Moonlight Ghost Twink

 

 

 

This one was very silly and self-indulgent but a lot of fun. As I was finishing up I used the sparkle brush on a whim and it fit incredibly well.

So I wanted to do a pinup of a man, and I really love this piece by Sabs. I also was interested in trying out the new process InCase has been talking about. Basically, you color beneath a cleaned-up sketch, and once you get to a certain point, you merge the layers together, paint on that, and then add in the linework on top. I think that was actually pretty good, but I'm not yet good enough at painting to make it work really well.

 

I also sketched this out on paper a couple of times before taking a picture, putting it in Clip Studio, modifying that sketch, and starting on top of that. I think that worked great.

Takeaways from this piece:

• A lot of the anatomy here is fudged, particularly the pelvis and chest. Surprisingly, the hands and feet are OK. Very happy with the legs.
• When starting to paint, throw in some hue variation. The colors get cooler as you go down the figure, which I think worked out well here.
• Rim lighting as your primary light source makes your life very difficult because it puts the rest of your subject in shadow, forcing you to eliminate detail. I found that too difficult so I ended up lighting the figure from in front slightly as well.
• I can't draw non-twink male bodies. This guy isn't just a twink, he's exceptionally skinny. I think he's drawn pretty well, but I need to practice other types of bodies.
• This one makes me so mad: I accidentally set the canvas size to 2000x2000 when sketching and forgot to change it back. This makes all the small details have little jagged edges and there's really no simple fix for this as far as I know. Grrr!
• For whatever reason, I have a lot of trouble drawing pecs unless they're front-on and fairly muscular. This makes the ribcage look flat instead of curved.
• Rendering! AGHHHH! It's fun but hard! I want to focus more on a more graphic style for now.
  

I was flipping through my sketchbook yesterday and was struck by how good my drawings were when I was doing more serious studying instead of focusing on making finished illustrations. I think I'll take the next few months off from trying to do these weekly paintings and study instead.

Busy

 Couldn't get anything done this week. Maybe some sketches/studies up before the next piece.

Wouldn't You Be Warmer Next To Me?

 

 

There is a small percentage of you who went "Wait, what the fuck?" after seeing this image. I will explain.

This week I wanted to focus on painting. I've been really stunned by the art of Humankind and recently watched a video on their process. Really interesting, but to emulate this I would have to learn 3D. I don't know 3D.

So, long story short, this is a paintover of a Skyrim screenshot, with some potentially-familiar props in the background. I installed some pose mods and set this up. An interesting workflow, but it has some pretty significant drawbacks, namely:

• The Skyrim engine makes composing a scene really hard. I originally wanted to set up a sex scene, but the NPC kept wandering off and I decided to make do. Wrangling the engine wasn't what I wanted to practice. There were some automatic headtracking issues as well.
  
• Even with high-quality graphics mods, the colors are fairly muddy and low-contrast (excuses, excuses...)
  
• Skyrim characters are inhuman abominations with broken skeletons and weird proportions--specifically, their heads are fairly small.

That said, this was the easiest time I've had drawing hands in my life. I also had success with painting (both the character and the background). The 3D reference helped with that, sure, but so did my increasing skill. Very happy with that.

I'm surprised I ended up liking almost completely black lineart--I usually go in and color it, blending it in a little--but the head popped SO much more when I hid that layer, so I toned it down a bunch.

All told, this took about 6 hours. For a piece with a background (admittedly, not inked or detailed, then blurred) that's not bad, but it's way above a professional pace. I also made a promise to myself to not abuse the undo key while inking, so that part took 3x faster. Once I forced myself to take my time and go slow, I was a lot more accurate and controlled. Next week I hope to practice faces--I feel my style slipping a bit, and InCase posted today after a long absence, so I feel pretty inspired. I've noticed most of my recent pieces all have the subject with their mouth open slightly, which is a little sexy but also a little 👁👄👁

Thick Lady

 

Experimented with an even simpler coloring style. Did both of these in like 6 hours, which is a lot faster than the previous one. Still not fast enough to do comics, though that'll come with practice. 

The biggest and most important part of my process here was reference. I used two primary reference photos--one by nnnneko666 and one by bunnyrhodes--though I ended up using many more. You can see how useful it was...all hands but the leftmost were drawn with reference and you can see how bad it is compared to the others. Finding good reference is hard, but it's absolutely necessary unless you're a pro at inventing anatomy.

Takeaways/self-crit:

• The boobs on the left are too huge! I think this came from combining two disparate pieces of reference. I thought it was good until I finished it and came back.
• My linework is still garbage. Every line I make I crtl-Z it like 5 times or more. This is an awful habit and one I should get to work breaking immediately.
  
• Fat is hard to draw! It doesn't connect to bone and muscle in a way I'm used to. This was good practice.

Fat girls, if you're reading this I want you to know that the little hint of tummy that shows on the outside of high leg panties/other lingerie makes me go awooga like a 1950s cartoon character. That's all.

Gym Babe

Jokes aside, here's the illustration. It's pretty good.

Wanted to practice coloring, instead did the best secondary forearm anatomy of my life. Everything I wanted came across, from the pose to the mild look of distaste on the subject's face. Why am I like this?

This took about 7-8 hours over the course of an entire weekend. I didn't push myself too hard, thankfully, and had fun. Some takeaways:

• Flat colors are very cool and good, but my shape and line control leaves a lot to be desired. It's pretty messy. The core shadow-subsurface scattering technique is pretty useful. Will I ever study rendering? Yes. But right now, I'm having a lot of success with this technique, which is easy and convenient.
  
