#q&a: process

[soursoppi]

How did you learn what's right and what's not? Like, you learned theory and start doodling stuff but how do you know if the hand is supposed to curve like that or this leg can bend in that direction. How do you know what parts are wrong and needed to be fixed?

I’ve talked about this before (though it was about drawing robots but the advice can be applied here as well)

Basically, you don’t have to draw things accurately to draw things in a satisfying manner. There’s no right and wrong to drawing. Beyond accuracy and anatomy, there’s also stylisation and aesthetics.

Anatomy is only there as a tool to help you develop your style. How far you wish to go with details or accuracy depends on what kind of style you wish to develop.

What kind of style you develop is informed by the materials or subjects you reference. If you aim for a realistic style, then anatomical accuracy would be a priority for you. That means learning how to make anatomically correct drawings, whether by starting from figure/gesture drawings or by drawing from life and training up your eye to hand observational skills from there.

When you approach this as a right/wrong problem, you’re sabotaging your own efforts and setting yourself up for frustration. There’s no right and wrong, there’s only what you wish to draw, and how you're gonna do it.

If you are unsure about how the human body bends, it’s simply a matter of sitting down, observing how an actual human body bends and translating that observation from your eye to your paper. 

If there are poses that you don’t know how to draw, there are drawing techniques to help you make sense of space and dimensions, like foreshortening and perspective. These are all drawing tools- but to use them successfully also means figuring out what you aim to use them for, and how they can help you get what you want.

At the end of the day, more importantly than knowing how to draw a bent leg, is how you problem solve. What’s your goal, what process or style are you aiming for. What reference or guide can you source in order to learn how to draw a bent leg the way you envision. Not all legs are drawn the same, nor do you have to draw the same way as everyone else. But learning how to figure things out, and to pick up strategies for overcoming drawing challenges- that’s more important imo.

[soursoppi]

how do you put out so much content consistently? i feel like you have a new drawing so often does it get overwhelming?

Like running marathons, when you train up your stamina and get in the groove of things, generating content comes faster and easier the more you do it. Speaking from experience, it’s always hellish at the start when you struggle with building up your limits and overcoming plateaus.

But once you start figuring things out, things actually go surprisingly smoothly (of course there are whoopsie months, like the past July for me but ah... life happens lol, gotta take it in stride).

When I first started drawing seriously I would obsessively nitpick my WIPs and in the end would only finish like 1 piece a year, but sketch 99 pieces. What changed things for me was starting this blog and responding to Asks. I changed how I approached “finished” pieces, rather than overworking things I focused more on drawing ideas to the best I can within a limited time frame. Having a time frame was probably the most important part, since it taught me how to move on to the next idea.

When you stop asking for perfection, it becomes less daunting to produce content. There are peeps who are suited to spending 1 month producing 1 piece, or to make very refined and clean art. Part of generating content is figuring out what sort of artist you are and what pace/style suits you. 

(I actually find my art very messy and don’t like it too much lol, but I realise peeps don’t actually mind the messiness, and so I’ve learnt to accept it as part of my style. I’m not exactly the most efficient with it too ah....)

That being said I make it a point not to overthink AUs or drawings, because I’ve been down that route. The more you plan for something, the less you’re likely to put it into action. That’s how it becomes overwhelming, when you stand at the very start of the track and try to count the hundreds of steps it’d take you to reach the end. Really the best thing to do is to split your journey up into manageable sections and tackle each section a step at a time.

Over the course of running this blog, I’ve gotten to know my brain well lol- in the sense that I know my brain usually has some sort of half-baked idea or whim floating around in there- the issue then becomes more of whether I’m willing to expend the energy and effort into drawing the idea, or to scrap it and figure out something else easier to draw.

Imo a lack of content generation/art block is more an imbalance between the effort you’d have to put in to render an idea, rather than the lack of one. Which again- the more you draw, the less you overwork things, the more you get in the groove of your style/process- the more likely you are to produce content. The biggest struggle is really figuring out how to draw things, when you’re able to do it without struggling too much, popping them out becomes a lot less overwhelming.

