Thursday Art Walk

 

In Which I Am Working, I Promise :P

I'm still working on the bonkbubble piece, I swear! It's taking a long time because I do everything pixel-by-pixel, which takes FOREVER when the canvas is a justifiable 10k x 12k pixels square lol. I took a little break today, though, by trying to come up with concept thumbnails (not good ones - these thumbnails are rougher than pumice!) for potential scenes. These are... super undetailed.

All of the thumbnails

I'm not promising to work on all of these concepts (though it'd be neat to see them realized!), and I'm not 100% sure that any of these elements would remain if I did, but I like the idea.

So what's the idea?

Well, what if I did a bunch of limited-palette images where everything was red or blue or whatever? Here's what I came up with for each color of the rainbow (not counting black/white/gray)

A Red Cityscape

I've done these before - but never particularly detailed. They tend to be silhouettes against bright, saturated skies (and I would love to do another black-buildings-on-a-red-sky picture...), but this one should be different - I actually want to use multiple shades of red to form this image. I'd obviously have to use actual reference photos if I wanted it to not suck, but I'd be down for that!

An Orange Fantasy City

If you know me irl, you know I love fantasy. I love how weird things can get, how outrageous, how unnatural. I would love to take an orange color palette and make an amber city in an autumn forest! I just think it'd be neat :)

A Yellow... Fortress maybe?

I'll be honest, I'm not a huge fan of yellow, so the only thing I could think of is the Thieves' Guild of Navarre in Trials of Mana, but... I don't want to do two desert images. Maybe a grasslands fortress? Maybe... maybe not. I don't know. Maybe I'd make a bee city in a grassland. That might bee more fun (no pun intended, but I went back and added that second e anyway).

An Indigo Library

Huh. Not sure why this is out of order, but I love the idea of a library rendered in indigo! Not 100% sure how that would work in practice, though, since Indigo doesn't tend to have shades/hues in digital art...

Regardless, I'd want to try!

Just think, infinite bookshelves leading back to a pinprick of light - the unused exit - while in the foreground, someone's assembled themselves a cozy reading area! Love the concept.

A Blue Undersea Scene

I don't know, guys. I love the idea of an underwater scene, but should it really be blue? Isn't that kinda... normal? I'm not a normal kinda artist, though... regardless, I'd love to draw a scene with some sort of building covered in coral, another made from the skull of a long dead sea behemoth, a kelp forest in the distance... sounds fun! And terrifying. Because I won't be able to look at reference photos very much since I have a pretty unfun case of thalassophobia...

A Green Hut

Y'all know what I'm not afraid of? Swamps and moors and little cottages! I even have a story that takes place in a place like this - a semi-retired bard, who is an ex-adventurer, settling down to try and teach the nearby villagers' children music, but he keeps getting interrupted by inconsiderate dragons. This piece should be really fun :)

A Violet Desert

At first blush, this concept seems... empty, doesn't it?

I really want the land and silhouetted mountains/buttes to give a sense of emptiness and loneliness, drawing the viewer up to the sky and the millions of stars I want to scatter across the violet heavens! I'm really looking forward to this one!

So that's what I'm looking at as future projects. Maybe. If I get around to them. And don't find another shiny new toy.

But they are pretty strong concepts, I think, and I look forward to making them, ya know, look good. Instead of sloppy. Because right now those are so flipping sloppy.

In my defense, they're only about two inches (5cm) across...

And I kinda drew over some really smudgy pencil.

I might also be losing a knock-down-drag-out fight against the urge to nap, which has consumed me all week.

I'm not running a sleep deficit or anything. I'm not even feeling particularly depressed. I just feel like napping all the time. This happens every so often. I'll snap out of it eventually lol!

Anyway, I think I'll go find some more inspiration on the internet and look up some reference photos (if I do end up doing these pieces, I will share my references, I promise!)

That'll do it for me!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC 

Thursday Art Walk

 

In Which I Swatch & Thumbnail!

I'm not very good about the leadup to a piece (as is evidenced by every work of art I've made...) so today is all leadup! I was given a Christmas gift by my grandmother - a pack of 70 colored pencils by a company I've never heard of (Nicole) - and decided I should do my due diligence and test out how they work!

The Pencils in Question

The first thing I did was take every single pencil and swatch them out. For those who do not use, follow, or know art terms, that just means that I tested them! I started from the back of the box to the front, left to right, row by row. I ended up with a messy grid that let me know what to expect on my toothy, soft sketchbook paper from these pencils, and I also ended up with that weird feeling I always get after inhaling the waxy smell from crayons for too long, so bonus? All's I know is this: I don't mind the smell, but it makes my eyelids feel heavy and gummy, so maybe that's an allergy?

Regardless, I swatched out all seventy pencils and discovered there were probably a lot of doubled colors. I don't mind this - I'll probably use up the doubled colors pretty fast (peach, brown, gray, black, etc). I also noticed that the neon colors are... very neon! It's hard to look directly at the neon yellow lol. I kinda hope I find some black paper to test them on...

And then I sketched out a little picture of Dedbert riding a slug up to some snowdrops. Why? Why not?!

The Swatch & The Thumbnail/Sketch!

