A question about your brush: How do the colors not blend so much with each other?
I'm trying the settings you shared years ago, but when I try to put one color over the other, it blends and comes out much less saturated than the original color.
I'm not sure if there's something I'm missing, I'm still learning how to finagle with colors, but when I watch your speedpaint, the blue comes out as the color selected, without just blending into the colors that are already there and turning out desaturated.
Sorry if this isn't really clear, I didn't know how to explain/describe it.
Hi, Anon!
I'm using CSP now, so I'll be taking screenshots from it. Below is an example drawn with my current brush set up and how i use it.
(Barok profile again, its just very shapely and easy to draw very quickly for examples)
I personally go with this one since i tend to pass by with my brush on an area a few times on one same trace to give it depth or switch to only using the bottom colour for some things (see bottom pics).
If you're using the same brush, but you select the under colour, it looks like this:
Shape before I used only the second colour on the brush:
But! You can also just play with the brush density + paint quantity of the brush so that it comes out more pigmented (the stroke under the arrow was just one with no repassing over any areas)
It doesn't match my style since I often do want to get the more desaturated greyish colours. I prefer the desaturated colours and then adding in the saturation via just by using an opaque brush with no dual colour setting on it on specific part (first orange and blue pic) or repassing with the brush very gently on that area and having the contrast make it look more saturated (see pic below, 1 is the blob example, 2 shows the "saturated colours" of the blob with the ones im mixing besides it).
Ex, I only added that opaque red in the areas surrounded by green, but if you look at it in the version of the image without the green line, but if you colour pick it and say the cheek, you'll see that the cheek is more desaturated but still reads as reddish. (I picked that light blue-surrounded spot because looking at it quickly is was the more saturated looking part of that dual colour brush)
So often it's not that my colours on the dual brush are saturated, it's more like I'm just tricking your eye into thinking they are by what's around it and adding the actual saturated colour in a small amount of places.
Hopefully this helps and makes sense?
Or at least gives you an idea on how to start playing with that type of setting on a brush.
2. most popular piece?
I had to use one of those look up tools for this lol
The one with most notes is this post:
There’s a cat in the phantom thieves, but it’s not the one whom you’d think it is at first glance.
(Protag was designed to be cat like i lo
But the one I see more often popping on my activity nowadays is this one:
The red eye in the sky made me think of the mal de ojo
5. how would you describe your art style?
At the expense of sounding pretentious, probably a bit visceral in the way that it so often has to do with viscera and is crude- I hope it has teeth, even if it doesn't always bite. It's very much on the messy and fantastical side. But I do hope it's a bit eccentric too.
9. whats something you always come back to when drawing?
Ahh, intimacy! As a shipper, I just really like the gravity between two bodies. Though I will say the themes do depend on the ships a lot. Heatserph lends itself to organs, Arginana more to blooms, Asoryuu to snakes...
Do you have any tips for to drawing the face? I keep running into an issue where it feels like I draw eyes too large, or if I try to draw them small, they’re so spaced out from each other that it looks unnatural.
I’m trying to push away from anime influences and lean towards a more stylized but somewhat realistic style
Eh, "general" rule of thumb is to space them about one eye away from each other. There's also that rule that faces are split in 3 with the nose being about the middle of the face and ears going from eye corner to mouth corner and the mouth spans the length from the center of one eye to another(quick drawing to show those "rules").
Now. There are "general rules" not reality- I don't really use them myself. People can have more or less space between their eyes, higher or lower noses, wider or smaller mouths. It'll require practice, and you should do so by drawing real people with reference.
Learn how skeletons look like and what the most obvious muscles/fat deposits are by simplifying the shapes of it until you get it, or by observatio. That would also help you know how to plane things.
After you have a general idea of how what's under the skin works, then you know how the shadows/depths of it would work, so you can skip to just this:
You want to draw real people- don't bother with the current popular hollywood or influence celebrities. They have a lot of work done (or higher chance of it), you won't see the breadth of possible features and their combination on a face as well as how they look like at different angles (or know how to 3D rotate them yourself to know what type of reference to look for). That way, you'll have more features under your toolbelt to build a character's face to reflect how you read their attributes.
(ok I'm exaggerating, you can look at them some times, but your artistic skill and imagination as well as "what does a general person look like" would suffer severely if they are your only examples faces)
Never forget to have fun.
If you are practicing on PC, remember you can always play with the layers to see how your drawing matches. I would say to do that after as a check your homework after you referenced by looking.
Also I'm going to paint or slightly colour, I try to get the shadows plane right from the getgo- it'll pretty much break or make your face and if Idont get those shadows right at first then I'll have a nightmare of a time getting the features right after.
