(no subject)
Feb. 26th, 2022 04:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kradeelav"Art Process Breakdown, Finding the current style w/lines." lukadian
lukadianJumping back on the talking meme! did a lot of spring cleaning, but let's finish these. ;D
this is auspicious in some ways because i've been manually re-tagging all of my stuff on the logs, deleting social media, and in general mulling over a lot of thoughts how my artistic journey has happened over the years, so it may be less "here's an exact process breakdown" and more "here's the mentality of why i got there".
for specifically process breakdowns: this wip tag may be more beneficial, as well as this resource tag which has a few similar posts.
this is auspicious in some ways because i've been manually re-tagging all of my stuff on the logs, deleting social media, and in general mulling over a lot of thoughts how my artistic journey has happened over the years, so it may be less "here's an exact process breakdown" and more "here's the mentality of why i got there".
for specifically process breakdowns: this wip tag may be more beneficial, as well as this resource tag which has a few similar posts.
nostalgia may be rose-coloring my vision a wee bit, but i loved so many styles in the golden days of dA. so many. it is hard to tell a general somebody who wasn't there to experience it just how many different genres of non-commercialized art were truly on there - from future AAA game concept artists to "high" art/fashion creators to fujoshi doujin drawers to BD french comic artists to pro-tier cosplayers who invested so much effort in free tutorials (beethy was so kind to me, a random fanartist), to- you get the point. there will never again be something like that. it wasn't the featureless-slurry-but-silo'd creative landscape of today on twitter.
naturally my style was all over the fucking place lmao. I was more influenced by the fire emblem games than not but i painted shit, i tried lineart (and hated it), cellshading, hybrid of cell-shade-and-painting, studies, everything. i think at least every month i at least took a stab at somebody's style which in hindsight was the best thing possible. it's what I would suggest for any budding designer - try all the things so you find out faster what you do and don't like visually and also for ease of "doing" for your sanity. some styles are just not gonna work for some people.
(for example - i'm never going to like the 1323321 hour paintings because i get bored to hell. my current style of lineart is literally borne out of 'do it as fast and lazy as possible', and I take pride in that. :P ) there was actually a period there around ~ '10 when I was using a ""trial"" version of opencanvas and kinda learned a hack to get around the "can't save stuff while on a trial" - i simply screenshotted the final drawing, and just kept the computer on for less than three nights and hope dearly the power wouldn't go off. :P
the medium step in my artistic style evolution was when I found makani.
makani, for the uninitiated, is a former fanartist who has worked at valve for a while now and was most known for HP and Legend of Korra comic strips that heavily influenced a certain niche of internet artists. her strong focus on body language, character acting, and slightly stylized faces (particularly making older women look awesome and expressive and kickass) hit at exactly what I wanted my art to look like, and for a while you can really tell when I was eyeballing off of her and chira (for similar reasons).
somewhere along the way - i think specifically after I started drawing iron crown, the comic pages itself and not just the concept art - I started optimizing heavily for 'as breakneck fast and lazy as possible while still readable"; it also changed a little bit when I started drawing NSFW art and started using blacks more, mmm, mindfully? inky pools (NSFW) to shape negative space as much as the lighter areas. I think working on the defunct Good, Bad, and Nasty zine (NSFW) is when that really started coming into play.
it's only a short skip-hop from that last link to my current style, imo; just slightly more refined. I had a mentoring session with chira (was fantastic, would highly suggest if you have the finances/will, disclaimer i'm a good friend of hers still) kinda right before that final nsfw inking style started being fleshed out, so that was another catalyst, likely, there.
what's exciting though is now that I'm off SM, i'm feeling ... like it's time to evolve once again, deliberately?
right now I feel like I can draw anything (not braggadocio, more "sandbags, sure, perspective, sure, people in complicated angles i'll bitch at, but sure") line-art quickly, like a line cook if I "have" to - but I want to put points back into experimenting with hybrid-painting, color, illustration and design in a truly mixed but unique sense. there's so much potential there that I can't quite articulate, and that I feel like zines have a unique ability to unlock. I'm loving this distinct sense of being able to individually "art direct" zines so that way they can be their own contained visual language, but be able to experiment with each one of them, and think that'll be the key to not getting bored so fast, but also not getting stuck in a multi-year rut of one style. here's hoping.
naturally my style was all over the fucking place lmao. I was more influenced by the fire emblem games than not but i painted shit, i tried lineart (and hated it), cellshading, hybrid of cell-shade-and-painting, studies, everything. i think at least every month i at least took a stab at somebody's style which in hindsight was the best thing possible. it's what I would suggest for any budding designer - try all the things so you find out faster what you do and don't like visually and also for ease of "doing" for your sanity. some styles are just not gonna work for some people.
(for example - i'm never going to like the 1323321 hour paintings because i get bored to hell. my current style of lineart is literally borne out of 'do it as fast and lazy as possible', and I take pride in that. :P ) there was actually a period there around ~ '10 when I was using a ""trial"" version of opencanvas and kinda learned a hack to get around the "can't save stuff while on a trial" - i simply screenshotted the final drawing, and just kept the computer on for less than three nights and hope dearly the power wouldn't go off. :P
the medium step in my artistic style evolution was when I found makani.
makani, for the uninitiated, is a former fanartist who has worked at valve for a while now and was most known for HP and Legend of Korra comic strips that heavily influenced a certain niche of internet artists. her strong focus on body language, character acting, and slightly stylized faces (particularly making older women look awesome and expressive and kickass) hit at exactly what I wanted my art to look like, and for a while you can really tell when I was eyeballing off of her and chira (for similar reasons).
somewhere along the way - i think specifically after I started drawing iron crown, the comic pages itself and not just the concept art - I started optimizing heavily for 'as breakneck fast and lazy as possible while still readable"; it also changed a little bit when I started drawing NSFW art and started using blacks more, mmm, mindfully? inky pools (NSFW) to shape negative space as much as the lighter areas. I think working on the defunct Good, Bad, and Nasty zine (NSFW) is when that really started coming into play.
it's only a short skip-hop from that last link to my current style, imo; just slightly more refined. I had a mentoring session with chira (was fantastic, would highly suggest if you have the finances/will, disclaimer i'm a good friend of hers still) kinda right before that final nsfw inking style started being fleshed out, so that was another catalyst, likely, there.
what's exciting though is now that I'm off SM, i'm feeling ... like it's time to evolve once again, deliberately?
right now I feel like I can draw anything (not braggadocio, more "sandbags, sure, perspective, sure, people in complicated angles i'll bitch at, but sure") line-art quickly, like a line cook if I "have" to - but I want to put points back into experimenting with hybrid-painting, color, illustration and design in a truly mixed but unique sense. there's so much potential there that I can't quite articulate, and that I feel like zines have a unique ability to unlock. I'm loving this distinct sense of being able to individually "art direct" zines so that way they can be their own contained visual language, but be able to experiment with each one of them, and think that'll be the key to not getting bored so fast, but also not getting stuck in a multi-year rut of one style. here's hoping.
