hello, hello! I was wondering if you'd have any videos or tutorials of your art process (or if you'd be up to make one in the future). I find the way you create texture with your brushes and the way you draw emotion and mouvement really interesting! I'd like to try and understand how you achieve that! (P.S. that last drawing you posted of the hands? really beautiful! Is the texure created by the brush or is it a filter? Either way... good shit. Keep it up!
hi! thank you!! i’ve posted some progress shots on a few recent pictures (mostly on twitter i think? though at least one on here as well). i don’t have any recordings of my process but i’ve been actively thinking about making a video or two. my problem is that in order to do that i need to sit down and research screen recording and video editing software first, which i know nothing about, and i’ve got too much stuff on my plate already tbh 🥲 so it’s unlikely i will make a video super soon, but it’s on my radar! i’ve thought of making just a regular old picture tutorial too but tbh i don’t know where i would even start 🤔 if there’s anything specific you’re interested in seeing me explain feel free to let me know!
re: the texture, i’m not sure which part of it you’re talking about, but it’s probably a combination of my brushes (i have posted my brush settings on here recently) and the Watercolor B layer texture in sai (you can achieve something that looks p much the same with a b&w noise filter in photoshop, i’ve done it before)
hung out with my friends on discord vc and yelled about @zmeess
thank you for appreciating the details! 🤭 yes that’s gold dust on his fingers ✨️ it’s the only reason he’s not wearing any jewelry. ya know, a very special occasion! and yes that’s a separate garment, he’s wearing at least four layers on his upper body in that first pic cause i love my Esseks like i love my onions. tear-enducing, bitter, and with a lot of layers
Hey there, I'm appearing out of the woodwork to let you know that the piece you posted recently with Caleb and Essek's hands has genuinely motivated me to sit down and do some hand studies. I've been a little stagnant with my art lately and have been idly thinking about how I'd really like to consistently draw hands really well, and seeing your piece has kicked me out of that stagnation and has lit a fire under me to do the dang thing. A little random, I just wanted you to know!! Rock on bud!!
aaaaa i’m so happy my art inspired you to study hands 🥺 hands are so expressive and can show so much character, i really like drawing hands and squeezing as many of my headcanons (or canon features, if it’s my OC 🤭) into them as possible 😂 tbh simply doing faceless hand studies is a bit boring to me, but drawing specific characters is super super fun! also motivates me to draw hands better and make them more detailed, both in said studies and full illustrations : )
i'm super shy but hi!! just wanted to tell you i LOVE your art!! (also, your inuokko art is just... you've helped me ship them even more than before, i am forever thankful for that. 😭💝) ANYWAY!! just wanted to thank you for sharing your art with us! 🥺 and also tell you you're a huge inspiration for me!! i'd like to go back to drawing, and it's partly thanks to your beautiful art!!! 💝💝💝 have a great day!!
hi!! thank you so much!! i’m so happy to hear that you are planning to pick up drawing again 🥺 and i’m glad to know that my inuokko art made you ship them more hehe, they’re a great pairing!!
Essek of this week (that’s number 3) is a sketch cause honestly friends i have been manically overworking for the past several months and need to pace myself ffs. Essek is still fancy tho!
(there’s nothing quite like prestidigitation to keep your curls in check)
(there’s nothing quite like
prestidigitation to
keep your curls in check)
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
i’m no longer surprised by anything that’s going on in the reblogs of my art 🤭
Hi hello! I tend to do a lot of historical costume designs for potential future cosplays on my Instagram (Elizabethan Ashton, Jeweled Catacomb Saint Skeleton Mollymauk, 18th century Venetian Carnival Captain America, etc.) and one of the ones I’m currently working on is Victorian Teagown Essek… and I think your art of Essek shading his eyes from the sun might have been why I realized that that could totally work for him? So I wanted to say thank you for that bit of inspiration, even if I didn’t realize it at the time!
hi! I’M SUPER HAPPY TO HEAR THAT MY ART INSPIRED YOU IN SOME WAY would love to see that teagown if you finish it!!
