Kit's Art Dump

Kit (they/it/she), tired art beast with mycelium for brains.

[mxkitchimera]

Furality ULTRA booth resources so if you saw my booth at Furality Ultra and wondered what the heck I'm even selling...

the answer is NOTHING.

Okay so I AM attempting to sell you on the idea of YOU making some traditional art.

hey HEY wait, this is for you even if you don't think of yourself as an artist, or are a digital artist with a longstanding grudge against non-digital paint. I get it. That paint knows what it did.

But you don't even have to be good at art to get something out of making art. I joke that painting is my version of touching grass because it makes my brain gears click back into alignment.

You can't hit UNDO in traditional art, which sounds terrifying, but I think is actually the key. A traditional painting is a place to make mistakes and then figure out how to keep going. To learn that you CAN keep going.

And sometimes it's nice to just make little potions and find out what happens when you mix them together :3

I put together this list of resources that really help me - present tense because I use them all the time.

https://mt.kanjon.art/ https://www.youtube.com/@MtKanjon Whether you're new to art or returning after a long time away, Mt Kanjon's videos are great for fundamental art tips digital and traditional, but also for the WHYs of making art in the first place, and how to keep at it when making stuff feels tough! Absolutely motivational~

https://linktr.ee/color.nerd The color chart I used in my Gamut Gamut Overload cabinet is by Color Nerd! I reference his charts and near constantly tbh. Go get you some free resources! He explains the science of both additive color mixing (RGB digital) AND subtractive color mixing (pigments, traditional). So much color science and appreciation for the history of how we understand color - with credits to the color scientists who got us this far. I'm gonna link a twofer video where he explains a part of my next resource. https://youtu.be/EACRRXynk1w?si=EKhjb1Jz66OM5zxP

https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/water.html Handprint is the most out of date site on this list, but still REALLY useful for understanding Why Paint Does That. https://handprint.com/HP/WCL/pigmt6.html This page in particular explains that paint names are proprietary garbage, but more importantly it also teaches you how to read the numbers and symbols that unlock the SECRETS OF PAINT-Paint-paint [echo]. Okay actually they just describe pigments, which are ground up color rocks. Get in, we're doing Chemistry! A quote from Bruce MacEvoy that puts into words the feeling I myself am hoping to convey to you, but like, eloquently: "I built this site because watercolor lifted me out of my life in a way that placed me back in my self. It made the world I saw incredibly more vivid and unexpected: it taught me to see, it taught me to teach myself to see." This man has Opinions on paint, but also brings the facts to support them. His work directly influenced other resources on this list, like the next resource:

https://artistpigments.org/ Do you like swatches? OH BOY are you gonna love this site! I really can't overstate how useful this one is, it's like Handprint for 2026. Use Mixbox for color mixing predictions, which replicates real paint mixing.

oh, you wanna know about the booth book stack?

https://linktr.ee/gurneyjourney https://www.youtube.com/jamesgurney Yeah, it's Color and Light by James Gurney. If Heaven is real, it's Dinotopia. Gurney keeps up with tech and is still making free videos about plein air painting with gouache on his youtube channel. Information-packed substack, too. The book Color and Light is helpful in understanding how lighting and atmosphere changes the way we see color.

https://linktr.ee/notsorryart https://www.youtube.com/@notsorryart When I was getting back into art, tiktok led me to Sari Shryack of Not Sorry Art. Her bright saturated paintings of dollar store aisles and still lifes of nostalgic plastic bits were a discussion of growing up impoverished, and I'm still in awe of how her work can say so much. Her paintings and art lessons gave me the courage to use the bold bright colors that make me feel things. She offers a ton of free lessons on youtube, but the book Modern Still Life: From Fruit Bowls to Disco Balls focuses on the process of painting, you know, a still life.

https://linktr.ee/70sscifiart VRChat is a bit like being able to walk through the kind of places I'd only seen in weird book covers, which were a core inspiration to younger me. Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s is a fancy physical version of the curation Adam Rowe has been doing for free on tumblr for years. I kid, but he does incredible work tracking down information about paintings and painters who mostly went uncredited at time of pulp paperback publication.