I didnt draw the details of Barok's face in the drawing below until after I got the shadows right so like I did most of the skin texture (the left skin texture TM is a re-creation of what I did- this barok is from November. That's also why theres a random skull, it's from a doodle layer)
Now note that these things work for me. Your approach at colouring, or actually building a face from geometric shapes might work better for you. The important part is that you practice with reference and know what's under the skin so you know how to play with it. It's knowing the rules to know how to break them for stylization.
Your choice of colours is MWAH chefs kiss I want to know how you do it please
Thank you!
I have no idea how helpful this will be...
To be honest, there isnt really that much thought behind how I pick the colours. At this point, I fully go off vibes since I've been at it for a while. I tend to go for a red-orange and then offset it with an unsaturated blue-ish or grey tone. Greys tend to come across green when with a saturated red so you gotta keep in mind to back off on the green saturation. I gravitate to those because of how fleshy most things I draw are and that's a good combo for that without having to add in others.
The greenish colour in this remnant of filths drawing is really just an unpure grey, and fully relying on the hot pink/red for the green tone.
(I draw on CSP but i was too lazy to open it instead of ms paint. Though I wont lie... I have finished some drawings on ms paint)
I try to have one saturated colour and then the rest are just there as support or to help it pop out more by either being a similar value unsaturated colour or unsaturated darker value colour. Saturated colours tend to pop out more when accompanied by greyer colours, and a drawing tends to look more harmonious that way (though like when you know what youre doing you can fully full saturation on all colours. Then it's more a matter of shape and how much of each you use). Oh, and I use a brush in which you input two colours and it auto blends it depending on the pen pressure. If you use CSP, maybe this could help you find where that function is, though note that my settings are in spanish.
I also like using that brush because it makes it easier to incorporate some bounce off from other colours into others or to bleed colours into each other. A lot of drawing is figuring out how to make those colours have a harsh contrast or a soft blended one.
Also, I just have colours I like with certain characters (ex: green+pink for arginanas (but watch out because I often use yellows in place of greens - esp greyed yellow when mixed with pink or red- see below:))
But, I do sometimes just use random colour generators where either like values or sat levels appear in multiple colours. Then the gist is really just figuring out how much of each you add and that will really depend on what youre drawing, its mood, how you feel like, etc etc. Colouring is a nightmare so at this point in my life i tend to go through vibes only.
You can grey scale drawings too to see if what you're doing is working. I personally never do because I like being unhelpful to myself. This is the first time I actually see how close the pale blue and hot pink were in value lol.
That's also the other reason why I tend to pick an un sat colour and a sat colour of very visible different values- I use them to blob out the pose and 3d of it directly.
James Gurney's Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter book would be a million times the help I could give in a general ask. He explains a lot of colour concepts and how colours affect each other by just being besides each other way better than I ever could. It's really good and dense packed with information for ambient lighting, optical illusions examples and pretty much everything one would like to know is a thing when colouring.
If I may be frank for a little, I think your approach to art is the closest I will get to the sort of style and atmosphere I want to convey with my art. I don’t want to outright copy you of course, but I would love to truly understand the thought process behind your art and study it.
I found out about you through your DDS art around when I got into it in like 2020. And I haven’t really found any artists who do it quite like you do. It’s so raw and clear yet messy all the same, and I love it.
I can’t quite understand the way you do things yet, but I hope your influence on my art is very clear because I have really looked up to you for years.
Thank you for the wonderful art. ❤️
Thank you, I'm really flattered to hear! I hope someday you're comfortable enough to show me a piece.
Don't worry, I understood it was more of inspiration and not copying that you wanted to do. I think dissecting what others do to see why you like it so that you can digest it and give it your own touch is good. You only improve by studying and all.
I think making sure that the values are clear can help something messy still read very clear. A lot of it is also just finding what you can get away with implying rather than drawing to help guide the eye- which is pretty hard. I still gotta get better at that lol
As for thought process. I would say being a pervert will give you a boost. It's also a bit more difficult to explain, because often it's just my brain making random connections that sometimes make sense, other times not. The short answer is I vibe and let the folds of my brain trib.
Like for this one below, I grabbed one of those grape clusters because I wanted to snack and i just thought "holding it like this looks like a lung lol" like you know, alveoli. They look like grapes in medical diagrams!
Which I suppose is just another way of saying I like seeing ghosts of other things. What are roots if not veins and branches if not bronchiole and red cardinals really do look like pomegranates if you think about it. Little tuft of hair uptop, the colour...
And visual metaphors are metaphors, so you can always use something else as a stand in for what you mean to give it a new layer. Cardinal mating habits include the male feeding its mate in what looks like a kiss.
