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
tldr:
and references
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