(I’d say it also helps that I’m energised by sitting at home and drawing and have 0% interest in socialising lol. I’m happy being an asexual introvert but it ain’t the life for everyone.)

tldr: don’t overthink things, don’t overwork things, know when to cut your losses or to make an extra effort- gradually build up to the pace you want

[soursoppi]

Your art is so beautiful! ♥️ I was curious how long did it take for you to find your own style and stick with it?

Aww thank you!! Regarding style I’ve talked pretty indepth about the technical aspects before so I won’t go over that part again, but basically I use bright colors and thick lines in order to help me break down the image more effectively into shapes/blocks because that’s how my brain processes images.

As for how long it took me to find it- I guess it’s hard to put a scope to it because I don’t feel like there’s a definite day when I was like “yes this is it!”? It’s more of a culmination of formative experiences, where I’d look at a comic, a piece of art or design and go “ooh I like that a lot, I want to try recreating that”. 

Although if I had to pin it down to a specific period of my life I’d say it was when I entered art school and started having to produce fully rendered stuff rigorously, that’s when I really started figuring my style or as I prefer to think of it: my “process”. Every “jump” I can define in regards to my drawing power level is always tied to me suddenly drawing full rendered pieces on a daily or near daily basis.

I used a cooking analogy to describe it once- if you chop and chop, and do nothing but chop you are never going to figure out how to actually cook a complete dish. In the same way if you sketch and sketch, and do nothing but sketch you are never going to figure out how to fully render an illustration.

There’s a lot that goes into cooking that dish, your ability to estimate ingredients, to know how long to cook things for, when to add things and when to take things out. It all affects how that dish will taste at the end. And figuring out a style is something like that, in which you figure out your drawing stamina, the limits of your processing power, how your brain breaks down and reforms images, and you take that knowledge and translate it into a process you can reliably replicate. That becomes your style.

[soursoppi]

How long have you been drawing transformers? I've been trying to work on drawing my Transformers and my TF OCs, but of course I have no idea how to work on drawing, designing, and creating them. It's mainly with perspective and expressions. I'm just trying to figure out what I should work on to be just as an amazing artist as you are!

Since January this year lol- or the start of this blog. I have to admit I’m not much of a robot person- when it comes to robot designs my natural preference is actually for the bestial animalism of NGE’s Evas. And even then I find it difficult to achieve the sort of mechanical detailing that robot designs usually incorporate. So for the longest time I never really got into the TF/robot lovers fandom simply because I felt like it’d be too difficult to draw robots.

Anyway my perspective on that changed after I saw Bonnini’s Casa MegOP stuff- and subsequently found peeps like juanmaodepp/pompoof who managed to translate intimidating robot designs into something more doable as someone who can’t deal with too much detailing.

The main thing I realised here: You do not need to draw robots accurately to draw them satisfyingly. Like I’ve mentioned before no one draws the robots exactly as they should appear- most popular and successful artists (and sometimes even the official comics) stylise the robots to an extent to accommodate the difficulty of drawing them (as you can see below with Megs- same design but done differently and to different levels of detail.)

There’s no “RIGHT” or “WRONG” way to draw robots. Leaving off details or simplifying difficult designs isn’t a sin that will result in people telling you to get out of fandom and to stop drawing robots. (I mean even Livio Ramondelli is still hanging on lmao- so if he can why not you?)

Once you realise that drawing robots is only as intimidating as you allow it to be, it gets a lot easier to draw them.

As for what you can do to work on improving your robot drawing skills- it helps to find artists whose drawing styles are similar enough to yours that you can understand their tricks and techniques for breaking down and stylising designs.

Everybody breaks down the robot designs differently, and builds them back up differently. If I were to try to emulate Milne for example I’d give up and die because I’m a painter not a liner- but with Sarah Stone who illustrates in a painterly fashion like me- I can understand her drawing process better and thereby borrow more from her to do up my own stuff. Milne draws them better but Sarah suits my process more.

