Thursday Art Walk: Ho Ho Huh?

 

In Which I have Inspiration... but not experience

I am a "by the seat of your pants" kind of artist, which means that I don't tend to go into Thursday blogs with anything resembling a plan. I basically just... draw something. Now, that's not a methodology I recommend - it's infuriating to get a better idea in the middle of a doodle and then realize "oh yeah, I have no idea how to do that!"

This week, I wanted to draw something holiday-adjacent, what with Christmas being literally 2 weeks away (gulp!). I plugged in the tablet and set to work and...

I had no idea what I was doing.

Undirected art tends to look like undirected art, and this is no exception. It at least looks like holly, but I'm going to spend the rest of today looking at other people's work on pixellated holly and try to mimic that next.

Holly 01, digital; 2020

However, you don't wanna hear me mope about not understanding how to do digital art when I still have pencils and pens in my room and could make traditional art if I tried, so I'll instead tell you what I learned from today's attempt!

1. If you do a pencil outline first, it's easier to lay colors with the paintbrush, even if you end up having to touch things up with various brush sizes
2. There is no function I can find in Paint.net to blend two different adjacent colors, so I'll have to plan my color rings out properly in the future!
3. Holly leaves are a very difficult shape to render in anything approaching a realistic manner unless you take a lot of time to research, trace, practice, and then attempt them
4. I like playing with the color shifting functions on Paint.net
5. I really, really, really want to get better at pixel art, not so that it's "easier" or "faster" but so that I like what I produce more. I just want to be able to lay some pixels down and know that I didn't do a bad job.
6. I think I've finally got the ratio of pixels/cm down! 10 pixels/cm seems to look good and produces a clear image!

I think that'll do it from me today, guys :)

Go Enjoy Something!

FC