Attacks for artfight. Spent too long on getting the linework done, turned it in just with linework and flats.
art blog(derogatory)
Today's Document

pixel skylines
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Claire Keane
tumblr dot com
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸

Kaledo Art
RMH
Three Goblin Art

blake kathryn

shark vs the universe
$LAYYYTER
One Nice Bug Per Day

Janaina Medeiros
i don't do bad sauce passes
AnasAbdin
hello vonnie

Product Placement
wallacepolsom
seen from Germany
seen from Sweden
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Canada
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from China

seen from Lebanon

seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from United Kingdom

seen from Türkiye
seen from Canada

seen from Argentina

seen from Malaysia
seen from Türkiye
seen from Canada

seen from Yemen
@makonekoart
Attacks for artfight. Spent too long on getting the linework done, turned it in just with linework and flats.
Dear ADs, this huge mega company is hosting a fashion/art competition wherein the grand prize is earning the 'possibility' of being in an internship with them and having your design go to retail. Though reading the T&C ALL entrants' works will hand over 100% copyright of their work to the company. Do you still think it's worth it?
—Agent KillFee
This is how I feel about most ‘contests’ people run. Yes, even places like Blizzard do shitty contests like this.
DAD, what are some ways an illustrator can be successful without client work?
Show in Galleries.
Post process pieces on Instagram and say the piece is for sale.
Start a Patreon.
Run a Kickstarter.
Teach.
Sell on Etsy.
Sell at art fairs.
Sell at craft fairs.
Sign up for a stock illustration site and post work.
Open a Redbubble store.
Open an Imprnt store.
Paint outside until someone offers to buy it.
License your work to companies.
Make celebrity portraits and give it to the celebrity and hope they post it, then have prints ready to sell to their fans.
Paint faces at kids birthday parties.
Paint bodies at adult birthday parties.
Get famous for something completely unrelated to art, then make art that will sell just because you’re a celebrity.
Make a pile of trendy work, put it in a closet for 20 years until the trend comes around again.
Make a ton of work, fake your own death, pretend to be an agent for the artist’s estate, and sell your own work at marked-up prices.
Paint copies of famous artworks, find a time machine, go back in time, sell the piece before the original artist painted it.
…that should get you started…
—Agent Negative Space
Saving this for later, more tips from DAD.
Dear young artists
Here are things I wish that someone told me when I started posting/doing art:
1: I know it sucks but you won’t get your art noticed right away. So be patient and enjoy sharing your art even if it seems no one is looking.
2: Do not take request that you know will take you more than 30 minutes. If it takes longer, that’s what commissions are for. Often people will abuse that you are an artist taking request and will give very elaborate requests.
3: Speaking of commissions, do not price ANYTHING under $5. Please value your art. I promise you the people that will complain the “it’s over priced” are cheap. If they actually want your art, they would pay for it as is.
4: SAVE SAVE SAVE. If you do digital art, save it at least every 15 minutes. Save every piece of art, don’t throw it away or delete it.
5: DATE YOUR ART. At the end of last year is when I actually started dating my art within the file name. Example: “6-13-Girl” and have a folder for each year. This would save time when you’re trying to remember when you did an old piece of art or are creating a portfolio.
6: For the love of god, you don’t have to finish everything. Do practice sketches without them turning into elaborate hours of work.
7: Continuing from 6, YOUR SKETCHBOOK IS A SKETCHBOOK FOR A REASON. That’s where you practice. Don’t worry about a drawing not being perfect, the book is for practicing.
8: You don’t have to show someone your sketchbook if you don’t want to. Just say, “I’d rather you not, it’s very personal” and leave it at that.
9: Post your practices and ask for feedback. P.S. take “you need to work on ______ but good color choice!” as feedback and “your art sucks” as someone being an ass.
10: Don’t trace references or others artwork. It will literally not help you in the long run. A good example of how to use a ref is sketch the basic shape and add details as you go.
11: Don’t tighten you hand when you draw or aka don’t carve into the paper. Keep your strokes light when doing the basic shapes then add to darken the lines when you like them. This will save frustration of it not being able to erase.
12: WATCH SPEEDPAINTS. Slow them down if needed and learn from other artists and take the techniques you like from it. This especially works for visual learners.