• Use reference 100% of the time.
• My composition is weak and I end up using tricks like vignetting and blur to prop it up.
• Next time I want to study color, do the following two things to make sure I'm not unfocused:
• Copy from a better artist. I can learn to invent color when I understand it better.
• DON'T WASTE TIME ON BACKGROUNDS YOU FOOL!

I'm happy I can make stuff that looks good at this point! I'd like to push for 1 finished illustration per weekend but who knows if I can keep that pace up.

Shower

 

 

 

After the last piece I decided I wanted to give another go at flat colors. Turns out--they're great. This slaps and I feel so POWERFUL!!! AHHHHH!!!

This is heavily inspired by the work of @rhabarberei, specifically a Tifa/Aerith image set she did. For my money, Maren is the best wlw artist on Twitter, and the way she uses flat colors is gorgeous. Go check out her work! Again, it's a really incredible style, but I think I should do painting studies with it before I try another full image this way.

This took about 11 hours total because I was constantly figuring things out and trying new things. I really wore myself out with this one because I did the whole thing in a single day--I worked from about 8 to 4 last night, and then finished it from like noon to 3 today. I need to figure out a way to not get carried away painting because that's a really fucked up work schedule and I'm concerned for my eyes, my wrist, and my sleep.

Dancer

 This was the first piece where I actually felt like the painting was coming together. Originally I wanted it to just be flats. Oh well, I'm a fool. Important things I did here:

• Really push the line color in certain areas. The lines around her hip start to even blend in to the skin, and many inks around the background light are actually just really saturated, light colors. Worked out well--much better if I left them all black.
• Really incorporate bounce light. On the edges of her body and leotard it's super saturated. It looks good and really puts her in the scene (though there's not much of a scene to begin with)
• Break down light and shadow into shapes. This one's really hard, as you have to imagine how light works, and I only really succeeded with her skin. But, for example, look at her hand...light from below is coming up to define the form. Same with the face, hips, and tail (kind of).
• Think about color not as an inherent aspect of an object but instead a way that light interacts with it. This is kind of tricky to think about, but in this piece, everything is basically a different shade of purple. The leotard isn't white, it's a purply-bluish-grey (IIRC) but it reads as white. The skin is basically pink, and the latex is a dark purple. But because of the light, all these things look more natural than if they were white, beige, and black, respectively.
• Use reference, especially for the latex. Man materials are hard.

 As always, my anatomy needs to be better. For my next painting, I want to focus on improving light and shadow shapes as well as using a smaller inking brush. I think my inks are nearly always too big and dominant for the style I'm trying to achieve.

Again, I'm really happy with this, and I think it's a culmination of all the painting practice I've done. It was always frustrating for me to hear this, but practice and study are really the only things that matter. Trust me, do like, fucking still lifes, set them up next to your desk and paint from observation. Do exercises where you break things up into just lights and darks and then practice blending them. Look at artists you like and see if you can replicate their painting style, then reflect on why you weren't able to. As always, ctrl-paint is an excellent resource. Going on picarto to watch streams of artists you like has been very valuable for me as well.

Painting Studies

 

30 mins each. Loosely based on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwRa5qTnr8o

NSFW figure drawing resource: https://www.redditp.com/r/nsfw/ , I skip gifs and set the timer to be 30mins.

Takeaways: Don't spend time drawing when you should be doing block-in. Don't be afraid to go outside the block-in value range. Need a lot more practice rendering.

I think this was a pretty good exercise. Not that I necessarily want to make heavily rendered stuff, I just need to know how to do it--plus this helps me study value.

Sketch practice

 Hey, this looks pretty good!

Oh damn while uploading this I just saw something else I hadn't yet posted.

Testing a new brush, specifically https://assets.clip-studio.com/en-us/detail?id=1761353.

I'm still just getting the hang of all this. Working on it!

Mommy Milkers

 

 

Damn, I can't avoid it, I love big titties. I think this particular bout comes from the recent Resident Evil 8 trailers and the big vampire lady.

Ok, thoughts:

• I'm happy with the expression, general form/anatomy, the pose, and the flat colors. The lighting, approach to bg, texture, and character design are all fine as well. Obviously these can all be improved, but I came in wanting to create a one-character, simplistic, finished artwork, and I think I succeeded.
• The one bit of linework that's really bothering me is the cleavage. It currently makes it look like the boobs attach to the top of the collarbone rather than the pecs.
• Disappointed with the hair. Fine shape, but the process I used made it so I had no room for detail or texture.
• The rendering sucks ass, it's so splotchy.
• The shadows on the face are bad.
  
• The style and process I used with my linework doesn't lend itself to this kind of rendering. I could've had better success with this linework and a flatter image, or more subtle, controlled linework and a painting style that was this rendered or more.
• Disappointed with the value scale and the hue variation of the skin in particular. Shadows are either too dark or not dark enough, highlights are either off-puttingly cartoonish or barely perceptible.
• This took way too long, and the reason why is that I can't just make a decision and stick with it. Most of the time spent on this piece was trying out different colors, values, weights, before making every stroke. I need to get to a point where I can make decisions confidently and stop hitting CTRL-Z impulsively. This extra time spent isn't even an asset to this piece--it's still riddled with issues.
  

The takeaways are do more studies, both from real life and artists I like. I know the issues of studying from artists, but I need to figure out how to combine linework and painting, and studying from good artists will help me with that.

Holiday Practice

 I was away from my tablet for a while, so I did some trad stuff. First I practiced asian facial features/epicanthic fold, then boobs.

Result from this is I'm much more comfortable with inventing asian chars. and boobs. Fun.