Girl on Couch

More Sketches

 

Sketch on Sketch

I've mentioned it before, but a technique I like to occasionally do with digital is to use a color brush and just slop down a big spread of paint or pencil dusting or whichever, then go back and use an eraser tool to "carve" the design into it, keeping it on the same layer. In this case, I actually just ended up using a white pencil line over a black tilted pencil spread. The effect is the same, really. The challenge here is that, while I am using digital and I can still use the undo button, this is a lot less forgiving of a technique for immediate fixes. It's harder to go back and do any touch-up work without making obvious screw ups with the texturing, and resizing/repositioning just messes things up even further.

So unless you're willing to undo a bunch of otherwise good lines to try and fix one messed up line you don't catch until later (and it's easy to end up exceeding your undo limit depending on the program anyway), you're stuck with the mistakes you make, almost like using actual pen on paper. Obviously, you could still touch things up if you really wanted to with delicate patchwork, but you're usually still making the patch-up more of a hassle than is worth it for a sketch.

In any case, I also think it makes for a striking visual style, as well as a neat little challenge to myself.

Young Woman Sketch

 

Actually used a photo reference for this one. I wasn't sure about the shadow, so I went back to touch it up, and I can't tell which actually looks better, so here's both.

Glamour Girl

 

Somehow, the Jem and the Holograms theme song got stuck in my head, and I felt the urge to try and draw an 80's glam-rock girl. Can't say I'm stoked on the fashions of the time, but I love the wild manes of hair from that era.

Sketch Dump, Ladies and Others

 

 

  

 

 

Another big ol' dump of sketches, made on various programs.

Discovering Hard Round Opacity

 

Hard Round Opacitive Brush. Have you seen this? Have you heard about this?

I'm lead to believe that if you're a digital artist, this is literally one of the first brushes you find out about and learn to use. I had no idea it existed until earlier this year, and it suddenly explains so much the look of digital art, painting, and coloring techniques. Even when looking up tutorials on shading, this thing never came up, instead it was always "use the air brush" or "turn down opacity on a whole layer used just for shading." Somehow, in all this time, a brush that actually alters opacity with pen pressure never tripped my radar.

This was apparently one of four main brush types utilized in Photoshop, which it seems two or three generations of digital artist cut their teeth on. By the time I actually tried getting into digital art, though, there were a ton of other alternative art programs, and as I played through the various brush types, if I ever did stumble on an opacity-pressure brush, it somehow never clicked. I was always much more concerned with finding a good basic line brush or playing with the special effects brushes. When I wanted a "paint" brush, I would try to find paint-texture brushes, most of which never really looked that much like paint to me.

It is a common wisdom in the digital art community that one should not get too hung up the types of brushes you use; there is no single magic brush that instantly levels up your own skills. However, there are certain brush functions that utilize certain mechanics that cannot be replicated with just any old brush. Soft Round (air brush) and Hard Round are two different mechanics, and if I'd just known the different options, maybe I could have had a less frustrating time with "soft" shading.

Chalk it up to my lack of actually sitting down and taking learning art more seriously. I barely think to actually look up tutorials, but when I do, I sometimes don't know what precisely I'm looking for. Just like how I should really use references a ton more than I do, its just when I start drawing, I don't even know what I'm aiming to make most of the time I'm just laying down lines, and sometimes, that flows into doing a drawing, and I'm halfway through it before it even occurs to me that "hey, maybe I should look up an image". And two-thirds of the time that happens, I don't have immediate internet access for research material, so I say screw it and keep winging it.

Sometimes, though, you just don't know what you don't know. An under considered obstacle to many a self-taught person is not even knowing when there are alternative possibilities to doing something, because what may seem incredibly obvious to one person just doesn't even occur to them. I'm laying it on a little thick here; I'm talking about discovering the Hard Round Opacitive as some great revelation with a little tongue-in-cheek bemusement at myself. But truly, never having encountered anyone talking about it until I stumbled into a random brush tutorial for a program I don't even use, several years after getting into digital art, is one of those perfect examples of why its important to not only have access to learning resources, but to actually know about them, and how to find alternative avenues to things you may not have considered before.

That's why you get an endless line of newbie artists who've never had an art teacher or mentor to show them incredibly basic shit, coming onto art forums and making the regulars sick and tired of that dreaded question, "What kind of brush do you use?" Sure, in most respects, the brush doesn't matter if you're learning basic level stuff. But to assume every person is looking for a "makes me look like a master artist with no effort" brush is sometimes missing what the actual question is, from someone who might literally not know the difference between an air brush and an opacity brush, or might not have any idea what a blending mode is.

Taco

 

Mmm, lunch.

Practicing the watercolor brushes in CSP, plus used the new "rough ink" pen.

More Various Sketches

In the shadows...

Storm from X-Men, I guess.

Storm, line work.

A Library-Anne.

Testing out Screentones.

DemonAngel

Sleepy Guy

Couple girls.

It occurs to me suddenly that while I tend to darken my canvas to make drawing on the tablet easier on the eyes, I should probably brighten it back up when posting.

Ladies and Lines

 

More sketches, some of which I had forgotten to post before. Largely just trying out different techniques. The fifth image of the smiling lady, I'm pretty certain I was going from a reference, but for the life of me, I can't remember what I was working from.

More Sketches

 

Hair and Hatches, Blue and Shroud

Practicing hair mainly, in the first two. Getting hair details is fuggin' complicated!

Other pic is a little more coloring practice, watercolor on the left, regular fills on the right.

Black, Pink, and Paint

 I've taken up an interest in trying out watercolor-style digital painting, but I am finding it quite frustrating to use. Less because of my lack of practice with paint, and more because of how the watercolor brush engines in various programs always have something constantly screwy with how they work. Either they bleed too much into one another, don't have a good "wet paper" grain texture to make it look like proper watercolor, or the "opacity overlap" effect means you have to be extremely careful with every stroke you make. It's most the latter effect, and any fuck ups have to be committed to, as blending tools just destroy the texture of the brush and ruin the effect.

I might have to actually just learn "regular" digital painting with the classic round brush before coming back to watercolor effects. This is one of the few times I'm tempted to actually try out analogue instead just to see how different it really feels.