13: Try tutorials even if you don’t like the style. You won’t know you like doing something unless you try it, that’s how people improve their art as well.
14: If you look through my blog, you can see that I do A LOT of redraws. I find them important to do sometimes to see your progress and show you what you need to work on.
15: Most importantly: Remember that your favorite artists, no matter their age, have been working on their drawing skills for years. It’s taken me 6 years to get my art where I like it and I’m still improving like everyone else.
Any other artists that would like to add or correct, feel free!
good advice :)
Number 10 is a bit silly, because tracing can help you learn the basics of how other people put things together, what shapes they see, and so can master studies, where you attempt to recreate a finished piece of art to try and understand how and why people do things the way that they do. Look at Snow White and the Seven Dwarves by Disney, a lot of that movie was directly traced from film that the studio shot of the story being acted out, because they had no frame of reference for how things should look during complex shots. That technique is called Rotoscope Animation.
That said, your entire body of work shouldn’t just be you copying other people, it should be you learning what you like or dislike about other peoples’ styles and making them your own. Finding your unique voice in the universe.
I would like to add a few of my own:
16: Do carpal tunnel stretches and take care of your arms, wrists, and hands. You’ll get into a rhythm and forget and probably wind up injured. If something bad happens to your hands you’ll have to spend time re-learning how to do art, which can be frustrating, with something other than the hand you’ve always used. A lot of efficiency with movements in art is from muscle memory.
17: Every failure is valuable. Every piece of art you try to make will have faults, this is just the way of art. But those faults and failings are valuable because they are how you grow into an even better artist. Learn from the mistakes and don’t beat yourself up about them, they are precious jewels.
18: Back up all your art in as many places as you can. If you do traditional media, scan or have them photographed, and save them with your digital files. Save your digital files to multiple places. I have a backup server run by a friend, I have Google Drive, Dropbox, an external hard drive, my second hard drive on my computer, and burned backup CDs to fall back on if something goes missing.
19: Never throw anything out. Sketches, half-finished pieces, the frustrated doodles you did at work or school. Save copies of it even if you don’t save the physical art. I wish I had some of the art I made when I was younger and new at things and didn’t know how to look at the world like an artist. This ties back in to tip 14. If you have a copy of something old, you can redraw it and have it side-by-side for comparison.
20: Learn to really sketch well. Not polished sketching, but translating an idea from your eyes, to your mind, to your hand, to the paper quickly. It should be like a visual shorthand with details being filled in later. They don’t have to be perfect, neat, or able to be read by other people. Fill it with as much information and expression as possible so that later when you are taking your sketches to the polishing stage you can see what caught your attention about the thing you sketched.
21: Not every sketch has to be finished, like tip #7 says, not everything has to be polished. It’s true. Especially sketches. Not every sketch is going to be an idea worth following through to a finished piece of art and that’s perfectly fine. Keep them anyway. It’s a record of how you see the world around you.
22: Draw from life whenever possible. Even if you’re practicing new art styles, or drawing in a specific way, draw from life. Learn to see the world in shapes and relationships and abstract that into a drawing. James Gurney recently said in one of his videos that all art is abstraction and I realized he’s right. There will never be a 100% photo-realistic representation of how you see the world, it’s all abstractions of how we see the world around us and that’s okay.
23: Perfection is an unrealistic goal. Try setting better goals for your art like communicating a specific message or feeling to the people who will look at it. Every person has a unique view on the world, including you, and trying to get others to understand what you’re trying to say without writing an artist’s statement about it is a pretty good goal to have.