I really like the way these colors work, and I hope that in the future I can use them for a better thought out project, like a faux stained glass effect or some kind of dreamy scene. For today, I just wanted to test the supplies out. I'll probably test them with the gel pens, my sharpies, and also maybe the pack of highlighters I have. I think that'd be fun to see how they all interact!

The Swatches

The grid I have is kind of misleading because Column A is actually the last row of the box and Column G is the front with Row 1 being the left hand side and Row 10 being on the right. Still, I know what I'm looking at and I suppose that's what matters? It's a very pretty set of colors. They should blend into each other nicely once I find an inexpensive blender or make one from rolled paper. It's been forever since I had one.

"Snowdrops"; colored pencil & ballpoint pen; 2021

As for Dedbert and his slug? I want to try using this scene with a few different mediums, so look forward to seeing this in gel pen, just ballpoint pen, crayon, Sharpie, and possibly more! I will be getting back to my fruit dragons at some point, too, and I hope to start reintroducing the watermelon dragon into my work!

That'll about do it for me today. I'm exhausted and I kinda just want to curl up with some more lemon tea and check out the new safety eyes that came in today for future amigurumi projects.

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Thursday Art Walk - Fruit Dragons!

In Which I Drew A Bunch of Thumbnails

I recently started following YouTuber DrawingWiffWaffles, and while I don't know that I'll ever be as good at drawing as her (I do not have boundless quantities of patience and discipline for my art, you may have noticed), I am hoping to apply a lot of her techniques to my own art. Hopefully, that'll help me improve so I don't just... stop after sketching a little.

One of the techniques I'm taking right now is thumbnailing - essentially messy sketches that you use to refine final drawings. I'm very bad at letting messy things stay messy, but hopefully, you can see the sketchy thumnailiness of the following images.

I'm also stealing a prompt list that DrawingWiffWaffles used. The list is by @SeaLemon on Instagram, and it's 30 days of Fruits. I did the first 5 below, but instead of just drawing fruits (which, in hindsight, maybe I should've started with...), I decided to make Fruit Dragons!

1) Watermelon

I really like the idea of a Watermelon Dragon for some reason. The smooth, green-striped outside of a melon is fairly herpetological to me, and I like the bright pinks and dark reds of the flesh, the white pith before the verdant rind, the glossy, dark brown or black seeds... the fruit looks wonderful, and designing things to look kind of like it is fun!

This is also where I settled on how I'd draw my dragons - the shape of the fruit determines the shape of the dragon! I used all ovals to lay out how this dragon looks, giving him half-oval watermelon slice wings and watermelon slice horns, half-watermelon feet, and oval floppy ears! I like his sweet yet derpy expression, too. I'm super proud of him.

2) Blueberry

This gal is a bit odd, you must admit. Circles are not very dragony, but I liked the idea of making an almost medieval-style two-legged dragon, but I might take her wings (which are supposed to look like the flower-end of a blueberry but instead look like weird grass...). I tried to make her more birdlike - pigeon-toed, kinda goofy, bipedal, and round-headed... but I don't like the profile view of her face. It looks terrrrrrrrrible. I honestly don't know what to do for a face on a round dragon, though. Do I give her an extra bubble-muzzle? That might work! I like the almost scorpion-like segmented neck and tail.

3) Pineapple

As far as positions go, I'm pretty pleased with the smaller version of Pineapple, but I like the way the wings are folded down on the laying-down version up top. I want the wings, horns, ears, tail, and toes to remind people of the green top to a pineapple, but I'm struggling with how to get across that classic pineapple shape on the body without making him... spiky. I'll figure it out. Kinda happy with how I got the rounded cylinders of the pineapple to go together to make the body.

4) Lemon

Lemon was maybe the easiest to draw - mostly because I didn't give it a tail and I've got it sleeping in a nest! I really like the "lemon at rest" idea, and I'll probably keep it, though I'm not 100% sure how I'm going to really make it obvious that this baby is a Lemon Dragon (besides body shape - look at that lil tail nub!). I'm thinking I'll make the wings lemon wedges and give him little lemon pip horn nubs. Besides that, though, I think that might be my design, right there - right down to the lil floppy lemon-shaped ears! I like this one.

5) Banana

Ugggggh. I Hate how I drew poor Banana Dragon. I wanted to have a more Asiatic Dragon in appearance but I ended up with a messed up Muppet reject. I'll have to thumbnail this a bunch more to get it to work, but I still like the idea. Maybe I'll just draw a bunch of bananas in different positions, then put them together in Paint.Net or something to make the outline? And from there, I'll make the actual dragon? But yeah, not happy with Banana Boy here At ALL.

Still, this was just the thumnailing stage. I still have the actual sketching, lineart, coloring, etc to do.

My plan is to compose the image so the fruit itself is visible somewhere, either as a background in and of itself or as a background element. Maybe Lemon Dragon has a few lemons laying around? Banana Trees for Banana Dragon to hide in so I don't draw so much of it? I love the idea of Blueberry Dragon maybe trying to peck at some blueberries that have been scattered on the ground like some sort of derpy chicken!

All in all, this is a fairly successful experiment, and if I don't make all 30 dragons, it'll be because I get distracted... probably by Inktober, let's be honest lol.

I hope today's blog gave you a break from the State of Things as the are today. It's been a rough 2020, and I'm ready for something better, even if better can be hard to hope for. All I can say is this: Keep making things that make you happy, and share them.

Go Enjoy Something!

FC