#info asks

[sanctus-ingenium]

I love the way you draw wings 🥹 they’re so realistic but very stylised at the same time, do you have any tips or tutorials for drawing them?

ya

a million people have made better wing tutorials than this but i think the best way to get a wing to look nice is to understand how it folds & what movements it can make in 3D space & how angle and perspective affect feathers. think of it like fanning out a deck of playing cards and viewing it edge-on

[chivi-chivik]

People really like your other blog, and I thought you abandoned it.

I abandoned it. I’m fully aware I abandoned it. I still must do something before announcing the closure and leaving it for real (But I’m heavily procrastinating on it. My bad. 😅)

But yeah, it’s abandoned, and I have no intention of reopening it again. I want to focus on building an artistic career and becoming a professional artist instead.

However, I’m also fully aware that people love that blog. I got so many asks through conversation (which is forbidden) that basically show me that people really liked it. But alas, I can’t live off making SPM asks. Sorry.

[sparxwrites]

Really weird Segway but I grew up reading and writing exclusively gay porn. I’m a female and now that I’m older I’ve come out as lesbian but I’m really weirded out by seeing f/f kissing or anything of that nature. I’m thinking it might have something do to with my only showing of these things was with males and no women involved. I do have urges to be with women but I get very nervous and sick to my stomach over trying to initiate anything/thinking of it.

Yeah, you’re definitely not alone in this. I’m bi (though at the Kinsey 5 end of the scale), so I’m perhaps not the best person to address this from a lesbian perspective, but this is a common thing for bi/lesbian women, even those who haven’t read/written lots of gay erotica. We’ve got a lot of internalised misogyny and lesbo-/homophobia to deal with, and a lot of guilt and fear, and having that affect how we feel about romantically or sexually involving ourselves with women is perfectly normal.

The gay porn probably isn’t helping, though. I know from a personal perspective, it fucked up my ability to relate to my own body/sexuality in ways I’m still working through. Not that I think gay erotica is bad in and of itself, but when that’s the only image of sexuality you have and you’re saturated with it... erotica/orgasms/arousal are really, really good at reinforcing stuff, and if what it’s reinforcing is constantly “two men having sex”, that’s not doing anything good for any female sexuality - least of all lesbian sexuality.

I don’t have much in the way of advice for this, other than that easing off the gay erotica might be a good idea. Try and read/write stuff that focuses on f/f relationships - and not just porn, either. Definitely do not watch lesbian porn, but if you can find shows with good, healthy depictions of f/f relationships, that might help. Hell, find a bi/lesbian women’s social group near you, if you can! It’s often helpful to be in an environment that normalises your sexuality, if you’re struggling with it. (And also- if you’ve never been involved with a woman before, or even moreso if you’ve never been involved with anyone before, fear and anxiety around romance and sexuality is not uncommon. Try not to worry about it, or you’ll just wind yourself even tighter. <3 ) As always, though, if you have access to a (good) therapist or counsellor or some kind of professional, even a good and trusted helpline/online advice service, they’re good people to talk about with this. Many bigger cities have LGBT-specific advice probably have better advice than a rando on the internet who doesn’t even study sexuality.

(I’ve seen this in a lot in younger kids questioning if they’re trans, too, incidentally, which is partially why it’s so heavily on my radar. Like “I’ve read and written and rp’ed tonnes and tonnes of gay erotica and now I can’t imagine having sex as anything other than a gay dude, am I trans?” like! No duh! I’ve no idea whether you’re trans or not, but also having your sexual fantasies affected by the erotica you read is totally normal! It concerns me that I don’t see fandom addressing this (other than in the derisive “oh lol fujoshi” kind of way, which doesn’t help anyone). Whilst exploring your sexuality is a normal part of growing up, the predominance of gay erotica in fandom (whilst understandable! Men are the default, men don’t have to worry about misogyny, there’s hardly any good female characters in most mainstream shows) is something I think we need to talk about from a “what is this doing to young people who are growing up and discovering their sexuality solely through this” perspective. Especially given the increasing evidence of how badly video porn damages even established, adult sexuality - I don’t think erotica is anywhere near as bad, but I do think shying away from these kinds of discussions is not doing us, as a community, any favours.)

[injureddreams]

Hello! I was wondering where you get your stickers, prints or other merch printed? I’m looking to get some done myself but don’t know where to go 🤔

Hi Nonie!

