commission for @elle-thereafter, an original character named Perran from her CR fanfic Gate Building: See also, Bargaining with Archfey, Complications of! El wanted to know what her character would look like if put on canvas, and helping people visualize their lovely brainchildren is one of my most favorite things, so i was very happy to work on this portrait. thank you for commissioning me! 💜
perhaps a silly ask but you are so good at drawing hands and feet, and they (feet especially) continue to elude me. do you have any tips for breaking those fuckers into manageable shapes/refs you recommend?
aww, thank you typhros!
my forever ever number one tip is using references, and more often than not i photograph my own hands (and feet!) to get the exact posing and angle i need. the downside of using only your own body as a reference is the risk of ending up drawing bodies that all look the same, and i do my best to counteract that by studying pictures of other people! just, anywhere and everywhere. i save quite a few pictures to my ref folders with thoughts of ‘oh yes, these particular hands have this particular feature that i want to give this particular character when i draw them’. then i can use my own hands as a pose reference, but give different characters their own unique hands.
(teeny tiny tip related to the above: imo a very fast and easy way to diversify your hands is to give your characters differently shaped nails. and i don’t only mean differently shaped nail tips, but the nail beds specifically! it’s amazing how diverse nails can be, no one in my family has the same nail shape. : D that being said, nails are not the only thing you can play with: hands can have different amounts of fat on them, veins that are or are not prominent, thin or thick skin that influences the color, various degrees of being manicured or not, all sorts of marks such as freckles/moles/scars/hangnails/tattoos, and tons of other stuff.)
the legendary @ adorkastock here on tumblr has two whole books of nothing but hand and feet references (which i regrettably do not own but hear are great), and i also highly recommend @ subwayhands over on instagram for random hand enrichment. simply a great collection of photography (done by Hannah La Follette Ryan) if you want to study what human hands look like.
as for how to break hands and feet down into manageable shapes: a lot of great tutorials have been done on the subject and i don’t think i’ll be able to recommend anything particularly nifty when it comes to the building blocks, but i can recommend drawing the outer shape of hands and feet first, especially when you’re working from a reference! and only then start filling it in with details.
this will help you not get lost in the minutiae of fingers and folds of skin and instead allow you to reliably capture the proportions and movement.
hope this is helpful! happy hand and feet drawing 🤞
commission for @elle-thereafter, an original character named Perran from her CR fanfic Gate Building: See also, Bargaining with Archfey, Complications of! El wanted to know what her character would look like if put on canvas, and helping people visualize their lovely brainchildren is one of my most favorite things, so i was very happy to work on this portrait. thank you for commissioning me! 💜
A while back I just happened to be scrolling through Tumblr when I saw @zmeess had opened their commissions 20 minutes prior. I had been thinking for a while I might get some art of Perran from my Gate Building universe commissioned and the prospect of getting that art done by the wonderful @zmeess sounded magical.
As a writer who is extremely, extremely far toward the aphantasia side of the visualisation spectrum, figuring out what things look like is a constant challenge. My descriptions are about vibes and hinting at aesthetic, tone, or emotion because I can’t picture anything, all I have is words. I don’t really know what anything I write about really looks like. My brain works entirely in words and abstract thought.
Seeing this character come to life has been an absolutely thrill and I couldn’t be more delighted to finally know what Perran looks like. I never meant to create Perran. He was a narrative convenience and meant to deliver exposition and disappear in a couple of chapters, but became something so much more complex and real, and I absolutely fell in love with him and his unexpected part of the story.
I’m so delighted I’ve been grinning all week. I can see him! His hair, his nose, his lips, his fucking lovely freckles! His bracelets! His endless tea! The muscles in his arms from smithing! The faraway look in his eyes.
If you ever wonder if commissioning art of your original characters will be worth it: yes, yes it absolutely is.