Part 2 coming after Furality, and I'll explain why I think watercolor + gouache is the most affordable and effective paint medium to start with. I'll show my modular setup that works in small spaces, bc I, like y'all, am just making stuff in my bedroom.

video versions for additional accessibility coming after Furality

[mxkitchimera]

acrylic paint gelli print texture scans from a round-the-table group print free for art use at my ko-fi

[mxkitchimera]

SO MANY THINGS I didn't talk about this year ;_;

random updates on some of the social medias I'm trying to keep up with, corralled at my CARRD

it was a weird year. here's the art stuff I put skill points in: cold wax oil painting: I feel like I'm understanding the medium a lot more, impasto is best pasto? mixing everything takes a lot of physical energy though. I painted a bigger canvas board for the Nighthawks parody than I'd tried before, which let me achieve more detail gouache: I technically painted a few things in gouache, but I think I mixed more color palettes for possible paintings than I made actual paintings :< I think I'd like to use it more in 2026, maybe do more sketchy things with it? I wish I could it over pilot ink, but alas printmaking: I'm trying to be social again irl while adapting to a new place - a few art classes are now accessible to me in this location and an intro to printmaking class seemed the most accessible. the process of printmaking by hand has such good puzzle solving and thinking backward, it was like a good brain scrubbing BLENDER (3D): lawks, I thought I'd be done obsessing with this program by now, but there's so much to learn it's like peering into the abyss. it's so so good to get into a flow state with, I might be addicted? the progress feels incredibly slow at the time, and often painful, but it's very cool to build things I normally have trouble visualizing. I've been modeling a room at The Whitespring (Fallout76) for more than a year now, but I've learned so much about blender via this one project? I've been modeling it for a cozy space in VRChat but also learning animation and textures and compositing in blender itself *stares at GenAI like a cow looks at an oncoming train* -also made a few new avatars for VRChat (so some Unity skills too ig? mostly building all the menus with VRCFury haha OH but I did focus on optimizing avis to below 50mb this year)

it's not anywhere on these images, but I continued learning about DaVinci Resolve (video editing), too.

I'm not doing great with marketing/ telling anyone about what I make, but I'm not sure the benefits of being Known outweigh the consequences.

[harlequips]

"I hate gouache" "gouache is so hard to use" gouache is incredibly forgiving. not as overly forgiving as oils, not as fast paced as acrylic or acrylic gouache or as meticulous and layered as watercolor, but pliable and revivable and perfectly pigmented. she is your friend. she is a friend to practically every other medium and wants to help you. fuck the gouache haters. if gouache has 1000 fans, I'm one of them. if gouache has only one fan, it's me. if gouache has 0 fans then I'm dead.

[kitchimera]

Melody Amaranth - ink, watercolor limited palette study: PR122 + PG7 + PY110 + PW6

[no pencil sketch, ink only lineart practice]

[kitchimera]

I found a photo of the lineart from two years ago still on my phone! I cleaned it up a bit for y’all to paint/color on if you want

[kitchimera]

Furality Aqua - cold wax oils 5 x 7”

pigments: PR122 + PG7 + PW6

a painting of this scene from the Furality Aqua lobby world (VRChat) took only three sessions (not including the underpainting, so technically four ig).

I love PG7 (phthalo green blue shade) and PR122 (quinacridone magenta) as a limited palette for all the purples and blues mixable from them. They each have a pretty dark value, so using PW6 (titanium white) or paper white (in transparent watercolor) gets a large value range, too.

I like cold wax medium bc I can wait a bit for some curing, then scratch details back out (toothpicks used in this one, to reveal the green-white underpainting layer).

[kitchimera]

WIP cold wax Furality Aqua (session 3)

pigments so far: PR122, PG7, PW6. (PY184 on palette but not in painting)

[kitchimera]

WIP cold wax Furality Aqua (5x7”)

pigments so far: PR122, PG7, PW6

working on my backlog of paintings from photos I’ve taken at Furality (VRChat furry convention).

I think I really like using a palette knife with cold wax; not having to clean brushes is nice

Still feeling out how much I want to blend (I think there were earlier points that were more intuitively painted before I muddied it up? and I would have saved so much time and energy had I stopped sooner!)

[mxkitchimera]

Stratus Loading into VRChat [comm, owner Max Extreme] watercolor x digital

I love when someone takes a risk on my "I Do What I Want" commission tier. It takes me about a month to roll things around in my head, and the final product is never my first plan. This one started as a concept for an ink/sumi-e painting--using the VRC loading/buffering circle as an enso. My body was in too much pain for confident brushstrokes. But I decided to do some additional research into the clothing items and weapons on the references provided to better understand what I was drawing... ...and ended up researching ronin portrayed in ukiyo-e, specifically the works of Hokusai. I see why van Gogh was into these--the compositions and colors are deceivingly simple but I can't even fathom the skill it would take to render with 19th century tools. Everything portrayed is clear in a way that feels so futuristicly Graphic Design. I see a lot of echoes of his works in flat design magazine covers from the 1920s-30s, and honestly through advertisements and art of today. In the end, I decided to use Affinity Photo and scans of my own watercolor textures to create a simple setting for Stratus that felt like it could exist at many points in time. VRChat feels like that to me, it allows a transcendent experience when you move from one artist's world to another.

