2023-03-19🌱

Planted on

Last Tended on

Work and Art

Commission

AAAA finished anothere commissionssss just 1 more to go!!!
Truly a difficult year but I pulled through! Learned a lot too.

Sketch

random girl, testing some flowy linework

new OC, I like this kind of open mouth~

Abstract Scribble. Reviewing the process of painting with blending modes, mostly Overlay and Exclusion. Also a test for painting under a fully filled blending modes, I call this Blending Modes Color Masking (similar to Gamut Masking). The interaction of colors is different but it is easier to have harmonized palette this way.

Study

Solid drawing: this term describe more accurately what I've been calling "3D-ness" and "form drawing"
- I have come across this terms before but didn't use it that often for it to register.
- One of the resources that help me a lot with this is Toniko Pantoja video. I love actionable, digestable exercises like this
  - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_ZB90XqI9E
  - I also love this because I'm similar to him, I prefer flowy gesture and looser drawings so I didn't like practicing solid and 3D stuff. However I also don't like fully flowy stuffs and always wanted to add some structure to my art.
  - Another reason why I like this video is his studies looks so unpolished. I always saw really polished studies with clear linework or a clean sketchiness look. That really skewed my expectation on studies. Nowadays I just focused on the thing I want to improve and understand and don't care about posting. If I want to post I can just cherrypick the best and edit them in 1 publishable post.
I really need to think more before I put a stroke on the canvas. I need to control this kind of Autopilot mode.

The thing we don't like also shape our style
- example: I'm looking at Onmyoji character art and think hard about why I don't like it as much as Arknights even when I can recognize its high level technical qualities.
  - superficial reasons? I might just prefer the aesthetic of modern+fantasy rather than traditional/cultural design.
  - deeper reasons in design choices?
    - Choice of fabrics?
    - I love Onmyoji pattern and decorative work, but maybe don't like the combo of flowiness of the big shapes + small ornamental pieces
- it's hard to tell and I'm just speculating
Texture brushes combination
- Texture brush is mostly an uncharted territory for me
- I observed that there are some artists that have a really natural usage for texture brushes: like Merasgar and pofu31. All of the textured strokes blend together well, and there are pretty much no noticeable "digital stamp" artifacts.
- This will be a future research topic!

Bottom-up thinking🌱
- Before Obsidian and Eagle, I generally organize my thoughts in a top-down way: I have several top-level categories, and smaller ideas will be derived from those categories
  - Example, let's take any Yoneyama Mai artwork, do I place it in Character Design folder? Or do I put it in Stylization? or Decorative art? There are many cases where an idea or thing just don't belong in a single category. The fear of categorization (don't know which category to put it in) has stopped me from taking notes on a lot of things.
  - Top down is still very useful when I need to do a random review on a subject and don't know where to start: I just need to access the top-level notes/folders and explore from there.

I watched Suzume this week~ Good movie.
- I don't think it is as good as Kimi no Na wa but I absolutely love the non-action scenes.
  - The part where Suzume's Aunt shared her struggle when she took Suzume in and the part where they made up after that.
  - Child Suzume finding her mom was heart wrenching.
- Animation wise, I'm impressed with how they animate the 3 legged chair, really convincing.

Undoubtedly HIRO's animation
- https://twitter.com/siiteiebahiro/status/1636382556315848704
- his first animation back then was really good but it was more because of the polishness in individual frames. This time the movement is truly mesmerizing! I want to draw hair like that too!