Thank you @zmeess, you were wonderful to work with! 💜🧡
a little study i did to try to depict Essek looking as realistic (within my style) as possible. you can tell i was serious by the fact that i blacked out his clothes so as not to get distracted from the task at hand /j
i encounter a few persistent issues when i draw Essek; it’s not only in him not being a real person that i can’t look at to then draw accurately as far as his facial features are concerned, but also in the fact that purple people don’t exist. i can’t study, from pictures or real life, how skin of that color would behave in different lighting, how the blood vessels would appear from underneath it, what shade the sebum would highlight the nose and forehead with, and on and on and on. i can only make an educated guess, and it takes a lot of mental math each time 🤭 so here i tried paying special attention to the realism of it all, to see if i’ll learn something! my art is somewhat (semi-)realistic as is, but there still is a fair amount of stylizing going on, and i wanted to have a bit of fun figuring out where it happens. so far noticed that i tend to exaggerate facial features and make them larger than they would probably be on a real person (noses and eyes in particular), and my art could benefit from more different hues when i’m doing skin, especially green.
a little study i did to try to depict Essek looking as realistic (within my style) as possible. you can tell i was serious by the fact that i blacked out his clothes so as not to get distracted from the task at hand /j
i encounter a few persistent issues when i draw Essek; it’s not only in him not being a real person that i can’t look at to then draw accurately as far as his facial features are concerned, but also in the fact that purple people don’t exist. i can’t study, from pictures or real life, how skin of that color would behave in different lighting, how the blood vessels would appear from underneath it, what shade the sebum would highlight the nose and forehead with, and on and on and on. i can only make an educated guess, and it takes a lot of mental math each time 🤭 so here i tried paying special attention to the realism of it all, to see if i’ll learn something! my art is somewhat (semi-)realistic as is, but there still is a fair amount of stylizing going on, and i wanted to have a bit of fun figuring out where it happens. so far noticed that i tend to exaggerate facial features and make them larger than they would probably be on a real person (noses and eyes in particular), and my art could benefit from more different hues when i’m doing skin, especially green.
So the traditional logic for faces is the yellow, red, and blue zones, yeah? Yellow for forehead, red for nose and cheeks, blue for mouth and jaw.
I remember reading one of my textbooks—probably Gurney’s Color and Light—and he explained that it was because the forehead has bone really close to the surface, the cheeks/nose/ears have a ton of blood vessels, and the jaw has a ton of hair follicles, which, for darker hair, creates a bluish cast!
I also remember my art teacher putting on the DVD extras for the 3D Smurf film, playing an interview/BTS thing from the modelers and animators where they talked about what color of blood Smurfs have. Going by Smurf logic, you’d expect blue, right? Everything they eat is blue, they are blue, To Smurf is To Blue. But apparently, when they rendered that with all the subsurface scattering and the slight translucence that comes from skin, the blue blood looked super creepy and off-putting, so they ended up changing it back to red, and that looked right.
I read a fic recently (I know it’s called zweifacher, but I can’t recall the fic writer at this exact second), where one of the author’s notes mentioned that they were treating drow like silkie chickens, with hyperpigmentation, so their blood was almost black, their muscles and bones were black—not teeth though, because teeth aren’t bones??? madness— and that just seemed really cool to me.
So I guess all these thoughts coalesce into a series of questions:
Are your drow capable of growing facial hair?
If not, are they like children where they just have very fine hair that doesn’t grow very long or thick, or are they like, alopecia-smooth except for scalp and eyebrows?
What effect does white or very pale hair have on the skin when it is shaved smooth?
What color is your drow blood?
Does the color of your drow skin influence the color of their organs/muscles/etc?
Something that might be a super useful tool would be like, a flesh orb or something. Make a sphere in Blender or something, and give it material settings so that you could individually set the local color of like, skin, muscle, blood, hair, and bone, and then have a couple rendering presets for lighting scenarios, and then you’d be able to mess around with the colors to find the look you want, and then boom you have your skin tone reference.