[bolaneno]

the color signatures of various elements when ignited

FB image credit: Ceres Science

[mxkitchimera]

something like a self portrait. watercolor/gouache 5.5 x 8.5"

pigments: [KITCHI palette] PG7 + PR122 + PY110 + PY184 (wc) + PW6 (gouache)

painting myself experiencing joy helped stave off some of the despair.

[moldspace]

where do you get your sculpt ideas from? i havent made anything in like 2 years and i really want to get back into sculpting but i just dont. have any ideas

Oh man. So this has been sitting in my inbox for a day or two while i chew on it because i’ve realized this is a really hard question to answer!! I asked myself how i’d gotten the ideas for some of my recent work, or the sketches i’m planning out right now, and really… it’s just been me looking at my own work. Copying off my own notes. Asking myself “how can i continue to explore this theme i’ve been working in, with the shape and symbol and color language i’ve already built up?”. And that’s not really helpful advice to anyone else, especially if they don’t have an existing body of work to pull from!

So if a lot of my work right now is inspired by my… past work…. There must be a progenitor, right? An ancestral fish-thing that grew legs and crawled out of the sea? following this train of thought, I realized i really CAN trace my work back through its evolutionary tree. My current polymer clay work, which i classify roughly in my head as my “surrealist-y metaphorical-y tarot-y colorful-y narrative-y stuff” branched off from its great-grandparents at pajamas here, beginning the eventual transformation into what i think of as my real primary “style”, when i decided to give this little human-faced freak bright colors and a star pattern.

But how did HE come about? He was actually a bit of an outlier in his litter, sculpted at the same time as a bunch of little alien creatures. When it came time to paint him, i had gotten bored and was out of ideas, so i decided to rather unthinkingly and spontaneously paint some stars on him, and bam, there it is - the evolution of warm blood, or flight, or a big brain, the one tiny mutation that shapes the rest of the species for all time!

But lets trace it back further. why was i making aliens? Because i was beefing up my creature design skills for a scifi webcomic i had been raising in my head for the past few years. Why scifi? Because my sibling is a huge star trek nerd, and we brainstormed the premise and characters together.

Another example: my current clay work. I can trace most of the forms i’m using right now back to my pit firing days, where the extreme limitations of that medium really informed my work. Pit firing (or MY pit firing, at least) has a high failure rate, and even pottery that makes it through the firing without exploding is still very soft ceramics, and can be broken easily. So i made forms that were simple, sturdy, and that i could make a lot of at a time (so that if i lost a 25% or even 50% of my pieces, it wouldn’t be HOURS of sculpting work down the drain).

But when i was able to start taking pottery classes again and fire in a kiln, some of the limitations of pit firing disappeared. kiln-fired pieces are harder when finished, have a much higher survival chance, and can be glazed. Still, I kept working with the shapes i was familiar with, but with a little more freedom to push them into new things. Those round blobs with faces became slightly more complex blobs with faces, and glazes, and wings and feet!

I’m not sure how much sense i’m making, but i guess what i’m trying to get to is that none of my sculpture ideas come to me “spontaneously”. They’re all a result of an artistic evolution and exploration. Usually, they’re a happy accident that i then decide to run with. And the more work i make, the easier it is the think of the next thing, because i DONT have to make something up out of whole cloth, but continue with the momentum i’ve already built up. This might sound really discouraging, if you don’t have that creative momentum. And it can be hard to build up that momentum! But for me the only way to get ideas has been to make things. At first it might be hard to figure out what to make. What you make at the start might be fairly arbitrary (aliens because your sibling is a fan of star trek) or rooted in the limitations of the medium you’re working with (stout little unglazed faces because you’re pit firing) but if you keep making things, you will start to find these little pathways of inspiration to follow and chase, and before you know it you will be somewhere different. I believe that art always builds on itself. It’s an accumulative thing.

