Tag: Illustration

20230105

I’m going to attempt to write stuff every now and then. It’s going to be rough. Read at your own peril.
Read time: ~3-4min

Monastery

So many lives were lost. What was left of their hope was little more than embers. After days, who knows how many, of unending pounding by this storm, they were the only two left.
Their expedition had started with 72 people; only them, the two who started this disaster, remained. And he had thought they were going to die as well. Had been sure of it more than once. When the rope connecting him to Nathanial had slackened, he had been certain that he wouldn’t be able to raise Nathaniel back up again when he reached him. He could barely keep himself up after all.
Damn this cursed storm. It appeared out of nowhere. This tempest blanketed a clear blue sky and replaced perfect weather with unending desolation. Thick, soggy snowflakes are whipped about with more force than their weight should allow. Each flake feels like wet leaves clinging to your clothes, like tiny hands that try to drag you down into the muck. And whenever they meet skin, they bring the sensation of small sharp biting pincers that burrow into the individual pores and attempt to tear it inside out one pore at a time. They are carried by a harsh freezing wind that never lets up but is never steady enough for you to adapt. Gusts of wind that throw pinpricks of ice under your hood. Bursts of air that entrench frozen barbs between the layers of your wrappings until your movement causes their spikes to scrape their way to your flesh, where they prick into you like thorns. Each sting introduces more coldness and relieves you of more of your fleeting energy. But also, there is that slight relief when the needle pierces, and the flesh heats in response. The small comfort of a droplet of blood leaving the confines of your body, relinquishing its warmth onto the surface of your unfeeling meat.
Curse this damned storm. And now this.

Continue reading “20230105”

w45 2021

Sometimes I wish I could just settle for a “look” for the stuff that I create. But it’s just not going to happen I guess. I’m still exploring how images can look utilizing lineart and “coloring inside the lines” and I never like what I do long enough to make it a distinct thing.

The week before I was doing some erotic drawings. This time unfortunately I didn’t like the cleanliness of smoothed, pixel-perfect lines and crisp cell-shaded coloring. To alter that impression the first thing I tried was to simply throw a paper texture on top and add some noise. This time such quick fixes only added to my annoyance. So I modified one of my favorite sketching brushes to look like a little broken bleeding pen nip and restarted my drawing from there. I did a couple more drawings using that brush, experimenting with different methods of coloring them, the length of my strokes, whether or not to use it with lazy nezumi/photoshop stroke smoothing, and then let it sit for a few days.

some quickly grabbed examples from the exploration

This week I decided to pick up the exploration but instead of drawing naked woman I decided to go for a fantasy scene. I didn’t use any brush smoothing and instead of making designed marks and lines I decided to “doodle” a lot of the linear details. I looked at Moebius art, Lorenzo de Felici, Sergio Toppi, Mark Nelson, Jonathan Edwards, Jorge Zaffino, Ashley Wood – not that it shows. I painted the background using brushes from Dice Tsutsumi, Greg Rutkowski and Justin Gerard because I wanted “texture”.

While I enjoyed it while I was doing it, I’m now already thinking that it’s too random. Not designed enough. The line thickness is too uniform. The perspective is too boring, the scattering of the details too equal. The coloring seems to be in limbo between full flat color an volume based painting.

On to the next thing I guess. The learning continues.

w43 2021

Me: I don’t like painted rendering. So much time spent polishing stuff. I will stick to lineart and simple coloring, so much faster.
Also me:

For whatever reason, I wanted to go completely overboard (for my standards) with detailing. I wanted to push patterns/textures to an extent that made no sense. It was good for me to follow this urge because now I know with almost certainty that this is not for me.

There are individual parts that I like and which will lead me to further exploration, like the simplified outlined trees in the background or the heavy detailed lineart texturing in the foreground, but the combination of it all into illustrations like this is not where I want to go.

A joke – haha – 001

While I was working with a team I learned about myself how much I enjoy telling terrible jokes and making others suffer through it. I made it a habit to look for a couple of bad jokes every weekend which I would then force myself my team to listen to throughout the week. Most often I was the only one laughing, but I got a couple of laughs out of them at least as well.
Since I don’t have a team anymore, I’m looking for new ways to indulge myself. And since I like comics, and I like experimenting, I might try combining these things as long as its fun.