So you're just going to have to get interested in things. Read to be exposed to new ways to describe things and new expressions, in your own language or ones you're learning. The arginana below is based on a japanese expression that literally translates to "a hand comes out of (my/your/etc) throat" to express wanting something very badly.
This one here is literally just a sex joke:
I thought that Varna's neck things looked like a vagina, and concha is a slang (in spanish) to refer to the female genitalia. I think I captioned these "cometela"? That's like "Go fuck yourself" but literally translates to "go eat your(own)" as in give yourself head.
The other thing is don't skip on having some more than basic understanding on how the components making your subject work under the surface. If you know what lies under, it's easier to warp its skeleton while also making it still look cohesive. It helps to find more metaphors or echoes of other things too, like turning Ryuu's pin into a rosary, echoing it in the scars Barok van Zieks has, among reasons.
A lot of these decisions are made on a whim when I sit down to draw, so it's something you'll develop as you go, just as you'll develop your own visual language. And just as language grows the more concepts there are to communicate, so will your artistic arsenal the more you observe things. I personally read a lot of science stuff and have other hobbies that can help me learn something new to add into my art.
You'll get to the point where you, too, will find how to make life be perverted.
(Note that im very tongue in cheek about being a pervert, but I don't mean you have to make it horny. There are so many different ways to be a pervert, after all.)
24. whats a compliment about your art that has always stuck with you?
Oh, I really like the anon that said that it felt like my art was gnawing on their bones! That one, and the one where they mentioned that my art made them realized they were gay. Another one I really liked was the person who said it made them think of Florence+the Machine's music.
34. whats something you still like from your old art?
I have good ideas, I really like the comics and stuff I've done.
As for art wiseI think I'll have to say the sketchy lines, like in these:
I think they give them such nice moods.
Also the line of motion. Sometimes, I drew the weight of things/their interaction in a very pleasing to my eye way.
12. describe your process while drawing
I let the demons win.
Joking aside, I really do just sketch out silhouettes and blobs until something catches my attention and gives me an idea. Then I just sketch and colour all at once. It's a messy process, that uses maybe two layers max. Sometimes though, the first step is that I see a set of colours that I think look neat together and then I use them to start putting in the silhouettes, so i start kind of colouring before I even sketch anything or have an idea of what I want to draw. Sometimes, I even draw a rectangular frame first to limit the drawing, as I draw everything on one big canvas
Example of the "process"
(on here I had those 5 colours already in the canvas- I used it for some porn doodle. Anyway, I used the orange and pale blue to do the silhouettes/blurs and then just blocking of stuff with the others)
Since I draw everything in like a layer or two, I redraw things I dont like like the snake on ryuu's nose in that left panel. After I just add random stuff that I think either frames it better or makes it look more cohesive to my eye.
(edit: oh oops 5 and 6 are the same image my bad)
My friend, on how I draw:
What I mean by multiple drawings on the same canvas layer (as in there are more layers just like this in one canvas. I think once I made like an 200MB file because I just kept everything in it. If I were to turn on all layers on multiply it would probably look like a giant black canvas. This canvas contains quick old film screenshot "studies" that I managed to convince myself to do for like 2 weeks before I just stopped being dilligent ):
I've been thinking of recording the "process" one of these days. Maybe next time I do happen to come in with a theme before i open CSP.
18 is here!
19. where do you find inspiration?
Everywhere. Plants, organs, animals, physics, songs, cultural practices, word etymology or word plays or idioms...
Also sometimes I just go "hahaha wouldnt it be funny if (...)" and that's that. I tried to find the more obvious example of each but I did get lazy, so I didnt scroll far enough back to show something based off of redshifting which would have been a more obvious physics example.
29. do you use a lot of references while drawing?
Ah, this is a terrible habit of mine- I don't use them. I really should, it would make things much, MUCH easier. Any other artist out there looking at my stuff- please don't do what I do, and actually help yourself to them. They aren't cheating, I just forget to look for them when I draw. But I suppose that has to do with my rarely knowing what I want to draw before I'm like already with the program open and doodling.
8. thing you struggle to draw?
Children. I don't get much practice at drawing them, since I rarely draw anything that would involve them, but I can draw them ok enough after a bit of struggle. if not, I think dogs? Oh wait- definitely cute mascot characters. Look at the one time I drew Mona.
28. whats a piece you would like to redraw at some point?
Hm. I don't think there's really one? Except for that one P2 Maya drawing and the Lilith+Lilim drawing, I tend to let art go and then accidentally do a redraw because I used the themes again LMAO
I guess maybe finally do something more visually interesting with this:
