Origin of my process
@bread-atronach idk if you were serious in the tags or just ooh aahing but...
You remember back in grade school in computer class when there was a pause and nothing to do, so you’d open up Microsoft Paint and throw down a bunch of shapes kind of like this...
And then you’d start filling it with color...
And to make it more fun, the colors couldn’t touch...
So you’d get something like this?
And if you felt ambitious or particularly bored, you’d make weird shapes. Either a mix of polygons or ones that just weren’t squares.
Well suddenly it’s not mindless-- it’s now a logic puzzle. That big white space shares a side with 8 other shapes. This puzzle can’t be done with just two colors. If I want to keep it to three, I have to make sure there’s no green touching it so I can make it green...
In doing so, I had to add waaay more green than I had spaces open. I had to swap out several color shapes. Now, as a ten year old on a computer without internet before wifi was a thing, I would either go “sure yeah whatever” and start a new one, or I’d make it pretty.
I was not the only ten year old to do this.
THAT is the basis for my “mosaic style”.
I wouldn’t have started it except my tendinitis flared up DRAMATICALLY and I... cannot hold a pen... Or I couldn’t. I recently found some chiropractic videos on youtube about adjusting your own wrists and hands, and my tendinitis has gotten better since.
For my current art... Here’s a picture I’m just gonna trace over that I grabbed off of google
Then using straight lines (I use firealpaca. It’s shift with a brush) I’ll do something like this
Now, NORMALLY I’ll have a rough sketch of what I want. I don’t just... trace over a cat.... But my hands hurt, it’s 3 am, and I am too irritated to sleep SO
When I’m satisfied with that, I drop the lines to black
Realize I need more lines to better define the shapes as I go along and.... Voila!
For the most part, each shape is just a plane on the surface, but the shapes define the .... shape... of the object because shading is dependant on... the shapes.... I need another word. It’s 3am now. But THIS only took me about 15 minutes. The cat I mean. So once I get a sketch I like it’s smooth (ish) sailing from there.
Less tends to be more, as the third era Sotha Sil I got way into and had waaaay too many shapes on him. Also fucked up my pen size oops. Where as the one of Revus has far more limited shapes (polygons?) and looks waaaaaay more refined and intentional.
So other than the initial sketch, I don’t use my tablet pen at all. I don’t even use my tablet.