✦ (N)SFW: This blog is 16+. I sometimes post blood and gore, possibly body horror, some nudity or imagery suggestive of sexual situations, and themes you’d expect in gothic fiction and horror such as corruption, religion, coercion, manipulation, murder, (self) mutilation etc. Let me know if you need any triggers tagged.
✦ Do not repost my art anywhere, and don't use my original art/characters/designs as your OCs or NPCs, or anything in that vein. Please respect my wishes, thank you.
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✦ ART PRINTS @ INPRNT
⤷ All my prints are automatically +25% off whenever INPRNT has some kind of sitewide sale! They have sales often, so I will no longer make a post here each time there is one.
will you ever open commissions again? i wanted to commission you a few years back but i missed the window unfortunately
Hi! I probably will at some point at least briefly, but I can't tell you when. However I can tell you I fantasize about quitting my job every single day, so maybe in the summer?
Hellooo I've been blissfully offline for the past few weeks working on a project that's been on my mind for a very long time now!
I've scoured every source I could think of and made a list of nearly every named location in post-conjunction Barovia and their exact or approximate locations when possible, with the goal of painting a huge map not for gaming, but something that Strahd might have/had at Ravenloft.
Others have made maps with all locations on them (there are awesome maps over at r/ravenloft), but what I want out of mine is somewhat sensible geography, my preferred placement of places we don't know the location of, e.g. Renika, and omitting locations I personally don't feel the need to include.
Started with the physical sketch but realized there's little point in placing many of the locations if i don't know where the rivers are, and to place those I had to figure out the mountain range and valleys until I got something that feels good.
With these sketches done I'm pretty happy with the geography and I'll move onto designing a frame and settling on an art style for the final painting :^)
i recently came across the concept art for Alfred, Hunter of Vilebloods, from Bloodborne, and it reminded me of Kaspar. i think it's the sideburns and outfit.
was there any inspiration, or is it pure coincidence ? (i hope that's not a rude question). either way, love Kaspar's design
Oh it's not a coincidence at all. When I first started coming up with Kaspar as a potential DnD character (we were playing a different campaign at the time, and I was playing a lot of Bloodborne as well), he was literally Alfred but with brown hair and a caster, same personality (yes, all of it), voice etc.
I told myself I'd design him a proper outfit if I ever played him in a campaign, but then many months later we decided to play CoS, and I was too attached to the design to radically change it even if the personality changed and he got a backstory and all. Most of the ref and inspiration images I found for him resemble Alfred's outfit anyway because the aesthetic and utility and environment of Bloodborne Excecutioners, and DnD Doomguides (as I imagine them) are similar anway.
You could probably find a lot of SoulsBorneRing inspiration and similarities in many of my OCs, I am not a professional character designer and for personal things like DnD characters that will never end up in a portfolio of any sort I don't really care about lifting from games that I enjoy aesthetically (but not other people's OCs obviousy).
I've been working on Kaspar's Ravenloft cleric (20+ years post-campaign) outfit, and while I'm not fully happy with it I also can't figure out what about it is bothering me so I'm leaving it here for now. May just lack layers/volume/texture/signs of wear.
I wanted him to have something more refined as he's no longer a traveling Doomguide but the castle priest and surgeon during this time, but not so refined that it makes him a completely different design. I want it to look like he's clearly somewhat important and not just a random priest, but also like he's very clearly going through it (this can mean hunting adventurers or being in the dungeon himself).
Key points for me are the obnoxiously long prayer beads that obviously take two hours to get through, buttons on the front of the scapular that make me think of a wedding dress, and the really tall gloves that remind me of old timey surgeons for some reason.
Replaced his shield with a much smaller buckler as a regenerating vampire doesn't need to fight as defensively as a mortal.
I'm going to be asking a lot of artists I follow this question, but how did you develop your style? It SEEMS like most people find their style and stick with it forever, just making improvements and iterations. I tend to work in a lot of different styles because I enjoy doing that, though I know there are things I gravitate towards as well. But I wonder what your journey was and how you got feedback and improved while staying true to what you enjoyed?
Interesting question!
I never really think about style when making a piece, I don’t worry about making it match the rest of my portfolio, it’s just that the things that make up my style are things that come most naturally to me when I don’t think about it.
✦ TL;DR: My style is a combination of: the different mediums I use (including tablet and PS brushes), the fact I’m scatterbrained and unlikely to finish if I take too long, the aesthetics I like seeing, what feels good physically (movements that feel good to make with my arm and hand), and rhythms that feel innate and come naturally. I really believe that the things that make up your, or anyone else's style, are already within them, they just need to be brought out into view through making art.
Longer thorough answer with images below 👇
✦ I’d say that I “developed” my style by doing what feels comfortable - the shapes of my lines are I think influenced by the fact I’m “lazy” and don’t like erasing, which isn’t a problem in digital, but I used to do a lot of traditional art in ink, and not to mention etchings where I definitely can’t erase without wasting a bunch of time.