Hi!! I'm frothing at the mouth over how much I love your art!!! I was wondering, how much of your rendering and drawing you do from reference, and how much you do from imagination?
hi!! thank you very much!! it’ really late and i’m really tired so this is gonna be long and confusing, but here goes
i actually use tons of references, and i think this is a great opportunity to get on my soapbox of ‘use more references y'all’. i use references for poses, for anatomy, for various objects, for lighting, for color schemes: 50% of the images on my phone are pictures of myself semi-naked in various silly poses and pictures of all sorts of random shit that i took cause i thought that the lighting was super cool and i could use a similar sort of mood in one of my pictures.
however, as to how much comes from my imagination: a whole ton! i think the best way to go around using references is actually to study them and not copy them entirely. you can use shit that is completely unrelated to your illustration as reference. for example, i referenced a pic of myself holding a colander for my illustration of Essek holding a beacon. i shit you not:
what i needed was to get a sense of the angle of the elbow in such a pose as well as how the palm of a hand might interact with a quasi-spherical object of that size. as you can see, the finished illustration doesn’t look much like the reference, but it looks much better than it could have thanks to the reference and me studying it!
another example, this is the picture i used as a reference for Yuuta’s mermaid tail:
i could never come up with a fish design as cool as mother nature can, but i sure as hell can use it as inspiration for my mermaid
i often use dozens of references for one illustration alone, including 3d models, character posing apps such as designdoll and magicposer, architecture and interior design software such as sketchup, high fashion catwalk pictures, pics of my own weird-looking hands and a pic of a bug i took in 2017. the key is to figure out what you need help visualizing, find or create a reference of that specifically, and use your own logic-, imagination- and observation-based skills to incorporate that into your work!
like here:
i used this picture of my hand to get a sense of how a hand might interact with a small spherical object, and i used my imagination, logic and a lifetime of just looking at things and memorizing the way they interact with the world to depict a different sort of color scheme & lighting, replace the shell with a piece of amber, and alter the proportions in order to turn a tiny short-fingered hand into a much larger & broader long-fingered hand
Hello! I love your art and how intimate it looks, with warm colors are bright, sharp lighting, but a softness in the unifying and blending of the colors, which tells me you likely put some of a base color into the more contrasted colors so they’re more muted and drawn towards a unified hue. It looks so good and is so cool! I especially love your use of line weight and direction to signify shape, like you did with the drawing of Essek and Caleb’s legs intertwining, you can tell, simply based on the direction of some of the brush strokes, where Caleb’s heel is pointing and how foreshortened it is to display depth. You are a master class artist my friend! I would like some advise tho, if you are willing:
I’ve noted the way you draw kisses and they look very passionate and close and realistic, and I don’t draw them that often and when I do I struggle with them. Their noses get in the way, or their lips look too parted, or I struggle drawing the shapes of characters so close to one another when any pressing, moving, or touching of skin warps the base shape in some way I can’t wrap my head around. And I can’t exactly get good references for the exact pose I’m imagining because I’m not going to ask 2 people to make out in front of me so I can take pictures. You can imagine how awkward that would be. So do you have any method or tutorial on how you draw characters kissing, hugging, close to each other, etc?
If not and you’re busy, that’s fine too. Just wanted to let you know I love your work!!! Thanks!
hi! thank you so much for your kind words 🥺 i’ve found that when i draw i kinda take what i do for granted (like a lot of artists do, from what i’ve seen online?) and when people tell me that this or that thing i did in my art is cool and Why it’s cool from a technical standpoint it really puts things in perspective and lets me appreciate my own work more. so thank you!!
re: kisses, oh man i struggle with them myself big time! whenever i draw a kiss i usually end up redrawing the whole thing several times haha. i have to say that i use tons of references when i draw kisses, though not anything specific most of the time; i just google ‘kiss’ or something and spend a lot of time studying all the photos that come up. more often than not none of them are a perfect reference for what i’m looking to portray, BUT once i’ve looked at how two pairs of lips interact with each other in like twenty pictures i usually have a better grasp on the plasticity/weight/gravity/etc of the whole thing and am able to come up with a pose of my own.
one tip i can think of when it comes to drawing kisses (or any other instances of soft flesh pressing closely against soft flesh) is to make sure that any lines/colors used where the lips meet are not too dark. if the contrast is too high, or the line of your lineart is too thick it might look like a gap between the lips. very often leaving the lines very thin or even nonexistent helps me portray how closely something is squished against something else phdgjf
(gonna use my own drawings instead of pics of real kisses as an example like a total douchebag)
another thing is that people often describe the way lips look in a kiss as a zigzag but i’ve found that making the zigzag flatter works well for me, if drawing a zigzag at all
in fact, the closer/deeper the kiss, the flatter the line between the two pairs of lips would usually be; the more pronounced the zigzag, the more pursed the lips are, and so the kiss is lighter
here too:
not really a zigzag anyway tbh if you look at it
and the last thing that comes to my super super tired and sleepy brain rn is, squish the tip of the nose into the cheek. often looks very good
hope this helps in some way?? it’s a little bit in a jumble, real sleepy rn. thanks again for the complimenmts
