"These city lights are the glow of fallen dreams and burn with the life of man's last hopes. Let's take these hopes and set fire to the sky; watch it burn while we make love under the stars. Gravity only holds on to your body, don't let it tear down..."
In lieu of some of the stuff happening on youtube, I wanted to revisit some of Emily Artful's videos and I kept getting recommended this video and it reminded me of some of my own thoughts on art.
I believe this video influenced my thoughts on art a lot but before I saw it, I usually told new artists asking for advice that they need to think of 3 Ps: Patience, Practice, Perseverance. I added Pride to it after this video. Later I added Play later due to letting myself just play and enjoy art supplies instead of fearing wasting them on things.
So, I wanna break down each one of those. Putting it under a read more so that you don't have a super long post to scroll past.
Practice
It's not a dirty word. Art is a skill, you need to practice skills. You practiced tying your shoes or brushing your teeth. You practiced your writing and reading. So why is practice for art such a dirty word?
You need to practice to build your skill. Sometimes that can be tedious and boring, but it's worth it.
Play
When practice gets overwhelming, play. Makeup challenges for yourself. Or do play dates with your friends where you draw together and chat. Break the idea that your supplies only need to be used for perfect, finished pieces.
There no way you'll make a polished finished piece if you don't learn your supplies. So play with them. Don't let them be precious. I got some Holbein watercolors for my birthday last year and for a little bit, I was super precious with them because they are professional grade paints. And theeeen. I stopped caring. I wanted to paint with them, so I painted with them.
Playing with them has been bliss. I love them so much. I have tubes to refill the little 1/4 pans and I am just so happy. Playing with my art brings me joy and I know that it will help me build my skill.
Patience and Perseverance
These two go hand-in-hand together. With any skill you're learning, you need to be patient with it. You will not immediately be amazing at it. Be patient with your learning and yourself, you'll get there eventually. Everyone learns at a different pace and in different ways, don't measure yourself by anyone else's yardstick.
Also, you have to keep at it. You need to persevere through the ugly stages to get anywhere. Getting frustrated and quitting is the only true failure. It's okay to fail at something as long as you keep trying. Don't be a quitter. Persevere and be patient with yourself.
Pride
The last one is pride. This isn't me telling you to be like "I am the best artist ever!!" but more like "I have grown so much and I'm proud of myself."
Pride can be good for you. You are allowed to be proud of your accomplishments. You are growing every time you do new art.
This also can help when you're feeling frustrated with your art or having an art block. Instead of talking down to yourself try saying things like "I have come so far since..."
You can be proud of yourself. You have grown, you will continue to grow, and you can be proud of that.
Having pride in your art can help counteract those negative thoughts that you may have. "I'm not good enough" "I am XX and someone younger is so much better!!" So on, so forth.
You are learning at your own pace. Own that. Be proud of that. Celebrate your accomplishments. You got this. I am proud of you. You can be proud of yourself.
Anyway, that's my thoughts on that. I try to approach my relationship with art with these five Ps in mind. More so play lately because I need some fun in my life.
Something like this would be so colossally helpful. I'm sick and tired of trying to research specific clothing from any given culture and being met with either racist stereotypical costumes worn by yt people or ai generated garbage nonsense, and trying to be hyper specific with searches yields fuck all. Like I generally just cannot trust the legitimacy of most search results at this point. It's extremely frustrating. If there are good resources for this then they're buried deep under all the other bullshit, and idk where to start looking.
another addition as far as physical media goes there is the encyclopedia of national dress (that i still need to buy myself bc this kind of thing is super important to my sort of fantasy designing) but yes i do agree i wish there was EVEN MORE documentation on this
I'm a little over half-way through Full-Body February and here are all the pieces I've done so far. I have had a lot of fun working on these. The latest one was one of the paid slots for @asingularcanadian to add to the Dracula Hoard they have.
yo here’s a useful tip from your fellow art ho cynellis… use google sketchup to create a model of the room/building/town you’re trying to draw… then take a screenshot & use it as a reference! It’s simple & fun!
This is an incomplete tutorial, and it drives me crazy every time I see it come around.
We live in a pretty great digital age and we have access to a ton of amazing tools that artists in past generations couldn’t even dream of, but a lot of people look at a cool trick and only learn half of the process of using it.
Here’s the missing part of this tutorial:
How do you populate your backgrounds?
Well, here’s the answer:
If the focus is the environment, you must show a person in relation to that environment.
The examples above are great because they show how to use the software itself, but each one just kind of “plops” the character in front of their finished product with no regard of the person’s relation to their environment.
How do you fix this?
