Thursday Art Walk

 

In Which I have A Rough Sketch To Share!

I'm still learning digital art, so bear with me, but I think I've got a good start going on this drawing I'm doing of a rave cat!

If you're wondering why I'm drawing a digital art piece of a rave cat, uh... it's kind of a dumb inside joke involving the game Beat Saber, a friend, and their cat being very interested in what they're up to. My drawing doesn't look ANYTHING like their cat, though, so just enjoy a silly rough draft of a drawing of a cat at a rave!

"RaveCat 01" digital only!

The shadow you see under the image is my outline/gesture drawing. I just kinda forgot to remove that layer before saving as a jpg to share it on her.

My usual process for digital is something like this: I take my base color and reduce the Alpha to about... 80? Then I start sketching out scribbly shapes, scribbling madly until the shapes begin to look more like actual limbs or heads or whatever. Then I start applying my first layer of color (orange), then more layers of color get added, and eventually I'd get around to lineart (you can see the beginnings around one hand and the rave locs). I'm going to fix her shoes eventually, maybe undo her dress and replace it with uh... a more visible one lol. I might do a few layers on the dress with different colors and different percentages.

I don't have a very good grasp on the language of digital art, so if you're someone who does this, please shoot me suggestions ("get photoshop" isn't the kind of suggestion I'm talking about here - I have a hard enough time with paint.net and I am completely lost so far on Krita, which I downloaded today and 100% botched the first draft of this on). I'm always eager to learn new stuff :D

I might try a version of this with traditional art some time too!

For any teacher out there, btw, who thinks "digital art is easier" somehow, please know that you're wrong. I've been drawing and painting for close to 25 years, and I find a set of watercolors and a nice sheet of rag paper 100000000% easier to control and understand instinctively than digital art. I am having to work a lot harder to figure out how each layer works with the others, and I don't think I'll ever 100% get it. Also, just... remember that art changes over time. If you accept anything other than cave paintings, you understand this.

Alright, that'll about do it for me!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

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

Thursday Art Walk 323: Learning To Draw

In Which I Have Been Practicing

So, I was given an XP-Pen Star G430S for my birthday by my incredible partner (who also got me a yarn ball winder and a mug with our favorite bunny Tato on it but we're talking art today lol). I've been experimenting with it, and I'll be sharing my progress as I learn how to use the Paint.net program. I've never used a stylus-based drawing tablet before this year, and my exposure to digital art-making was almost exclusively MS Paint until recently. This has made for an... interesting learning curve.

I know how to draw. I know how to paint. I know how to do both of these things pretty okay. But I only really know how to do them in the analog pen-or-brush-to-paper world. Drawing with a touchpad, which is how all of my previous digital art was produced, is very awkward, but fairly intuitive and fairly easy for me to do. Using a stylus and tablet is a whole different animal from either pure analog or pure digital.

See, if I'm drawing with a pen or a paintbrush at my kitchen table, I'm watching the pen as much as the work, but... that's not the case with the Star G430S. You watch the computer screen, not the pen. The work is not below you but before you, and there is a definite difference in the way you control a writing implement you're looking at than one you're using on a screen separate from the point of contact. It takes a lot of getting use to.

Add to that the fact that I barely understand the program I'm using and you end up with some frustration.

But there's also the joy of discovery! I'm learning something new every single time I play with the tablet, and today I made a multiple-layered, gradient-backed drawing that, while incredibly childish, is still cute and still makes me happy!

"Bunbun" digital art; 2020

Holy cow, guys! I made that!

It... kinda looks like a NeoPet.

Were the NeoPets originally designed in Paint.net?!

But yeah, I'm pretty happy with how that turned out (though the gradient and flowers are a bit low, and Bunbun looks like he's levitating...)!

Would you believe I did all that while my arms felt like they were going to fall off? Because that's how they feel. I think I have a touch of inflammation in my tendons right now because while typing doesn't hurt, gripping and holding and pushing do. The pain is in my thumbs running down to my elbows, far worse on the right (dominant hand) than the left, and it feels like the time I hyperextended my elbow but much calmer. Like my body is warning me.

I guess this means I cannot play Breath of the Wild today :(

Part of the discomfort could be that I failed to stretch before I moved a large, heavy tent outside the other day, then got myself sunburned because I'm stubborn, but it could also be that I've been making test images every day for up to three hours a day using the tablet. Even with regular art, I try to take a day off between sketches because I developed repetitive motion soreness in my college art classes.

All in all, though, the tablet is a dream come true, and I'm having a lot of fun with it. When I'm not drawing with it, I've been using it like a mouse, because you can actually use it as an input device! I love that! I've been using it to play PokefarmQ and scroll through Facebook. It helps me figure out the sensitivity, the maneuverability, and the right way to hold the stylus.

What a blast this has been so far! I'm looking forward to using this inexpensive tablet literally to death.

How about you folks - are you trying anything out this week? Learning a new skill? A new craft? Trying out sketching or something? Let me know!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC