For Nami-Tsuki <3
Because she had a sad couple of days, and I know sardines can always help her out. FenFen is comforting Valvatorez.
(It’s not my best, and I’ve never drawn these characters before, but ALL IS FOR MY NAMIS - I mean - MY LORD!)
armor, ink and digital
ever have one of those flash fantasies where you’re embracing and cutting through an emotionally unavailable man on a bed of twisting fiddle heads? yea, me too.
god my choice in subject is so fucking weird sometimes.
sophia and i talked a lot about the direction of contemporary illustration (mostly editorial) and how it relates to our work. i decided that i had to start creating art that had more balls. seriously. i’ve always felt so conservative with all my aesthetic choices: anatomy, value, palette, texture, subject, media. everything is always so bland. considering the ink work on armor was already finished by the time i spoke with sophia, my attempt at addressing this problem came in the form of an uncharacteristic palette choice: red. mother fucking red.
what i didn’t realize at the time was that i am intellectually incapable of working with red. my natural inclination is to use it conservatively and offset it with its complement. the first color sketches of this thing, therefore, came out green. i stared at it and screamed, “NO, RED!” then i got up and went to sleep. my eyes wanted to bleed (but i’m sure it would have come out green instead).
so i finally muscled my way into a red palette, but i can’t shake how much it reminds me of a kurosawa film. maybe that’s a good thing. he was a little zany, which i like lol.
another thing about this color sceme that proved troublesome was the heavy use of black. whenever black plays a dominant role in a piece, it tends to suck out the saturation from the rest of the colors. i ended up spending a lot of time exporting different versions of this with varying levels of saturation. some made my brain hurt, some looked depressing. i think i arrived at a happy, juicy medium. at least i hope i did.
regarding subject matter, i noticed that a lot of people seem to think my work is about “love.” it’s come up in descriptions and conversations before, “well he clearly loves her,” “it feels so romantic,” etc. the strange part is that almost none of my illustrations are actually about love. it’s quite the opposite. i explained it to a friend of mine: the ambiguity or mistaken judgements in tone are due to my identical experiences in the last year. i just thought i’d clear that up lol.
one more boring note that i’m sure no one noticed or cares about is the issue of the signature. this is literally the first piece i’ve decided to sign in the last 5 years. while a freshman in art school, my dear drawing professor, george parrino, berated everyone in my class for turning in signed homework assignments, “what are you showing your paper bag drawing at the Met? are you having a retrospective at the Guggenheim? get that signature off there.” he scared the signature out of me— and i stayed scared for years.
i also realized that my obnoxious john-hancock-sized signature threw off my compositions (i literally used to use it to help balance out bad designs when i was younger and dumber haha). going back to the signature is experimental. it still seems arrogant of me to sign something, but that’s due to my art-school-freshman-modesty. in reality, though, that’s just stupid.
Reblogged from jennifer hom blog
Neil Gaiman is an amazing man and writer. I couldn’t possibly think of a better man to talk to future-artists about how to make it out there in the real-world. It’s nice to think that someone out there, someone with that much impact, still believes in breaking the rules and doing what you want.
I intend to keep this speech in mind for the rest of my artistic path.
Reblogged from Joe Does Things
Video Game Lessons
Inspiring lessons learned from a classic set of games, brought to you by the artist: http://paperbeatsscissors.tumblr.com/
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
First, go grab some headphones. The best ones you’ve got. If the best ones you’ve got are these suckers (or something similar), you should really go buy new ones, but use the best you’ve got for right now.
Take a break from whatever you’re doing for 2 minutes and listen, but just listen to the whole thing, even if you have to multi-task.
Headphones on? Ok. Good.
Now, press play.
“Upular (3D Audio Version)” - Pogo
Reblogged from HAMBURGLR
Some of the finest Diablo III cosplay around thanks to the girls at Spiral Cats.
Reblogged from Galaxy Next Door
I'll tumblr for ya: After seeing the number of folks who have suffered OH GOD NO I INKED...