Well, here’s the simplest solution:
This is a popular trick used by professional storyboard and comic artists alike when they’re quickly planning compositions. It’s simple and it requires you to do some planning before you sit down to crank out that polished, final version of your work, but it will be the difference between a background and an environment.
From Blacksad (artist: Juanjo Guarnido)
From Hellboy (Mike Mignola)
Even if your draftsmanship isn’t that great (like mine), people can be more immersed in the story you tell if you just make it feel like there is a world that exists completely separate from the one in which they currently reside – not just making a backdrop the characters stand in front of.
Your creations live in a unique world, and it is as much a character as any other member of the cast. Make it as believable as they are.
I’m a 3d artist and have been exploring the possibilities of using 3d as reference for 2d poses. I want to add a couple of tips and things!
Sketchup is very useful for environment references, and I assume it’s reasonably easy to learn. If you’re interested in going above and beyond, I highly recommend learning a proper 3d modeling program to help with art, especially because you can very easily populate a scene or location with characters!
Using 3ds Max I can pretty quickly construct an environment for reference. But going beyond that, I can also pose a pretty simple ‘CAT’ armature (known in 3d as a rig) straight into the scene, which can be totally customized, from various limbs, tails, wings, whatever, to proportions, and also can be modeled onto and expanded upon (for an example, you could 3d sculpt a head reference for your character and then attach it to the CAT rig, so you have a reference for complex face angles!)
The armature can also be posed incredibly easily. I know programs exist for stuff like this - Manga Studio, Design Doll - but posing characters in these programs is always an exercise in frustration and very fiddly imo. A simple 3d rig is impossibly easy to pose.
By creating an environment and dropping my character rig into it, I have an excellent point of reference when it comes to drawing the scene!
Not only that, but I can also view the scene from whatever angle I could ever want or need, including the character and their pose/position relative to the environment.
We can even quickly and easily expand this scene to include more characters!
Proper 3d modeling software is immensely powerful, and if you wanted to, you could model a complex environment that occurs regularly in your comic or illustration work (say, a castle interior, or an outdoor forest environment) and populate the scene with as many perspective-grounded characters as you need!
hope this isn't too annoying but you do have any tips for drawing teeth? i l o v e the way you draw them but i can't seem to draw fangs that well :/
I've seen some amazing tutorials for teeth which explain much more about how teeth fit in the skill, which is very useful! But this is a very quick explanation of how I do Teeth!
I don't often outline teeth too hard, unless I'm doing tusks, since the gums and teeth edges suggest pretty well without em!
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I did these last night at the same time. I just had the urge to draw whales and decided that I hadn't done watercolor in a minute. I really love how these turned out. I love using my watercolors and I really should do so more often.
Why do you say "do not repost" your art? Unless it's paysite material I mostly ignore that line. I mean, reblogs & re-tweets technically count as a art repost so that makes "do not repost" invalid. If you don't want your art out there don't post it to the internet. Not trying to come off as mean, that's just the mindset I have. Once you posts something to the internet... it's out there.
…… hm.
when i say “do not repost” i mean, do not:
save my art to your computer
reupload it to your own social media site, especially without credit
exploit my my art so you can become more popular/get more attention/etc
reblogging/retweeting is not the same as reposting. those actually allow the artist to keep ownership of their own art as it gets spread around. they are different things.
it’s not that i don’t want my art to be on the internet. that’s why i post it. but i don’t want OTHER people taking credit for MY art and the hard work i put into it. i have a store where i sell my art. having people repost my art to their own sites literally takes money away from me. because people don’t know that I’M the artist who drew it, then they don’t know about my store, and instead consume my art mainly through websites that repost my art for their own amusement or profit.
do you know how many japanese artists have deleted their pixiv/twitter accounts because people kept reposting their art without permission, OR credit, and have even profited from stealing their work? so much art is floating out there without an owner because the japanese artists were harassed so much due to their art constantly being reposted without any credit to them, that they had to disappear from the internet just so they could keep ownership of the rest of their art.
do you know how many people found my art through pinterest? i’ve gotten so many messages from people saying they found my art there, and it took them anywhere from days to WEEKS to find me and my blog, because most, if not all of it was posted 1. without credit, or 2, without a link back to the original, because the pinterest user reuploaded it from their own computer.
do you know how many people try to apply for jobs with their art, but can’t seem to claim ownership of their own portfolio because it’s been so spread out and reposted everywhere on the internet, that companies can’t be sure that the person they’re interviewing is the actual artist themself?
i don’t think you understand just how detrimental reposting is to artists. and i don’t think you understand how important it is for people to respect artists’ wishes. my art is not yours to use for your own amusement. there is a reason why most websites have a dmca report option, to take down unauthorized use of their art. even the law recognizes it as a personal right.
