. And that’s enough.

I knew my little hen would not live that long. It could be very easy to take a broad view of the life expectancy of a hen and distance myself from it by virtue of its mortality and its commonness. People who raise livestock do it all the time. But I also think it’s wonderful that we should all be capable of loving very small, very brief little things. Edwina is not, to my mind, the rough equivalent of a fancy lunch and a coffee. She was our little hen. For her whole life, she was ours. And I’m so happy she was here.

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Good night, Edie. Our oldest hen, the last of our first flock, has passed on. She was a very sweet little bird.

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I drew more of my little dolls in their little outfits

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I have been using Ob11 dolls to kinda push my cartooning. You can read a little more about it on this free post on my Patreon. It’s been super fun and gratifying. Also I made tiny pants!

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Did you draw a Spirit World cover?

Yeah this one

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Started a new sketchbook, trying hard to keep up this habit.

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I can’t tell if I’m kidding, really.

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Every time my color artist popoalu turns in a page, I get SO amped. She’s brilliant. I am always so nervous about how full color may or may not complement my line work depending on the color artist, but she makes such thoughtful choices. I’ve loved every page.

I am so excited for people to be able to read Angelica and the Bear Prince when it comes out!

👑

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Another free Patreon post that I’m cross-posting!

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Hold on there’s more

I’m doing some little character designs for my Patreon webcomic side project, and the harpies made me laugh real good