Dang it, now I really want one of those, why can’t I just be magically better at Blender
i kid you not this is exactly my thought process! i headcanon that drow have dark purple/almost black blood (which influences the color of the blush, subsurface scattering, veins, lips and mucous membranes), no robust facial hair but hair follicles present at the unnoticeable peach fuzz level (which influences the jaw and the area around the mouth), white bones (which lend slightly yellow-ish cast to areas of skin that stretch close to the bone), and so on and so forth. i’ve even been working on an Essek 3d sculpt in Blender in the hopes that i’ll be able to figure out how to paint it and then stick it into environments for on-demand color references 😂 (it’s slow-going because i’m a Blender novice)
a little study i did to try to depict Essek looking as realistic (within my style) as possible. you can tell i was serious by the fact that i blacked out his clothes so as not to get distracted from the task at hand /j
i encounter a few persistent issues when i draw Essek; it’s not only in him not being a real person that i can’t look at to then draw accurately as far as his facial features are concerned, but also in the fact that purple people don’t exist. i can’t study, from pictures or real life, how skin of that color would behave in different lighting, how the blood vessels would appear from underneath it, what shade the sebum would highlight the nose and forehead with, and on and on and on. i can only make an educated guess, and it takes a lot of mental math each time 🤭 so here i tried paying special attention to the realism of it all, to see if i’ll learn something! my art is somewhat (semi-)realistic as is, but there still is a fair amount of stylizing going on, and i wanted to have a bit of fun figuring out where it happens. so far noticed that i tend to exaggerate facial features and make them larger than they would probably be on a real person (noses and eyes in particular), and my art could benefit from more different hues when i’m doing skin, especially green.
very very quick psa: lads please don’t send me spoilers 🥲 i totally understand that everyone is super excited, however i’m not caught up on c3 and won’t be for a while. i’m doing my best to block all the cr tags but it’s hard to avoid spoilers when they’re in your inbox or tags 😭 thank you
a Caleb study to go with the Essek study i posted a couple days ago!
just like with Essek, i tried to focus on the realism here 👀 it’s easier with Caleb because he is a human and photo references are easier to come by for humans, but he is still not a real person i can observe so there is a fair bit of theatre of the mind modeling going on when i draw him 🤭
p.s. also i’m aware that i’m posting art right after some exciting things have happened in c3, so just to make it clear: guys PLEASE do not spoil anything in the tags. thank you \o/
I came for the shadowghast and I'm staying for how absolutely inspiring everything else you draw is. I love how intentional your colours and brush strokes look, I really want to get to a place like that with my art and damn if yours doesn't re-motivate me to keep trying!
hi, thank you so much!! i’m so happy to hear you like my stuff and that it’s inspired you to continue making art 😭
not even a proper ask really i just realized one of my ocs was practically made in a lab for you to have a good time drawing (lilac-themed eladrin with hair made of lilac flowers) and i have now started saving up for when your next batch of comms drops :) hope you're having a good one!
aww thank you for thinking of me 🥺 your OC sounds AMAZINGLY purple and i would love to draw them!! i’m already pondering how i would render lilac flowers 👀
I love your art deeply and love the painterly quality of it. Thus I've been wondering if you have any traditional art you can share? I've seen the watercolor nature paintings you did and loved them, as I also love working with water colors.
Have you every worked with oils, or gouache?
hi, thank you so much for this sweet message 🥺 you inspired me to do a study of a tulip i saw on my walk today! it had a bird cherry bloom inside of it and i found that incredibly charming.
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as for oils and gouache: when i work digitally i 100% employ the principles used in oil painting (and other types of opaque paints, as opposed to watercolors), but funnily enough i have always hated working with gouache, and i have never worked with oils! mostly because i was very young and very broke when i was a traditional painter, and oil painting is Expensive. or at least it seemed so at the time 😔 now that i’m considering it though, i think i might try oil painting in the future. could be fun to roll around in real paint!
fellas for the love of god PLEASE stop spoiling the latest c3 episode in my inbox. i’m begging you. if another person sends me an ask even as much as hinting at what has happened i will be blocking them and closing my ask box for an indeterminate amount of time.
Just wanted to ask what do you think would be Essek and Calebs favorite tea? Or do you think one of them is more a coffee person?
Hope you have a nice day :D
thank you for the sweet non-spoilery ask \o/
i think i’ve had this discussion with some friends before! i can see many different headcanons with different reasoning behind them fitting them in many different ways, but if i had to pick one now, i’d say… 🤔 Essek is definitely a tea person but not as much of a tea snob and/or connoisseur as Yussa is. he has one or two VERY fancy teas that he loves and he inhales like a bathtub of it a day (moderation? don’t know her). strikes me more as a non-fermented kind of tea person, i can see him being a fan of the exandrian equivalent of bai hao yinzhen.