i do want my art to be shown to the world, but under my own terms. i want my wishes in regards to my art to be respected. you are not doing me any favors by reposting my art onto other sites without permission or credit. just the opposite, in fact–your hurting me personally, financially, and possibly hurting my chances of earning a job with my art.
so in conclusion, here are the dangers of reposting:
the artists loses ownership of their art
no one knows who made it anymore, and don’t care
the artists stop making art because all that happens is their art gets reposted without a source, and so they prefer to disappear off the internet entirely. the world has now just lost an amazing artist.
people make a profit off their art, literally stealing money and potential customers from them, because no one knows where the art originated from
they lose job opportunities because the reposting and art theft is so ubiquitous, that even if they are the original artist, no one can be sure of that.
etc.
reposting is detrimental. it’s not the same thing as reblogging/retweeting, it’s something that literally harms artists in the long run.
at the end of the day, the biggest way to prevent this from happening is by respecting the artist’s wishes with some basic human decency. that’s literally it.
Every artist who sees this post should do the following:
- Watch the video.
- Follow the instructions
- Reblog
I can’t stress you enough about how important these exercises are for your drawing hand. You don’t wanna get CTS of Tendonitis and similar stuff that will prevent you from making art or even hold a pencil.
Okay, this guy is my HERO. I just did these exercises as I watched the video, and already my arms and hands feel better. I have a degenerative tendon disease that prevents my muscles, tendons and ligaments from retaining their elasticity, and so anything that maintains the health of my bendy parts is important.
I URGE YOU. Even if you don’t draw, do these several times a day. Even just sitting at a computer can do serious damage. My dad, who was a rugby player, a carpenter, and now a handyman, suffered from severe carpal tunnel syndrome, simply as a result of sitting at the computer at the end of the day to play a little solitaire. Don’t let it happen to you!
Wow, these are REALLY helpful. And yes, this is not just good but IMPORTANT for more than artists — if you type a lot, play a lot of video games, do anything that requires lots of repetitive movements of your hands, wrists, and arms (gardening, sewing, factory work), these can help. Even if you don’t yet get pain these are a great preventative measure, because the damage builds up over time. Youth is no protection.
And like he says, you should feel a stretch, but don’t push it too far!
Signal boosting. Guys, I just did this and holy cow do I feel incredibly light and limber in my arms. Again, even if you don’t have any sort of disease, do this as a preventative measure.
Thanks for your posts about the systemic fatphobia in expectations of weight loss for diabetes treatment. I just got diagnosed with type 2 about two weeks ago and some of my disordered eating is already resurfacing bc of how all the medical professionals are talking about it. I don’t know how to handle my blood sugar while not ending up in starving/binging cycles. Been feeling very lost about it.
It's hard. Honestly, it is. I find it helps that my partners look after me a little bit when I'm struggling with disordered eating. I can just say "hey, I'm struggling with not eating enough, when you see me, can you ask me when the last time I ate real food was?" or whatever, and they will. You just have to find the system that works for you, and there's no shame in trying different things and working it all out. 💗
So... I remembered that I have watercolors and then kind of started doing some little paintings. Say hello to The Pod Squad.
I wanted to use up the painting from the first one, the Isopod. Then I did the Gastropod this morning and finally the Arthropod this evening.
The paint is mostly Holbein watercolors on Strathmore Travel Pad 100% cotton, which is my favorite watercolor paper. I also used a yellow gel pen and a Pigma micron in Sepia. I love them.
So... I technically drew this 3 years ago but forgot to post it. I think I was going to clean up the end and make a nice recap, but I ran out of steam and then just left it as a wip for years. I got reminded of it because I was talking to a friend about how to draw wheelchairs today.
This covers most of what I view as the most common errors when it comes to drawing characters who use manual wheelchairs. I hope it helps you a lot.
Image description is in alt text, but there is a back up image description under the cut in case that does not work for some reason
[image description: a 4 picture long wheelchair tutorial. the background is white and the text, when it appears, is black and in calibri. each step will be labeled with "Step #" and a description of the drawing next to it, and "text" and then the text that is written to explain it to follow.
Step one text: So, you want to draw a character who uses a manual wheelchair? Awesome! I can't approve more. Drawing characters who use wheelchairs is a bit different than drawing standing characters, because of obvious posing differences. But to start, you need to know what parts of a wheelchair you will draw. So, without further ado, here are 3 wheelchairs!
