Art blog @skullcaps - Tumblr Blog

A commission I did recently, happy welcome back to HxH!

#for however brief it may be #Hunter x Hunter #Killua #Gon

Not sure if you still answer or look through your asks, but what advice could you probably recommend for just improving with art time and efficiency? I've seen your work on FA, and they're so gorgeous for only 1-2 hours of work!

It just takes a lot of practice dedicated specifically to that honestly! 1-2 hour drawings are the bulk of the commission work I get, so I’ve been working at them for a little over a year now.

As you work you begin to find shortcuts and techniques to do things more quickly. I’ve cut out lineart completely by sketching cleanly and using my sketch lines as lineart rather than inking over a sketch on a separate layer. I do this even for cleaner drawings as well. For flats it helps to make sure you have no gaps in your lineart so you can select the area outside of your lineart and invert and flood fill the selection, saves way more time than manually filling your lineart. Take advantage of learning all your blending modes for layers too, as they’re a big help with color schemes.

Becoming facile just takes repeating something over and over and over. You begin to learn the way things look and it starts taking less and less effort/time to get something to look right. Hell I struggled even getting a decent character drawing on a flat background when I started doing this.

If you start doing timed drawings for practice, you’ll improve! I started out doing the 69min challenges for HxH, and it evolved into me taking on 1-2 hour drawings for commission work. If you’re in a fandom, hunt around for a 69min group on twitter and take part in it! Outside of that, you can just do it for fun on your own.

#Anonymous

what printer do you have at home for prints? printing at home would be amazing!

I use a canon pixma pro-1, and it does really nice prints, but it does come with very high running costs. Ink is $300-350 per set and I’ve replaced it twice in a year with somewhat light-moderate use. It will also purge ink in a cleaning cycle when left sitting for more than a week (increasing amounts the longer it sits), and this is true of all of canon’s pixma pro printers. There are smaller ones, the pro-10 and pro-100, which are cheaper and have fewer, smaller ink tanks.

I haven’t minded it, it’s worth it for me to not have to deal with printing services and I use it frequently enough that it’s not an issue, but it does come with its own set of cons that you should be aware of before you go for the pixma pro line (or any higher end printer, really). If you can cover the costs and will use it enough, it’s worth owning, but for lighter usage, I’d recommend looking at their other lines so you don’t deal with it literally spitting your money into a waste tank when left unused.

#Anonymous

Sorry for intruding, but can you recommend some photography blogs for references please?

Sure! I’m not following many right now but the ones I do follow are A+ quality. All of them have been sources of inspiration.

etherealvistaslobo-de-lunaexpressions-of-naturejohnandwolfvisitheworld

#Anonymous

Hello, I watch your stuff over on Fa, and I wanted to ask as a learning Animator, how do you come up with your colors and lighting in your work, especially in your complete scenery images?

I’m not sure how to answer other than practice! I used to have an extremely difficult time selecting colors, everything would just come out like mud and none of the colors worked together. Honestly it’s a lot of just.. developing your eye for color and experimenting and finding out what works and what doesn’t.

As for setting color schemes, I just pick whatever I think would suit the mood or feel for the picture. I’m very fond of heavy shadows and intense lights. Try finding some good scenery blogs to get ideas, god knows I’d never make it if I didn’t have decent sources of photography to look at to understand how light works and the way different lighting effects the colors of the environment because I don’t leave my house much haha. The things I focus most on are a dominant color and atmospheric perspective. Most of my drawings have a very obvious dominant color, and I’ll choose colors that will relate well to that dominant color. Subtle variations of saturation and value of the same color can have some really nice effects and color relativity is your BFF when learning to use color. One helpful thing I do a lot with one/two hour scenes is coloring something in its base/normal lighting colors and using a layer over the top on either multiply, screen, luminosity, etc (whichever looks best and suits the image, you just have to experiment) with whatever the dominant color is. This is helpful for colors that are difficult to adjust to a contrasting lighting color (like greens always stump me). Also take advantage of laying a flat color and using the hue/saturation slider to adjust it and see how it looks at different saturations, values, hues, etc. The selective color adjustment tool in photoshop is a big help if you need some last minute adjustments.

Gah this is getting rambly because I’m not sure how to explain or help since it’s just something I’ve had to learn slowly over time and haven’t felt confident with until.. probably just this past year. But I hope any of this is helpful!

