#autthesnot

[autthesnot]

POV: You’re isekai’d into the Path-E-Tech office circa 1999

[autthesnot]

Would yall still love me if I posted Dilbert fan art

(Your answer won’t change the outcome)

[autthesnot]

Helloooooooo

I made a Toyhouse so I could have a more browsable archive of my character art!

Check it out ⬊Here ⬋ if you wanna snoop around the past couple years of my OCs

If you have questions or comments please feel free to leave them here or there :>

[autthesnot]

Hey, in your bobs burgers drawing (which is really good BTW) you draw on brown background. I've seen a lot of other artists do this too and I am just wondering why that is?

Thank you in advance if you answer this (no sweat if you don't!) and have a good timezone.

There are a few reasons for this actually!! Thank you for sending an ask, I love to geek out about art stuff like this.

For digital specifically, it reduces eyestrain, drawing high contrasting lines against a bright white background starts to hurt after a while. It doesn’t have to specifically be brown, but picking something a lil darker than white helps and not super saturated helps. I usually tend toward browns and like blue-grays (just depends on the vibe lol). I sometimes go a step further and will use something lighter than black against something darker than white (like for example, I enjoy an army green against beige). This is partially for like, feeling out colors and having fun, but it’s also just easier to look at over the course of several hours.

This is more of a traditional art stand point (but that’s where my education lies lol) Once you get to coloring or rendering, it kinda helps you identify the values (lightness/darkness) of the colors you’re going to use. If you already know what general color the BG will be it’s nice to work off of that, I usually go in Not Knowing That lol. If you have a more painterly style (which the Bob drawing isn’t the best example of) it also really unifies your color choices if you integrate or mix your background colors with your subject’s colors. When working traditionally I will physically mix a bit of my background paint colors with my more “star of the show” colors, and with digital you can do this by lowering the opacity (making something more see-through) or blending/including it throughout your drawing.

I straight up forgot to post the finished piece but here are some examples to illustrate the point some:

So you can kinda see how on pure white the shadows seem overly dramatic and things are comparatively dark. And with pure black, everyone seems weirdly glowy and they’re all very bright. And then on the neon green (for an extreme example) it really makes the color balance weird. Most of my art is very saturated in general, so this example isn’t very extreme, but a super bright background can really wash out a vibrant drawing and make it seem more bland, in addition to like making complimenting colors seem really extreme and similar colors more drab (like Linda’s red shirt seeming Extra Red against green, and everyone looking more orangey, but also Louise’s dress looking more murky)

For comparison against the brown, the colors are more grounded, you get the best of both worlds of seeing what is Actually dark and light. It isn’t a saturated color (but not fully gray) so the skin tones are less orange by comparison. In my real final piece I just ripped a background from the show and lowered the opacity over this brown to kinda draw attention away from it and keep the focus on the characters. (I’ll post it in a sec oops)

If anyone else has questions about why artists do certain things please feel free to send an ask, I am happy to explain anything I know!!