as for Caleb… here’s a question: how readily available would tea and coffee be in the Empire? from what i’ve seen canon treats them as something everyone knows and can buy at the local market, but i feel like it might be more fun to picture them as a more or less expensive import, and that would probably mean that Caleb didn’t have them as a child. tisanes made of local plants though? that could be interesting, and i can see Caleb having a soft spot for elderberry tea that his mother used to make or something like that 🥺
Tea snob Yussa is so correct, so now I simply must ask what you think his favorite teas would be 👀
i feel like Yussa would try any tea at least twice to make sure his conclusions are correct. and he strikes me as a person with very refined but Very varied tastes that would have a favorite tea for any occasion. ‘i think this particular sunset calls for [anything from an incredibly famous and incredibly expensive tea to some smelly lichen that grows only in one godsforsaken patch of eiselcross], steeped for exactly 30 seconds’
this picture was a very fun challenge for me from the point of view of posing, and y'all know me. always happy to draw ropes 💜 thank you for commissioning me!
Is there a magic secret I never learned in all the art classes I've taken? How do you pick the colors you use??? I'm in love with all your choices. Like the little bits of color that don't match what color it's near... how do you decide where the color goes? Is it like the shadows and highlights? Your color palettes are gorgeous. Your art is so beautiful.
thank you!
there is no magic secret! it is all about how you choose to interpret the color you see—i.e., your personal stylization.
look at this wonderful picture of fuji apples:
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(By Scott Bauer, USDA ARS, Public Domain)
the local color of the fuji apples above is red, and they’re lit and photographed in a way that makes them appear pretty uniformly red in hue as well. but you can still pick up some small variations in hue, as well as saturation (chroma) and value!
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you can go the hyper-realistic route, carefully observing and replicating the colors you see to create a painting of fuji apples that is as close to real life as possible. you can also choose to stylize and interpret the colors through a certain lens, which may help convey a certain mood or just make the image more aesthetically pleasing (humans usually enjoy limited palettes it seems).
there is an infinite number of ways you can do that! which is where the fun of experimenting and developing your own style lies. the important thing you need to remember is that, while i picked those little swatches with the eyedropper tool, you should observe and depict any color in relation to its neighbor and not on its own. is this patch cooler or warmer in hue in relation to its neighbor? is it more or less saturated? is it lighter or darker in color?
once you have analyzed those properties, you can think of how you want to stylize them. would you like to lean the darker shades red? would you like to make one object more saturated than everything else in the picture, to draw the viewer’s attention to it? would you like to make all the lighter colors lighter and all the darker colors darker in order to up the contrast of your painting? the possibilities are endless.
here’s my little 15 minute study!
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i made the background more green in hue because i wanted the apples to stand out more, pushed the highlights away from white and towards light green to make the color scheme more harmonious, and added purple to the shadows because that’s what i do. : ) among other things. it has changed both the mood and the lighting of the original photo! and you don’t have to follow this algorithm for everything, or indeed anything—you can play around with color any way you want.
you can do this kind of color nudging with color overlays in graphic software too, to a certain extent. for example, if you set a solid yellow layer to ‘darken color’ over a picture, it will turn all the pixels of that picture that are lighter in value than that particular yellow into that yellow. things like that can make your color palette more cohesive/limited, and doing those adjustments in your head as you paint (as opposed to on a separate layer) can make them look more varied and fun. no shame in color correction, use it! it’s a tool just like any traditional glaze is, and if you have a favorite 'glaze’, with practice you will figure out what it is you like about it and start incorporating that right at the painting stage.
tl;dr: observe the colors around you in relation to each other, experiment with them, and most importantly paint and practice a lot! thankfully there are no magical secrets, only color theory and practice 💪( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
for color theory reading, i recommend James Gurney’s Color and Light! it was recommended to me last year, and introduced me to the gamut map approach, which i hadn’t been familiar with before. i’ve only used it once but it was tremendous fun and taught me a couple new things.
this picture was a very fun challenge for me from the point of view of posing, and y'all know me. always happy to draw ropes 💜 thank you for commissioning me!
