So much art before the mainstreaming of photography rocks because you could not be an indoor hermit as easily. It happened but if you were you were like Extra hermity. Modern day hermits can access the internet very easily so their social factors don't become as unmoored and so many go down antisocial pipelines to justify the hermitage rather than actually sitting alone with one's thoughts until they start talking about a grand needle piercing through the state of all being and the frey of the fabric of existance being the natural state of decay. Like the actual interesting stuff.
Anyways you had to go outside to draw because life was outside and you couldn't browse Pinterest for that so their shit looked less flat and had a greater depth of study because the fidelity of Real Life is shithouse insane compared to a jpeg. And since everything sings, breaths, and the sun only gives you a sense of hold for 15-30 minutes (if you're lucky) and tomorrows sunset may be different due to the weather, and realistically after about a week (I think?) the sun no longer sets at the same angle, you really had to get at it.
Anyways this is why all the older artists are a bajillion times more salted and interesting then your standard YouTube guy who's making a living copying another contemporary artist and selling tutorials. You had to like go outside and see people. I don't think I like the vibe of the internet anymore because everyones too online now. Gamifying and creating an Algorithm is so strange to me it's made wanting to be a TV Star every single hobby and topic on the planet.
I suppose this has always been a thing but the dislocation of voice and the meditation of the process for the sake of bite size movie magic really unnerves me because it turns most content into ads. Everyone is a business now and we're all poor.
Internet so unhospitable a 20+ year mega hikikomori streak is breaking what have you idiots done.
In April I posted asking if anyone had some sketches I could line, and, here we are in July. I'm inking (and testing color/light on) the lovely @23b0075nke's swampert sketches (go check out their work its so good!!), but I'm so excited about my exploratory passes I wanna post a very early WIP.
Big excited yaps under the cut:
I gave the first inking on the head a pass and realized I wasn't executing it how I liked. So I gave it a few days while working on other stuff to think about why the inks were sitting poorly with me, and I think it's that I want to incorporate the form better into the data the inks give you. 23b0075nke's work has a yummy glut of textures I don't want to smooth out, and I love their interpretation of swampert. Mudkip was my first starter and I love how they make swamperts feel like big chunky, tattered with life, Swamp creatures with the cutest faces in the world.
After some planning, I realized I've been wanting to apply some lining principles I read in High-Focus Drawing by James McMullan. Mostly around how form interplays with light, and how that affects the line. I'm a sucker for trying to inject as much detail into simple form as possible (I fantasize about a work horse of a style where I can keep up with my flickering imagery memory), so I want to have light actually be a part of the line.
A big inspiration for my lining has been this boot, and this plant:
These two betray so much shadow and texture it makes me feel like the first cave man to discover a mango. My eyes sink in and my chest tightens, my fingers twitch and I think about the smug little things I could do with an logic engine like that in my tool box.
But my understanding of lighting is like actually so rough right now. It's one of the biggest things I have struggled with, and it would not stick even slightly until I started getting better sleep.
Now that I am though there's this huge conga line of information to be processed and it's sticking! I am so fucking excited by this I'm not spinning my fucking wheels anymore. I am nearing a borderline objectum crush on my CPAP I love this thing so fucking much.
Anyways since I can actually Do things and they have Learning Consequences I'm playing around a lot with the lighting on this piece so I can actually apply that learning to the inking. I could do a black and white study but uh. It does not grab me as much. I like to look up refrence images of pretty blackwater aquariums and think about how pretty the colors are. Art is my secret excuse to look up pretty things and then ruminate on those pretty things while drawing.
Thinking about it now though, the lighting would be less of a mess if I tried a black and white study too. I feel like I really locked in to a way of drawing I like so now I'm eager to apply everything to it. I think this is what it feels like to learn how to do donuts with a car.
I kept like trying to avoid drawing what I saw in my head bc it's so fragmented (like moi!) but in the age of formula I'm not really sure I care about following the guidelines/guidebook too closely. It can't be your voice, I don't wanna live by rules to look good when I straight up can't keep track of it and get bored when I do. It's not what's on my mind. Enjoy my memory world.
Like images flash way way too fast in my head and do not hold very long. They do not congeal easily and when I make them it's like masking to me. That's Not How I Thought That. They were seperate, together. You get multiple POVs. The failure to congeal is the Appeal 👍
I realized I do better with a "No Erasing" rule and a preset canvas size that is zoomed out to see the full canvas. I work with a flat square brush with no pressure settings. I open up a bit more when the central vibe has been scaffolded but until then it's basically mspaint. This keeps me peaceful.
drawing i made to celebrate that my body seems to responding somewhat positively to major changes I'm making in my life. It's a work in progress, I'm still oscillating in different states of flare, but it's progress baby! I'm really happy.
well the first thing i'm doing the moment i'm not blinking sleep out of my eyes, is browsing krita for brushes, so maybe increasing the cpap pressure from 5-9 to 9-15 is doing something. ha ha yay!
I have mixed feelings about Krita bc it's so so close to outstripping CSP but it's learning curve is just higher for me. It's come so far though, and the 5.3 update has this:
Which is something I've desperately desperately wanted!!! Krita is inching closer and closer to having a "reactive" canvas. My goal of figuring out a system to emulate paper crinkles divots and texture is still a ways off, but this makes the worst offender, a non-reactive brush, so so so much better. I can't think of like. Any??? Physical medium? That does not reduce white spot break through if you press it harder into the canvas, so this feels huge. I'll be testing it out today to see if it fucks as hard as I think it will.
At this point I think.....I wanna test a stupid bullshit work around for how to make a more reactive canvas possible. I'm not really sure it will work but....it will be fun to test.
Other exciting improvements to Krita:
This marker mode is going to be such a huge win for anyone who wants to make a watercolor brush that's more accurate to a nice wet brush.
note shown: the INCREDIBLE looking comic making tool I'm curious about.
I'm so excited about theseeeeee I can't wait to test them out today!
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
titsay
amandla