So to summarise:

1. Don’t sweat the details. If Livio can make it, so can you lol.

2. Everybody draws the robots differently. It is best to find someone who matches you stylistically- and learn from them how to adapt robot designs. Rather than just picking someone you like, pick someone you can understand.

3. Ref, ref and ref. There is no shame in referencing. Want to draw a tank OC but have no idea where to start? Look at Tarn, Megs, TFP!Shockwave or even Roller. Trying to create something from nothing is just an exercise in frustration and futility. Even Da Vinci had to use refs.

[soursoppi]

I love your art style!! It's so refreshing and the colors you use are so neat! If it's not too much trouble, may i please ask how you found your art style and how you choose colors? I struggle with having a proper art style and I just really love yours! AAAAAAAAAA

Haha thank you for the love! :D Sure I’d be happy to talk ‘bout it.

Regarding style there’s a few things that led to me doing things the way I do.

1. My personality lolI’m impatient and easily bored (Aries curse lmao) so try as I might to be patient with the drawing process I always end up rushing things (this trait is terrible for doing detailed lineart or solid linework hahaha). So I was always trying to find a style that would work with that trait rather than forcing myself to work against it. Know who you are, work with your strengths rather than against it. My traits play to speed/roughness and vivid/high contrast images (cause I like things fast and POW-WOW)- so I gravitated towards styles that helped me achieve that.

2. Blocking VS Lining- know which type you areOne thing that really helped was recognising the kind of visualising process I used. I could never for the life of me figure out how to properly visualise an image with a b&w lineart- for me it would always devolve into a mess of indecipherable lines. I can do sketches fine- but those intricate linework you see for comic covers? My brain ain’t wired that way.However I realised that I work better when I block in shapes partway through. (Like here) I found that if I broke down an image into shapes instead, I could work much faster and to a higher level of quality and finish than if I had tried to go the entire thing based on a lineart alone.This ain’t to say that a blocker can’t emulate a liner-esque style lol. But you need to know how your brain works first before you can develop tricks or techniques to achieving the effect you want.

3. Drawing StrategySo keeping in mind the two points above- I’m terrible with drawing clean lines, and I like to think with shapes (or negative/positive space in other words) I look at my drawing process. My style is guided by how I break down an idea AND put together an image so any drawing process you strategise should work with that.For me, I love clean and thick lines. But I’m terrible with lineart yes lol. So usually I start with a rough sketch -> block the colours in -> merge the sketch/colour layer -> refine the shapes and edges -> finally line the edge when I’m happy with the shape.

So while the end result looks like I had started work from a clean and refined lineart- filling in the colours after all that. I actually did the opposite of that- I started with a shape first and ended with lines. So the style you ultimately develop or work towards should be a style that works with how you see things and think about things.

Regarding colours lol, well there isn’t really much to talk on beyond the basics of colour theory.

1. Learn to use warm and cold colours.

A good rule of thumb is warm to warm- cold to cold. To warm up colours- add more yellow. To cool down colours- add more blue.

2. Use colour overlays to tie together an imageSometimes I get to the end of the drawing process and the colours clash. An easy way to tie them together is to use a colour overlay. I kinda overdid it in the example below lol, but basically it helps to align the majority of colours in the image to one hue.

3. Experience and experiment.Colour choices are honestly a personal thing imo lol, I’ve met people who absolutely hated my choices in colours, and people who loved them. But that’s the same for me. I seek out people or cultures who use colours in the way I enjoy (e.g. Japanese design/Scandinavian textiles) and avoid those who don’t lol (modern British design/abstract/fractal art).

Nothing bad about the stuff I dislike- just a personal choice. Anyway like a muscle- the more you use it the better you get at manipulating it. So keep a library of images/artists that you like and look through it when you’re at a loss with colour match-ups. There’s a lot you can learn about picking colours from what others have done haha.

Hope it helps :D