I actually have no memory of if I've sent you an ask before or if I got too scared and chickened out? Either way I just wanted to say I love your art, it's a blessing on my dash every time
thank you so much for taking time out of your day to message me, this ask made me smile so big 😭
Ok that's probably not funny in this situation but you are an amazing artist and I adore your style and coloring. Have a nice day!
thank you!! this is also a great illustration of the fact that titling things with *SPOILER WARNING* doesn’t work, because my brain wasn’t fast enough to send the signal to stop reading to my eyes and i totally saw the ‘i love your art <3’ 🤭 i’m glad you enjoy my art 💜
It’s the 9th anniversary of my annual drawing challenge, Draw Everything June. Will I see you there? Sign up on Adorkastock.com!
this sounds incredibly fun! despite having known about adorkastock since my deviantart days, i only followed them like a month ago, so this is the first time i’m seeing Draw Everything June and i am excited to try!
i really encourage my fellow artists to participate too! and apparently if you complete the challenge in full, you can get a pose reference pack, which is a fun little bonus on top of all the awesome drawing & learning 😍
i have finally watched episode 94! welcome back hot boy 💜
y'all might know that i am a staunch supporter of short haired Essek, so when i learned about his new hairstyle i went mmmmm not sure about that! but it took me like. two and a half hours to change my mind. it’s cool to experiment with your appearance! the dude deserves some cute fancy curls, as a treat. also zmeess you’ve been growing out your hair from a buzz cut for years, now he’s just like you fr or whatever the kids say.
so yeah, i support you man, you go and dazzle everyone with your fabulous Xhorhassian looks
i have finally watched episode 94! welcome back hot boy 💜
y'all might know that i am a staunch supporter of short haired Essek, so when i learned about his new hairstyle i went mmmmm not sure about that! but it took me like. two and a half hours to change my mind. it’s cool to experiment with your appearance! the dude deserves some cute fancy curls, as a treat. also zmeess you’ve been growing out your hair from a buzz cut for years, now he’s just like you fr or whatever the kids say.
so yeah, i support you man, you go and dazzle everyone with your fabulous Xhorhassian looks
commission for @mozzys-stuff, his half-elf druid Nele! i don’t often work with warm color schemes, so this sweetheart was a genuine treat to paint 💚 thank you for commissioning me!
i'm perennially in love with your work but lately i've been so curious about your rendering process. mainly, do you work in solid blocks of color, or do you use transparent layers to build up your values? ive started doing traditional oil painting and some of the glazing techniques remind me of the way your skin tones look!
hi, thank you! 💜
95% the former! every so often i would use a separate layer to sketch out the lighting, but then i merge it with the main underpainting and continue rendering on one layer. that’s so fun that my art reminds you of some oil techniques, i actually didn’t know transparent layers could be used in oil painting beyond pretty much just one or two finishing lacquers/glazes! putting this on my ‘to read up on’ list.
commission for @mozzys-stuff, his half-elf druid Nele! i don’t often work with warm color schemes, so this sweetheart was a genuine treat to paint 💚 thank you for commissioning me!
First of all I just wanna say that whenever you post I scream a little bit, I love your work so so much 😭
Idk if you’ve talked about this before but I was wondering about your thoughts on Molly x Caleb. I’m a shadowgast enthusiast myself, but I always felt that if Molly had lived longer they would have had more romantic overtures with Caleb. I know Caleb gets paired with literally everyone in this fandom, but none of the pairings really felt right to me except for widowmauk (and shadowgast ofc). Something about a character who has no past and no interest in learning their past vs a man who defines himself solely by his past mistakes and is completely consumed by them. Idk it’s really compelling to me and I wanted to know your thoughts •^•
hi, thank you so much! that’s so sweet of you 🥺
as for my thoughts on widomauk: i think my answer might disappoint you, but i am practically indifferent to that pairing 😂 in fact, before i joined the fandom after finishing the campaign, i had been a relatively quiet watcher for years and the first cr ship that interested me was fjolly. all i remember from my diving into the cr tag on ao3 at the time was a) ‘how come more people don’t ship the potential disaster that is fjolly’ and b) 'WHY is there so much Caleb/Molly’. i’ve never had anything against that ship, but it also never really grabbed me 🤭 i do agree with you though that had Molly lived, him and Caleb definitely would have had something going on.
but honestly, i think practically any Caleb ship has/had lots of potential because Caleb has a heart the size of exandria and is in love with everybody /j
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