24: Work digitally in large-scale high resolutions suitable for professional printing of your art piece. Minimum 300 DPI, RGB or CMYK based on the type of printing you want to do, and within the color gamut for the color mode you choose. You can always save lower-resolution, or smaller scale, copies from a high resolution file, you can never take a small low resolution picture and print it in larger size without the computer doing some ugly calculations and making some bad guesses for what to put where, called JPEG Artifacts.
25: Adding to tip #4: Save multiple copies of your file. At stopping points where I’m happy about how things are going I’ll save, and when I go to continue working on it I’ll save it with a new file name. Usually it’s ‘projectname.date.version’. If I do multiple versions in the same day It’ll be alphabetical versions or numbered versions. for example ‘customtypeface.4.27.18.A’, ‘customtypeface.4.27.18.B’, ‘customtypeface.4.27.18.C’, etc. It helps to keep everything organized in folders for each project with the title of the project in the file name. When I am done with everything I also package it (if using photoshop) and make sure that I save it with settings for it to be printed professionally if I want to do so down the road. Not everything I make will be worth printing, but I always treat the piece as if it will turn out to be a gem.
26: When putting together a portfolio for a job interview make sure you do it as high-quality and professionally as possible. Get the really expensive binder with the archival page protectors and design the layout of this book to your satisfaction. Make your portfolio tell enough of a story that they want to talk to you about what art pieces are in it. You should be able to tell them everything about the brief (project requirements), the process you took to solve the problem, the successes it had, all of this should be something you don’t have to think much about it. The piece will draw their attention and it’s up to you to sell how and why you came to that specific solution to the problem. When you’ve designed everything go to a professional printer and get the portfolio printed on good quality paper. It’s an investment in your future. It’s like buying that one expensive suit to interview in. You want your portfolio to make a good first impression on the people who will look at it.
Pleinair painting of clouds. Practicing my gouache skills. I learned a lot from this little painting and definitely had some happy accidents along the way. #happylittleclouds #gouache #pleinairpainting #gouacheinthewild #paintingpractice (at Concord, Missouri)
@vladtheteamaker look at this Eiffel Tower tea set I found. It's a teapot, cup, and lid. Saw it and immediately thought of you. (at Arnold, Missouri)
Making a fair bit of progress on this digital painting of some lucky bamboo. Trying out new techniques and digging the results so far. #digitalart #digitalpainting #photoshop #painting #luckybamboo #onebrush (at Concord, Missouri) https://www.instagram.com/p/BlrAhK0h66O/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=mzfrt30lrrc6
Working on a little painting of some lucky bamboo in an elephant pot. Trying out some new techniques in Photoshop. I am digging the way it os going. #digitalart #digitalpainting #photoshop #bamboo #luckybamboo (at Concord, Missouri)
Working our hotdog stand today and redid all of our hand-written signage. Experimenting with different line weights. #dirtydogz #socodirtydogz #customtype #typography. #handlettering (at The Home Depot)
Saving to be the richest hotdog stand in the wasteland. Collecting bottle caps for a friend's Fallout cosplay. #fallout #caps #bottlecaps (at The Home Depot)
Having some fun with hand lettering for our tip jar at #socodirtydogz This tip jar design is brought to you in part by Sterling Archer. #dirtydogz #handlettering #archer #sterlingarcher #justthetip (at The Home Depot)
Got great seats at the @jacksepticeye How Did We Get Here? Show. This gimpy lady got a stool to sit on. Lucky! I am so excited for this. (at The Pageant)
@jacksepticeye Saint Louis is excited to see you next week for your show! If you get the chance you should try the best hotdogs in town, #dirtydogz hotdogs. My boyfriend and I will be coming to your show as soon as we close down our stand at south county Home Depot on Friday night. (at The Home Depot)
Doing some refinement of a paper doll design for a client. #paperdoll #sketchbook #freelancing #wip (at Kirkwood, Missouri)
Taking my love to the doctor and we came across a sign for a hospital cafe. My reaction was to point like an angry monkey and hiss "Papyrus". #typography #typeinthewild #papyrus (at St. Anthony's Medical Center)
The squall line of a storm rolling in. Never seen anything like this. #updraft #squallline #stormwatching
Who is ready for the student exhibition? I am excited to see the work of me and my peers in the excellent gallery here at school. #studentexhibition #stlccmeramec #artshows #juriedshow #art #design (at St. Louis Community College–Meramec)