Hi! I was just wondering when you might be opening commissions again, if you know! I absolutely love you art style, it's gorgeous
hi, thank you! unfortunately, i can’t say for sure cause it’s pretty much out of my control. i’m located in russia and currently there’s no way that i know of for me to receive money from abroad (except for boosty, but that thing deducts a truly insane percentage from every donation that you receive and their tos freaks me out in general, so i really don’t want to use it). if anyone can point me in the direction of something else that might work, please let me know!
hi!!! omg i looove your art, so glad I found your stuff!! so sorry if this has been asked before, but what brushes do you use if you don't mind sharing ? :] The texture in your pieces is just phenomenal !!
hi, thank you!!!! you can find my brush settings in my pinned!
Hello! I love your work, I aspire to be as good at colors and anatomy as you... and so I wanted to ask, because I mainly focused on various animals for the entirety of my drawing life, how did you learn human anatomy? (I guess that'd apply to bettering any animal anatomy too) I see a little bit of conflicting info on where to start and where to go. Some say learn all the muscles, some say start out with just basic 3D forms and add knowledge as needed...
hi, thank you so much!!
i would definitely not recommend starting from studying anatomy extensively from a medical standpoint 🤔 the human body has eight billions bones and muscles, if you start from that you will only get overwhelmed and discouraged. my advice would be to start with studying proportions! especially from photographs of real people, not artist guides. a lot of the latter insist that the ideal human has a 1:8 head to body ratio and that’s silly as heck (my own head to body ratio is exactly 1:6.5 and i have perfectly average height for my demographic, hell if i’ve ever seen an artist guide that suggested this ratio for an adult person) (btw the taller you are, the smaller that ratio is, i.e. i might have that 1:6.5 ratio but a 190cm tall person might very well be 1:8 or even lower)
so yeah, studying proportions from real pictures is very important, bungled proportions is what sets me back in some pictures even when all the other stuff looks pretty good. people in my earlier pictures look suuuper long because of silly proportions, and silly horizontal proportions specifically! it looks cute and obviously sometimes it’s part of a specific art style, but in my case it was 100% not intentional so it just didn’t look natural.
(what is also really important to do is to train your eye for size/distance/various shapes/etc, as well as hand coordination. being able to draw a straight line in one line, a circle that is very close to being perfect, a right angle, two lines of the same length relatively far away from each other — all of those things will help you with understanding human proportions and are great for your overall drawing skill too. also very easy to train, you just draw a bunch of circles and stuff, a lot.)
then definitely drawing from reference, also a lot, and from real life too. and i think it’s really important to study and practice proportions before & at the same time with that because if you don’t you won’t know how to break down and analyze your reference and might end up with something that looks like an unfortunately copied photograph.
i personally think that drawing from reference, and making sure you’re not just copying the picture but Studying the 3d shapes, will help you more in the beginning than studying tons of muscle anatomy in detail, cause if you only do the latter your drawings might look really really stiff. anatomy atlases also absolutely do not account for fat & skin, which everyone has in various amounts and it heavily influences the plasticity & gravity of the body that in turn depends on the pose. photography and real life will give you a great idea of the natural lines and shapes of the body.
however, studying anatomy in small bits together with studying photographs of real people is good! i would say that looking up muscle and skeletal structures in conjunction with drawing from reference is the best strategy. just like keeping in mind your proportions, it will help you understand your reference better. for example, if your drawing features naked collarbones, it’s a good idea to look up the skeletal structure of that shit to know how exactly they connect to everything else, what their shape underneath the skin and muscle is, etc.
tldr: memorizing all the muscles and bones is very helpful as you’re refining your drawing skills, but i don’t particularly think it’s super helpful at the beginning of your journey. start with studying the proportions of the human body, then study the natural shapes of real people with various fat&muscle&skin structures, reinforce all of that with looking up muscle and skeletal structures to better understand what’s going on underneath the skin and the fat.
i have no idea if all of this is helpful, and keep in mind that different people might find one strategy more useful that others, but this is what has worked pretty well for me!
as someone who wants SO BADLY to draw kisses but is Not very good at it, your art is like... number one aspiration for drawing intimacy
so glad to hear that!!!! it’s always really important to me to convey The Intimacy™️ and to hear that others think it’s that good is really flattering 🥺
I found you on tumblr!!! Oh I am so happy! I finally found you on tumblr!! I've been following your twit forever but haven't been able to interact I am so happy! I love your art so so so much! Your anatomy is incredible! And the tenderness of your posing is- 👌💕💯
eeeeee thank you so much!! and ye i’m actually a tumblr old, been on here since 2012 🤭 also you can always send me a message on curiouscat if you want to ask a question or send a request on twitter (tumblr has that covered with the askbox)! and my dms are open too 🥰
Do you have any advice for finding reference images? Your Caleb and Essek drawings are soooo dynamic and well composed and I was wondering if it was just built up understanding of anatomy or well referenced
thamks for the compliment :3c i get most of my references from three sources: googling stuff, using 3d posing software like magic poser, and taking pics of myself lol. in the case of those two drawings i used two references:
1 i literally googled ‘kneel run’ cause google will give you very relevant shit based on like two words mashed together, and this is the image i used as a reference for the Caleb pic:
obviously the finished picture doesn’t look much like this one but i only needed a reference to figure out how close your chest gets to your thigh when you put your hands on the ground in this position. bam! this one helped a ton
2 for the Essek pic i referenced a photo of my fist
in my opinion, when you’re working on a drawing that is supposed to be it’s own separate thing and not a study, it’s best not to reference a photo entirely but to ref one part of it for added realism, or to break down the pose in that photo and draw it from a slightly or entirely different angle. the reason for that is because it makes your drawing look less stiff! usually artists naturally exaggerate and stylize things that are most important in their drawing, which makes it look dynamic and alive. a photo most likely won’t give you that!
another thing i do that i think is very important and doesn’t have anything to do with references is assuming the pose that you want to draw yourself and noticing the way your body behaves and where all parts of it are in relation to each other. right now i’m drawing a pic that features some cuddling and i’ve spent a truly embarrassing amount of time hugging my blåhaj to figure out where the arms should go
hopefully this helps!!
hello! i'm sorry if this is a weird question, and you can totally choose to not answer it, but are you polish? your art style is very similar to a lot of polish artists i've seen im various Social Medias
hi! totally not a question i was expecting on a sunday afternoon 🤭 but no, i’m not! actually, i don’t think i even know any polish digital artists. though tbh i don’t know many artists in general cause i’m afraid of venturing outside of my own social media. it’s a cold heartless world filled with spoilers out there
