#art talk

[mcromwell]

Gotta walk before you can run! Getting back into the studio is always an exercise in pacing yourself... By doing fun, stupid paintings 😜

[akanemnon]

How do you go about designing outfits for lightners in the dark world? Everybody has a process and I'm curious to hear yours! :>

My process behind it? I talk how I went about it in my comic in this document right here.

Making TWIN RUNES - Akane's Ko-fi Shop

Ever wondered what it takes to make an ongoing comic series? This is not a how-to, but a little insight of what went into the creation of m

But generally speaking, I take a lot of inspiration from Final Fantasy and DnD. I assign a class/job to every character and built the design around it. For that, I look up a lot of different references.

This was one part of a larger commission for someone who is planning on creating an AU, where the roles of our three heroes are swapped. With Susie taking the role of Ralsei, it wouldn't have made sense to go into the exact direction Ralsei's design works, since her personality stays pretty much intact. So I looked into the direction of battle mages and designed the outfit around that class. (Did Kris and Ralsei too. But the Ralsei design was already set in stone.)

Colors are chosen depending on if a character is a monster or human. The colors of monsters are slightly hue shifted. There is no right or wrong way to choose colors for humans. As far as I can tell, you can just go wild. I personally like linking back to soul traits, or do subtle connections like with Kris and Frisk.

And in general, colors in the Dark World are a lot more saturated and bright.

[sbeep]

Subsurface light - CLIP STUDIO ASSETS

Make illustrations, manga, comics and animation with Clip Studio Paint, the artist’s tool for drawing and painting. All you need for drawing

Catering to my own laziness, I put together an auto-action for cell-shaded scattered light in Clip Studio. Draw on your light, hit the button, adjust hues and layer mode as needed. (Pictured here are the unaltered function results.)

[fimbry]

Actually insane the way I'll start reading a fic and notice the upload date was like 15 years ago. Your old works still reach new readers. ❤️ Art is timeless.

[ephemeral-roses]

A very important skill that artists need to know is how to draw different types of women, not just different types of men.

When I say that, I mean face shapes, eye shapes, nose shapes, ear shapes, body types, weights, heights, etc.

Whatever details you will gladly give to male characters, be gladly willing to give it to female characters.

This is why people are growing tired of the designs of female leads in Disney movies. They may be ethnically diverse, but they all have to follow strict design rules that male leads don't need to follow.

[blackfilmmakers]

Alright, I think I got what I needed, thanks everyone!

So the reason I made that poll was because (looks left, looks right)… I don’t really make my (brown) characters’ palms lighter 😅.

I know, I really should. But I never considered why that was the case for the longest time, even though in the back of my mind I knew that’s how our palms be. Then I saw this portion of a “How to Draw a Black Lady” comic a long while ago on Pinterest:

I guess this comic clicked something in me and other Black artists that shared similar experiences; these cartoons be traumatizing us 😭😭😭😭😭😭.

As you could guess from the name, “Mammy Two Shoes” was an antiblack caricature that was often Tom’s owner (?) or a personal nanny (?) in some Tom and Jerry episodes. We hardly saw her face, so all we got from her is that she was loud, big, mean, and practically had literal paws for hands 🫤.

This seemed to be common amongst other cartoons that featured minstrels (Looney Tunes, Disney). When caricatures weren’t wearing those bright white gloves as they did in live minstrel shows (often to contrast against the pitch black skin), the animators would have these Black characters’ palms be extremely lighter than the rest of the body’s skintone. Which yknow, can happen to an extent, but it’s the way they are drawn with the hard cut of the two colors that bothered me (Like how Two Shoes’ looks. There’s no blend!). Anime also did this a lot (See Mr. Popo). I’m sure it still does.

Black artists have made plenty of tutorials on how to properly color in Black people’s hands, but idk, it just never seemed right when I do it 😔🤙🏾. I do wonder if it’s cuz I’m still on my art journey, and as of now my style is more on the cartoony end. I did notice some of y’all mentioned if it’s a simplistic or cartoon style, you avoid doing so. I hardly draw the wrinkles and folds of the hands in my art, so maybe my brain is unconsciously associating that with Two Shoes’ paw hands 😒.

Still, it’s that same trauma these cartoons be projecting that have us struggling to give our characters red lipstick, toothgaps, or even certain Black hairstyles. And with the way folks treated Annie from Sinners and that statue of the fat Black woman, that trauma if left unchecked can turn into internalized bigotry real quick.

I‘ll get there eventually, but I think I gotta become more confident in my shading and highlights if I hope to get a better sense of the way I color my characters.

Not all art styles necessarily need these traits if their white and nonblack characters are hardly detailed either. Needless to say, animators and artists still gotta be vigilant in this stuff. Like even in the comic, I get yucks with the Steven Universe lips style, cuz it often can easily become donut lips from what I’ve seen. Which, I mean -

[darkrooklobby]

Sometimes I have to remind myself that posting art online is like screaming into a void 🙃🦉✌️

The new year holds a lot of issues for me. Art is difficult, life as an artist is difficult, and the world isn't kind. The sense of impending doom and failure looms over me. Why is nothing ever easy?