I print both my stickers and prints from home~ I’m lucky enough to have found a really nice printer that’s both cost efficient and prints wonderful prints. But I know that on a pinch Staples has good printing services and I hear a lot of people use Catprint. Havent used them myself but I heart good things about them. I hope this helps you nonie ♥ 

[sanctus-ingenium]

i’m sorry i phoned it in but this is how i do literally every single shiny metallic surface. another tip is to add surface detail to something just so that you can pin highlights to it, that way you’re not faced with a big blank space to fill up

and to be honest, you can bullshit 99% of these armour embossing designs. i mean look at them. i didn’t even make them symmetrical. their only purpose is to help define the form

my last step is usually to go ham panting over the lines. most of what u see in a finished image is me having painted over the lines (u can see that clearly on the pendant). u can see in this one that i disregarded my lines in a lot of places and just kinda freestyled it.but u can also see that i place the highlights right up against the dark bits. this armour was very shiny so those dark bits are reflections rather than shadows (i guess?)

👍

[sanctus-ingenium]

hi im so sorry if youve already answered this but how do u go about selecting the colors you use for your works!

hi! i've had this question a few times and every time i've only been able to answer with a vague sort of 'ehhh i just pick them'. but i think i'll actually talk some more about it now since a lot of my art actually takes a lot of beating before i decide on a final palette. but with a lot of them admittedly i already know what palette i'm using, and i organise the whole composition around those colours.

i use like two main palette methods and here they are (once you see it in my art, you won't unsee it). It mainly involves picking one main hue, and then a contrasting secondary colour.

So the most basic is to have a drawing be mostly a small range of hues, in this case the reds and oranges, and adding a single contrasting shade. Here it is the bounce light on the metallic metal parts, and doesn't appear anywhere else. It looks blue but it isn't - if I used actual blue, it would be too jarring and the colours would not appear unified. This is a warm and nice scene. So instead I pick that strong blue and blend it into a small swatch of the base colour. Then I pick from the blended portion, and what I get will be more blue than the base, but not actually blue. In fact it is yellow-orange :) The entire drawing looks warm as a result.

When working with marginally stronger contrast, here I have a cream unicorn on a green background. The main shadows on the unicorn will be the colour of that ambient room temperature bg - green. So I use the same test swatch method to pick a shadow colour which LOOKS green without being too disruptive of the cream unicorn. I increase the saturation and darken the value (moving the colour dot diagonally to the lower right hand corner of the box) and also spin the whole wheel towards green just a bit. Then I blend into the cream and colour pick a shade in the middle. But for the bounce light, I chose to use a common contrast of green - pink. It looks like pink in the drawing but in fact it is a low saturation orange! Using that real pink would be disharmonious. I do the exact same thing - I blend the pink into the bg colour and come up with that orange shade. It looks harmonious.

Now (top example) I am using two contrasting hues side by side. I decide the shadows will be warm, and the highlights in that contrasting zone. That means that for every colour i pick - Islin's skin, hair, his glasses, his shirt collar, his coat - every colour gets slid around the colour wheel until it falls inside that narrow band. And when I am highlighting his skin, I turn the wheel towards green. When I am shading his skin, I turn the wheel more red. I do this for every single element in the drawing.

It's the same for the Rua cover but this time I am not using such a wide band of available hues on the colour wheel, it's much tighter. I did this to replicate the look of a faded print, intentionally lowering the available contrast I had to work with by removing black as tool. It's all in that small cream to red window but it LOOKS purple - it looks like Pascal wears a purple shirt and that the smoke in the bg is lilac. Well, it isn't. That's all red and orange. I pick those colours by, again, choosing my goal "look" - a low-saturation purple, and then turning the wheel into the red range.

Okay so! for this it's just... the exact same thing again. Literally it always is. But since this one is recent I still have the process fresh in my mind. I envisioned it in the car, and I wanted this empty sort of desolate blue bg and a cold, distant overall tone. I ended up making the white on the chessboard & white pieces warmer, cream instead of white-grey, which worked out great. I wanted the blue, I wanted the pale cream/white, and the black of the chessboard. I didn't envision a colour for Pascal's shirt. but when the time came it was an obvious choice. It has to contrast with the bg both in value and hue, without falling outside the cream range already established by the chess pieces. So it's shiny salmon pink :) or orange, whatever you think it is. The only disharmonious part of this palette is the red velvet under the black knight piece - it works, but if I'd taken more care I might have spun the wheel more into orange and it would stand out less. But I don't mind.

[sanctus-ingenium]

hi!! i was wondering if you could share the marker brush that you used to paint the beetle boy, it looks so good! please and thank you 💜

These guys right here