#Anonymous

skullcaps

Finally decided to take the time this morning to get some new prints of older works edited and ready to go! I’ve been putting this off for too long. The fishing one was already up but I realized that it was big enough for an 8x10 so I bumped up the size.

Thanks for everyone who’s bought prints in the past, I’ve sold a lot more than I ever expected I would and it’s really awesome to receive such support!

Get them here - http://akitamonster.tictail.com/

skullcaps

I sent out first orders this morning, thank you guys so much for the enthusiasm! Just as a note there is no stock level for these, I print from home so they’re unlimited and the shop will always be open unless something comes up. I’m hoping to take a break to do some new prints after my next round of commission work is over so hopefully I’ll be able to have plenty of new stuff done soon.

#Hunter x Hunter #and thank you for the reblogs as well!!

You do some great paintings, and quality HxH art! Have you ever drawn much Neferpitou or Cheadle at all? Just wondering about those two in particular because I like them. Though there are so many good characters in hxh. It's great.

Thank you, that means a lot!! I have drawn cheadle once quite a while ago

Sadly and weirdly I’ve never drawn pitou even though they’re one of my favorite characters! I need to change that sometime. There are so many good HxH characters that I neglect haha, I have a list a mile long of characters that I adore but never give any love.

#Anonymous

Eeveelution charms are here! Apologies again for terrible photos, I’ll finally be getting a new camera soon..

I’ll get them ready for shipment tomorrow and mailing them wednesday! Thanks so much to everyone who preordered, as always the support of my art means so much! If you’d like to get in on the first shipments you can get them here - http://akitamonster.tictail.com/

I’m happy with how they came out, I hope everyone else is satisfied with them as well! I’ll be doing the rest of the eeveelutions in the next couple of months.

#Pokemon #Eeveelutions #Vaporeon #Sylveon #Jolteon #Espeon #charms

skullcaps

Transparent Eeveelution charm designs because I think they look a bit better like this.

Preorder here! http://akitamonster.tictail.com/product/eeveelution-charms

skullcaps

Getting these ready for order in the next day or two, preorders are still open for them if you’d like to get in on it!

skullcaps

Just as an update these were ordered and should hopefully be here soon! I’m assuming they’re taking longer to be made due to it being a busy time of year with conventions. I’ll let you guys know as soon as I get them in! Once they get here they’ll all be packed and shipped within a day or two.

A new HxH print! It’s a larger print and will take a lot of ink, so I bumped the price a bit since ink costs for my printer are over $300.

It’ll be shipped sometime in May to give me time to order sleeves and tubes, if you wanna preorder it it’s available here - http://akitamonster.tictail.com/

#Hunter x Hunter #Killua #Gon

A little bonus 4x6 postcard I'm including with charm orders! I also have it for sale separately for $5 here: http://akitamonster.tictail.com/

Charm stock has also been updated with the extras I got! I'll be shipping them out in the morning (slight delay because the weather here has been crazy).

#Killua #Gon #Hunter x Hunter

Store Open!

http://akitamonster.tictail.com/

Finally open for print sales!

It's still a work in progress, but for now I think this will be good enough to get used to a new process. I'll be adding more prints as I get older drawings retouched.

Shipment of the first prints should go out later this week or early next week! These are going to be shipped in plastic sleeves and the envelopes will be packed with either foam core board or cardboard, so they should (hopefully) arrive safely unless you have a particularly bad mail carrier. Unfortunately right now I can only offer shipping within the US, but the site is supposedly working on offering more shipping options, so that will be doable in the future!

I'll also be doing other items like charms and bags, so I'll open up some preorders for things like that soon once I get some designs done!

Thanks in advance for anybody that chooses to support me! I'm hoping that doing this can help supplement my income, which so far comes solely from commission work. If prints are lucrative enough it'll help me to keep drawing art and offering more prints of the characters I love that I sadly haven't been able to do as much recently since moneymaking now has to be my prime concern when it comes to art. I really appreciate anyone that chooses to buy my art, it's a level of support that means so much to me!

#prints #Hunter x Hunter #tagging it since that's mostly what's available..

And after much headache, here's the process video for the last drawing I posted! Warning for music. The original video files were 13 hours long (although actual drawing time was probably 11 or so hours since I was doing other things as well).

#Akira #Kaneda