Step one image: a simplified drawing of a chubby woman sitting in a quickie GPV manual wheelchair and resting her hand on the handrim of one of the wheels. this is labeled "the artist"
step two: next there is a lineart drawing of three wheelchairs. one is a tilite TR series 3. this is an ultralight wheelchair with a bucket seat (the back is lower than the front), a big cushion and a short backrest that kind of contours to the back of the person who would sit in it. the caster wheels (front wheels) are very small and the footrest is just two little metal bars. next image is a quickie GPV. this is also an ultralight wheelchair with a low back, but its caster wheels are slightly larger, the back has regular upholstery (it does not look like it was made to conform to the back of the person who sits there) and the frame is boxier -- there is no bar underneath the seat where the wheels would attach, rather each wheel is attached to the side of the chair. the next wheelchair is an invacare tracer. it is how most people imagine wheelchairs when they hear 'wheelchair'. it has no cushion and it has a high backrest with handles. it has high armrests that would be comfortable to rest your elbows on if you were just sitting. the wheels are not bicycle wheels like the previous two but are rather plastic. it has big footrests and big caster wheels.
text: the wheelchairs on the left are the ultralight, sporty kind. I have one of them (the quickie). the one on the right is a more standard one you might find in hospitals or as the public wheelchair in grocery stores or the mall.
step three: first is text to accompany the tilite. "This wheelchair has a really thick cushion - it's pressure relieving, which you need if you use your chair ufll tiem and especially if you have a spinal cord injury. This wc has the smallest caster (front) wheels. They are hte most handy for turning in small circles." next there is text to accompany the quickie gpv: "This one has the one I use -- it isn't pressure relieving, but is still useful." next is text to accompany the invacare: "this wheelchair has no cushion - you do not want to sit on it for long. This one has the biggest caster wheels - they are useful for not 'tripping' when your front wheel gets caught on an obstacle.”
step four text: like with all complex drawings, you want to break it into simple shapes first. I normally have a box underneath the seat, a rectangle for the backrest, and a trapezoidal thing for hte area from the box to the footrest. these are the most important shapes, because your character will rest on them and they will move with your character.
step four image: the lineart of each wheelchair has been put on reduced opacity, so we can see the square representing the backrest of each seat (the square is the smallest for the tilite and biggest for the invacare), the box for each seat and area underneath it, and the trapezoid for the footrests. the next step labels the images of these simplified shapes as the lineart is removed. "Note the proportions of each set of shapes is not the same - just like how you wouldn't draw all your characters with the same proportions on their faces!"
step 5: we see the same shapes to form the wheelchair, but now with blue circles drawn where the back wheels would be.
text: next shape is the wheels - two circles
step six: next we see the wheels and shapes have been reduced in opacity and the basic structure of everything about each wheelchair: footrests, caster wheels, upholstery details, axles has been drawn on in orange.
text: the next stage is everything else that's structure - front wheels, handlebars, cushions, footrests.
Step seven: we see the lineart on top of the lowered opacity sketch.
text: you can then do detailing like axles, spokes, upholstery, etc and lines
step eight: next we see three drawings of different characters. there is patience, a skinny white woman sitting in a blue invacare wheelchair. kelley, a slightly chubby black woman wearing a stripey dress sitting in a red quickie gpv wheelchair and doing a wheelie while smiling. then luke, a white man with short blond hair wearing khaki pants. he is sitting in a tilite chair.
text: once you get your wheelchair basics, you need to find out which kind your character uses. here are three characters who each use one of the example WCs. patience uses the invacare. she needs one with a better cushion, but circumstance prevents it. Notice the chair is a bit wider than her hips - it's not custom fitted. Also notice she has to turn her elbows out awkwardly to move. the high armrests prevent a smooth push. her wheelchair has big caster wheels and far-back back wheels. it is made for stability and difficult to turn,but also difficult to knock over. Her chair indicates a lack of resources or temporary injury, and is primarily a transport chair
kelley uses a wheelchair like mine - it is fairly sporty, but has a box-y frame underneath. this makes it heaver than if it didn't.she has a mediocre cushion - it protects her, but only some. her back wheels are further underneath her body than Patience's, which makes it possible to do the wheelie (demonstrated here). her wheelchair is supposed to look line one you'd use full time, but it is a little old.
luke has a spinal cord injury. he has a very thick pressure relieving cushion for medical reasons. his chair is also ultralight, with no boxyness under the frame. his chair is the newest and lightest - it indicates his wealth/resources, but also that he needs to use on full time.
step nine: just a drawing of me sitting in my wheelchair holding my hands up to show fingerless wheelchair gloves. we're looking at me from above.