✦ My line art looks the way it does because it’s basically a cleaned up sketch, because I don’t have the patience to do both, or line art that was done without a prior sketch, just trying to make lines as good as I can on the first go knowing that any parts that end up feeling off will be painted over later. The brushes I've been using for years also play a role here.
✦ The way I paint digitally, as in colors are not often blended, and often the transitions between colors are made up of blobs of color or even something resembling hatching, stems from:
1. When I started art college, I realized I was waaaay slower than everybody else when it comes to painting, and in order to finish a full body real size portrait in time there was no way I could do it with blended shadows and realism (in high school I worked mostly in pencil, going for as much realism as possible because that's what was expected). So I started constructing planes from these blobs, only going into more detail if time allowed. The goal was to make something that can pass as finished in as little time as possible and then refine it later if possible. Sadly I don’t have much college work to scan as an example (some fruits are below). Quickly this became not just a way to finish a painting in time, but a part of what made my painting mine. I started doing it in charcoal, and in digital even when there was no time limit.
2. Digitally I used to paint with a brush with didn't always match the color on the palette, and the very slight color difference in each stroke or blob was interesting and something I started doing intentionally, and in traditional acrylic painting as well.
3. Long story short, the way I work in one medium influences the way I work in others. So it feels that choice of mediums (digital, acrylic, tempera, charcoal) leads to a style that can be reproduced in all these different mediums.
4. If I had any photos of my (unbaked, unglazed) clay works from sculpting class you could even recognize my style there as well. So we can assume that clay sculpting also influenced my 2D art as well.
Some examples of the non blended colors in different mediums (digital, acrylic, acr., tempera, digital):
✦ Obviously the things I find visually attractive and interesting - shiny or glossy surfaces, interesting pointy shapes, subtle differences in tone, dramatic lighting - will be things I reproduce and emphasize in my art consciously or subconsciously, and those will make a style across different mediums.
✦ A mostly consistent color palette is a part of style as well. I gravitate towards the colors I find pretty - grays, browns, reds, gold, pink, and shades of off-white.
✦ As for feedback, I didn't get a whole lot of it from my art profs (which is one of the reasons I dropped out), but one thing is they encouraged my choice of color palette and gloomy mood, and my messy process. My friends say the most recognizable thing about my art and what they call my signature is the little sparkle shapes I love to use. Not that other artists don’t use sparkles but when I put mine on at the end it feels like one really conscious choice that I make that makes the finished piece feel really mine ✨
✦ Another thing people noted about my art are the solid black areas I sometimes use as pure black cel shading, sometimes as kinda random blobs - I feel like line art needs to have a certain “weight” to look good, but as my lines are mostly the same weight, and often very light and sketchy, I add the black areas to compensate for that lack of weight across the piece. In my head this genuinely feels like weight, and if a piece feels too light in my head/hands, I add weight via flat black areas. I don’t know if that makes sense but it does to me and leads to a style. In pieces without lines it adds weight that's missing because of a lack of contrast or details elsewhere.
✦ And last but not least: The artists I admire and who are an inspiration have and continue to influence my style on a conscious or subconscious level. Either in regards to coloring, composition, shapes, or whatever. Leyendecker and Schaeffer are two pretty obvious ones I think. Mike Mignola and Chris Bourassa (the artist of Darkest Dunegon) also include flat black shadows and planes in their art.
All these things I feel like aren't going anywhere even as I improve, nor do they impede improvement or would hold me back if I decided to completely switch mediums or themes. They are so at the core of my craft(s) I don't think I could change or ditch them without great effort and even then it would be hard to stick to something else.
Basically I guess do what feels good and don't overthink, chances are even when you think you switch between wildly different styles there's something tying them together. At the same time, if there's an element that you really like, nothing wrong with consciously incorporating into your style(s), like I do with sparkles.
I'm having trouble drawing anything decent lately so I've spent a few days working on my unnecessarily detailed stream (yes I can stream now) frame and avatar..
I'm currently running Curse of Strahd for a group of friends, and I want you to know that we talk about your "fell into Strahd's occupied bath" art, like... Almost every single session. I think it may have fully altered the brain chemistry of my players
well, actually, he didn't fall in, more like he was (rather violently) pulled into said bath by the neck.. not his fault.. (definitely his fault. and also mine.)
& btw i immediately send every single ask and tag like this to my DM i love letting her know how many people's brain chemistry (including mine) she altered with the bath scene hehe. none of my CoS art would be as good as it is if she hadn't run the campaign so well <3
well, my curse of strahd PC fucked up and got kidnapped along with ireena after strahd manipulated him, and now they're stuck in castle ravenloft... and I think it's really funny to imagine my sheltered vampire dork running into kaspar in the castle hallway and both being like ????
He was just about to go on break after a hard night of vivisecting prisoners medical research and now there's new people wandering the halls unsupervised, Strahd preserve us.
Casually slides this over. The tome of pacts people (@SleepyWyrm_Ed on twitter) are doing another art book called The Book of Devotion which is a compendium of devotees and their Otherworldly Deities. Thought you might enjoy/ want to keep an eye on it. Applications are on Nov 20 :)
Ooh yes I very much would like to keep my eye on this, thank you for the info! 👀
