Ataliya

I am a fantasy writer with an interest in learning to illustrate. This blog is part of a daily art challenge and houses a small collection of writings and artwork tracking my progress as a beginner artist.  Work from tutorials is credited in the posts.

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Reblog if you’re planning to do NaNoWriMo this year.

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Drawn in Affinity Design. 

I’ll be doing a few more of these (and hopefully getting better with each one) for different woodland animals (badger, rabbit, hedgehog, owl etc). I’d ideally like to turn them into a collection of animal prints for a baby’s nursery but I’ll probably come back to this one once I’ve learned a bit more with the others.

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Here are the color sets for the butterfly prints. The first set is in seasonal colors (going clockwise: summer, spring, winter, fall). The second is a simple set of complementing colors. 

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An experiment with vector art, created in Affinity Design. Original artwork (please don’t steal, thank you). 

I’ve been wanting to create something that might make for a nice set of wall prints and finally decided to settle on butterflies for the main design. This is the first of several variations, intended to create a set of three or four different colors. 

As a beginner artist it took me a little while to figure out how to make the colors and shades work, not to mention how to vector art in the first place, but I’m pretty happy with the result. 

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Usually I draw by hand first and then scan to a computer to touch up and add color, but lately I’ve been trying to learn to draw directly on a tablet. Its been frustrating because the feel of paper vs tablet screen is completely different and its a lot like having to learn to draw again from scratch. So I decided to start this blog and between it and my deviant art account, keep a running, daily log of my efforts. 

This was my first attempt at drawing directly to tablet and as you can see its not the greatest, but I have a six month period from now forward to work on this on a daily basis. 

The target is one drawing a day, starting with tutorials and moving on to original works once I feel comfortable with my skill. Not all will be drawn on tablet, some I’ll probably go back to traditional pen and paper for, but hopefully this personal challenge of mine will lead to some improvement in my abilities. 

My goal is to be able to illustrate my own fantasy characters, so the focus will fall mostly on anthro/furry characters, as well as dragons and other mythical beasts. 

This attempt came from a tutorial from the book Drawing Fantastic Furries by Christopher Hart.

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A collection of furry critters, hand drawn by me and colored using photoshop. All three characters were drawn using a tutorial from a book (Drawing Fantastic Furries by Christopher Hart).

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Dragon drawn by me by hand and colored in photoshop. Taken from a tutorial book (Dragonart Evolution by Jessica Peffer). 

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Drawn by hand by myself and colored in photoshop. Drawn from from a tutorial book (Dragonart Evolution by Jessica Peffer). 

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Drawn by hand by myself and colored in photoshop. Illustration comes from a tutorial book (Dragonart Evolution by Jessica Peffer). 

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Drawn by myself by hand and colored in photoshop. Taken from a tutorial book as part of my efforts to learn to draw (Dragonart Evolution by Jessica Peffer).