But i can also tell you that i would never be able to put in the time it takes to build up such an evolutionary tree without having fun with it. So that’s my main piece of advice: make sure you’re enjoying yourself! The rest will come :^)

[buttpoems]

embarrassing myself

[bedupolker]

@topthagomizer Dogs and cats, and things that generally resemble dogs and cats, I think are a go-to for a lot of furry art partially bc familiar and partially because they're just easy to put expressions on. Cats have those big eyes and somewhat flatter faces that almost resemble the proportions of children, and dogs literally evolved to mimic our expressions so that we'd find them cuter. Just look at Judy Hopps who you mentioned, big almond shaped eyes on the front of her face, pink button nose, little snout... change her ears and teeth and she would straight up just be a domestic shorthair cat. I don't think that they made her look like this on purpose, just that when you combine Elsa Frozen with a cottontail rabbit this is the result. credit where credit is due, I think the animators were more faithful to depicting her rabbit-ness language than the designers were, and Judy ultimately did what Disney set out for her to do... be extremely marketable, and to make cops look fluffy and adorable (my lawyer is telling me to emphasize that this is a joke and I don't think cops are adorable)

Personally I have faith in people finding more exotic-looking creatures cute... A more extreme example but it's been a fun challenge to try and figure out how insect or mollusk anthro characters would express themselves through body language even though they lack practically anything we'd recognize as a face, I've seen people do this with robot/machine characters too. Wall-E? Pixar Lamp, or Aladdin magic carpet, neither of whom even have body parts? In fact, it's a common exercise for new animation students to animate a featureless sack of flour as if it were a character.

Reeling it back in I think a much better example of an expressive and stylized small mammal would be Remy Ratatouille (sorry for shilling for pixar so hard today), he isn't a photorealistic rat either, they moved his eyes closer together on the top of his head to make his expressions more readable, which IMO is a great choice since his personality still needs to read amongst his larger human castmates, but he doesn't lose his rattiness. I think the key is recognizing how you can take a real animal, capture its essence, and lose what details you don't need, which takes a lot of practice to really get an eye for it. You can sort of practice by trying to break down an animal into simple shapes. A rat's profile is basically a pointy box. A mouse is sort of just a triangle. A rabbit is more like an oval, and so on. They don't really have distinct snouts like dogs do, their eyes are on either side of the head, their mouths tend to be more on the bottom of their skulls. 

I think doing life studies is invaluable. Even if you want to base your character off a design you've seen before, just knowing what that animal looks like and how it moves will really inform you on why the original designer made the decisions they did. Maybe a controversial example, but Lauren Faust was very familiar with horses when she designed the characters of My Little Pony... very extremely stylized designs, but something about where their joints are placed and the way their bodies are shaped still make them sort of look like and move like horses. The generation immediately after, I don't get that sense, and even though they don't look too different, they just don't feel like horses anymore. since you mentioned a character based on a rabbit or a hare, I love Watership down, an absolutely beautiful movie, and it features both stylized and very realistic rabbit characters. 

Children's books are also very fun to reference, since they aren't marketed the same way animated movies and shows are, creators have a bit more freedom to make designs that are very appealing but not chemically engineered to look good on a million toys or lunchboxes or whatever. 

Even within animation, the most bland boring forgettable film is going to have some incredible concept art made by a very creative person who was nerfed for any number of reasons from practicality and time constraint to boring execs being boring. Going back to our friend Judy, I actually prefer this earlier design, the shape of the head and the smaller eyes resonate with me a lot more. 

Thumper the rabbit is also evergreen. You can sort of see how we went from a real cottontail, to Thumper, to Judy, where perhaps they pushed the dollface too far. I especially enjoy these pencil sketches that show some of the artist's process and some of these you can really see how his head can be broken down into simple shapes and how much you can push his expression even just by changing the angle of his face.

Referenced this in an ask a while ago but I can't recommend the Art of Animal drawing enough. Free PDF here! It doesn't cover every mammal ever, but he does have a section on rabbits. It breaks down anatomy, line of action, and stylzation in a good straightforward way that translates to most quadropeds.

Look outside pop culture too! Go to a historic art museum. Different parts of the world, different time periods, you might be surprised at what you find resonates with you. I've yet to find a horse design I like more than those cave paintings (sorry Lauren Faust). We've literally been drawing, painting, sculpting, carving animals since we've been human.

[mxkitchimera]

"You're so pretty!!"

sneakily painted a friend's avi in watercolor/gouache pigments: PR122, PB16, DPP [transparent orange], PW6 image description: a painting of a pretty anthro deer in blue jeans and a small knit top. Her shoulders have markings that glow pink-orange. Her blonde hair is put up in pigtail loops, with longer strands out, framing her face and glowing pink at the tips. She is wearing big round glasses with a little pink bow on.

[twistcmyk]

mind prison

[art-tnt]

[fujiwara-no-homokou]

[thethingwiththefeathers]

@elodieunderglass wonderful things with legs

[elodieunderglass]

Feels so educational!