text: when you're choosing what wheelchair to give your character, think of both their disability and their resources and go from there. questions to ask yourself: is it made specifically for them or is it mass-produced or a hand-me-down (if it's custom, the seat will not be too wide or narrow in comparison to their body and their feet will rest on the footplate naturally). do they want more stability (further back back wheels, big caster wheels) or maneuverability (the inverse). do they need a pressure relieving cushion? how long are they using their wheelchair per day? how long have they needed a wheelchair? Do they have health insurance? do they have access to a lot of spending money? How much can they spend on their wheelchair? are they athletic etc etc
posing steps:
step one: a sketch of two people standing up. one just shows the outline of a person's body, with legs that are ind of triangle shaped, the other shows a sketched pelvis and rib cage to go along with the bones of the legs and arm. text: step one: Most people have this sketch anatomy they put before drawing their characters for real. I kind of scribble around like on the left, but some people use skeletons on the right.
step two: there are now too sketched pictures of people in wheelchairs. one shows lightly traced human form (arms articulated, curve for a stomach, legs that are kind of triangle shaped and pointing down) sitting in a wheelchair that is just the sketch of footrests and wheels. the other sketch shows the sketch of a body with a circle for hips and an oval for a rib cage and the person doing a wheelie (lifting the front end of the wheelchair off the ground and leaning back). their wheelchair is also sketched out and defined by a circle for their wheels and 2 lines, 1 of the seat and 1 for the backrest. text: you need one of those for your wheelchair character. important: they should have both the person's main anatomy features (Usually upper body and at least hips) and the wheelchair's. for me, these are the back wheels, footrest, and seat. why simplify to just those features? Take a look at this incredibly quickly drawn wheelchair.
step three: there is a lineart drawing of a manual wheelchair with slightly cambered (angled towards the seat) wheels, a backrest, and a footrest. the frame is light and there are no handlebars. there are labels pointing to different parts of the wheelchair: Backrest, handrims, wheel, axle, seat, footrest, and caster wheels (the ones in front). text: there are a lot of parts, and not all of them are essential to your pose. trying to draw the whole thing straight out of the gate will frustrate you.'
step four text: take a character in heavy armor: if you draw her pose without taking her armor into account, her armor will clip through her body. if you draw a wheelchair using character without keeping her wheelchair in mind from the beginning, the pose won't make sense.
step four image: next we see two lineart drawings of different characters. one is a bulky woman wearing plate armor. her hand is on her hip and she is trying to scratch her back with the other hand. there is the label "shoudlerpad clips through face" and "thumb clips through chestplate." the next drawing shows a woman in a wheelchair with one foot rested on her knee and her arms rested back, such that they would be rested on the back of a regular chair, but the back of her wheelchair is not wide enough for them to actually be resting on anything. the text here reads "elbows not resting on anything" and "foot not on footplate"
step five: there are two images, one is lineart on top of a 3d modelled apartment with sketchup, the other is a colored in version of that lineart with the background also colored in and no longer a 3d modelled screencap two characters, one old woman wearing a green jacket and one younger woman wearing a white shirt and blue undershirt, are sitting on a couch. the old woman is leaning forward and the young woman is resting her arm on the couch. behind the young woman is a bookshelf.
step five text: you may say you'll just draw the chair first and then the person, but while that works for regular furniture, it doesn't work as well for most manual wcs. take this comic panel with characters on a couch for example - I 3d modeled the room and then drew the characters on the furniture. it works because you don't move furniture in most poses - you rest on it. but your wheelchair needs to move with you, especially if it's an ultralight one.
step six image: there is a flat color drawing of barbara gordon in her wheelchair. she is wearing a black sportsbra and black shorts. in the first image we see she is doing tricks in her chair, zooming through the air (as if she has just launched herself off the ground in a skater park or somethign) while her left hand is resting on a structure and her right hand is heading towards the right handrim. the next image shows her right hand planted on the ground and her chair and body above her, such that she is briefly doing a one-handed handstand, but the motion line indicates that she is moving and this will not last. her left arm is near the handrim of her left wheel.
text: take exercise Oracle - she is doing tricks. Her WC is an extension of her body. That is crucial to getting natural looking manual wheelchair users after posing.
step seven: we see a lineart drawing of paula from young justice. she is sitting in a standard manual wheelchair with high armrests (goes up to the bottom of her ribs probably) and a high backrest (goes up to just below her shoulderblades). she is setting her hand on the armrest, leaning forward, and holding her other hand out.
text: of course, there are exceptions - if you have a clunky WC, it is harder to move with your body. Take Paula from young Justice - here, i drew her resting her hand on her armrest, because she has a clunker wheelchair. her pose is already mostly static - she's sitting down - and she poses around that.