After seeing the number of folks who have suffered OH GOD NO I INKED ON MY SKETCH LAYER moments, I figured it would be worth sharing this easy trick to fix it and clean the scribbles off your nice clean lines.
It seems kind of long because I tried to make it as easy to…
Reblogged from I'll tumblr for ya
Okay, to clarify - these pieces and times are not here to brag. I want to introduce all of you to the wonderfulWHYof speedpainting and why I will advocate it strongly for anyone who doesn’t really do it.
Do you obsess over detail? Lose interest in the middle? Finish pieces of the work but not the whole? Get stuck on backgrounds? Get messed up with composition?
There are a lot more questions I could really ask, and if the answer is yes to any of them, speed paints will help you out if you approach it the right way.
Speed paints are a great way to fail a bunch of times quickly. You can examine your work afterward to understand why, but it really sucks to fail catastrophically on a single piece you spent 30 hours on instead of in 5 successive 1 hour pieces that try to practice the same thing before attempting to put the whole to the test. (Failing isn’t bad by any means though! You will do it. No piece is ever going to be entirely successful on its first try. Just give up that fantasy fairy tale right now.)
Basically, speed paints are a fantastic way to learn what works and what doesn’t and QUICKLY. You time yourself. Sometimes 2-3 hour “speed” paints are okay too, and I’ve posted a few that took longer than an hour in my examples.
Basically, speed works make you home in on the most important parts of your piece.
Doing anything quickly, where you’re trying to capture the “essentials,” is going to help you focus on those when you do a big piece, too. It’s really okay if you’re terrible with colors or composition right now- I was at one point (and I won’t profess to be a master by any means: I just know more than I once did about what works for me and what doesn’t), and I will still always have more to learn and experiment with.
You will have to make quick choices about what colors are important, how to set up and frame a piece (the composition aspect), what interesting poses to give, what lighting to set up, what type of marks to quickly add to give the desired texture, and most importantly, you will not be zooming in and focusing on details in any one spot.
Any ideal speed work is worked on uniformly at once. You block out the general thing and then slowly bring the picture to focus (sound familiar? that’s because it’s utterly sound advice)
If you’re working on tiny details in a section of the drawing before moving on to even putting color down for the rest, you’re going to end up with a drawing/painting that is not uniform at all. Those pieces are usually extremely obvious to any trained eye. It’s really really important to put down the base for the whole piece, the base colors, and then shade the whole thing at once, highlight the whole thing at once… This will help you keep the WHOLE piece, the WHOLE composition as the focus. You will not lose the forest for the tree, so to speak!
Working quickly forces you to make tough choices about how to best represent details as creative decisions with brush strokes or quick mark making take over. This knowledge carries over into your big pieces, reducing the time spent on those and improving the overall quality of your work.
Speed painting or drawing basically helps you get a lot more mistakes/knowledge under your belt so that when you get to these big pieces or projects you want to do, you’ve already messed up a lot and therefore will have a better chance at making successful work.
Absolutely do not be afraid to take chances, to fail, to make unsuccessful work. That’s part of the process, and it kind of sucks unless you learn to embrace where you are in art and move forward with the best you got, knowing that if you’re critically analyzing your entire body of work, you will, you WILL improve.
It just takes time. A lot of it. You will not become an expert in a day, a month, a year, three years… it takes a lot of time! (see previous post)
And most of all, don’t get discouraged. I know it is easy to, but if you experiment and don’t forget to have fun on top of everything else, you will get to higher places. Please trust me on this. I know it’s hard to. If you can’t and don’t believe me, then… work hard! See for yourself! There’s no shortcut. There’s only labor behind it. (And don’t forget to supplement paintings with tons and tons of drawing and being observant!)
Eventually I will make an updated tutorial on speed painting, and I will make an updated color guide/book thing. For now, I hope these words encourage those of you who needed a pick me up, and inspire those of you who didn’t think you could do it. You can, if you work hard.
Reblogged from Puer Chance
