The picture is technically finished! Like the sunset CG I’m going to save it for after I start taking preorders for the book to help with advertising ^^ but I’ve posted it in the gallery of this website already so you can see it there!
And I also took the livestream of the boots ornament on wednesday and edited it into video walk through :D livestreams are good for seeing individual brush strokes (and how slow I draw) but speed up videos are great for showing the overall process. I’ll probably avoid using livestream videos in the future though because I usually draw petty badly in streams, because I feel pressured to not pause and think too much, which is actually an integral part of my drawing process
I think this is as close as I can get to my pretty picture goal… I stopped before I start adding massive amount of details and depressing themes LOL. I started with Weirin but when I considered a sky texture for background, I thought the colours work with Veloce better. With interest to variety I’m pretty sure I should go with weirin but man, the pinks and lavenders LOL… Another problem is cyan doesn’t print, and I don’t know how to deal with that colour in terms of printing so I’ll most likely go with weirin. Which of the three do you prefer?
I mentioned this a few times to some friends but I don’t think I ever talked about it in public, even though it’s been a pretty big thing for me in the past few years–especially after I started going to conventions–but it’s been my goal to beat my old popular works for a while. I decided to write it here because I think it’s pretty absurd of me to do that and might be interesting to know. An artist improves and improvement sometimes means change, and and during change some old charm might be lost. Now that I’ve gone through 4 years of staggered experimenting with various styles/processes/procedures, I’m taking what I’ve learned and applying it to what people once liked best about my art. I didn’t expect this part to be this hard because I didn’t realize that some of the old charms of my art were thanks to my mistakes and lack of knowledge, and once you learn you can’t unlearn!
I really appreciate people enjoying my “basilica”, “too late” and “roxanne” pictures, both online and as a print in real life, but I don’t like the fact that they can be (incorrectly) seen as the apex of my career or the best I can do, because I can’t produce something with my improved skill that can defeat their popularity. It may be obvious that I’ve deliberately drawn things with this motive in mind and if not, this pretty picture thing I’ve been trying to do is an attempt to defeat myself at my roxanne picture. I understand that timing played a big role because those three pieces were all done during a time when I still actively posted, and deviantart didn’t destroy their fave system yet (I think), and now that they’ve got such surreal fame it’s even easier for people to spread it around. But even when I sold prints at conventions those three were the top three year after year. I’m so surprised that even after I finally did figure out why they were so popular, I could not come up with new pieces that work on the same concepts without them looking like a replica of those pieces. I’ll see at this year’s conventions to see if I finally succeeded!
And speaking of conventions, if by chance I win the AN contest and win a table, I don’t think my books will be here in time for the con ): is a little sad
I’m having SUCH A BAD WEEK omg but I’ll leave it for the next post or when my boiling rage dies down a little, so I can summarize all the events concisely without exploding into a spray of words. for now pls enjoy sum 4am weird arts
what are you doing get out of that F16
wow this picture looks even more dull and dirt coloured next to that layerraped scrap up there LOL. her face piss me off so much I HATE DRAWING FACES AUGH… I need to go for much more anime mouth and nose if I want to keep faces anime. or start drawing doll faces yaaaaa
Spoiler below! scroll down to skip the text and see art :D
I watched madoka magica with Sepia and it was so fucking ridiculous I’m glad I watched it with someone, otherwise it would’ve caused a helpless civilian to be spammed by me on msn or aim going like OMGLOLWTF. It’s so maihime I hope it doesn’t pull a maihime ending because that was really stupid for its good development. Sepia also pointed out how much of a low budget anime it is AND IT’S TRUE, all the recycled scenes and retarded art in general… I feel a little sad inside watching an anime with shitty art since my #1 requirement for anime/manga is eye candy LMAO.
I hate like everyone in the series, which is pretty normal for me lmao… for the grand total of three episodes Mami’s been around I kept expecting her to be a closet bad guy. Sayaka wouldn’t stop talking about Mami, and Madoka is retarded and is the reason why everyone is dead. Although it’s about a bunch of girls psyching out and getting karmabombed, it moved quickly and it was a good watch! The only logical people in the series is Homura and Kyubey, but Homura didn’t exactly choose the smartest solutions and Kyubey is fucked up overdosed on logic lmfao. Kyubey is like Aizen on crack adn without the narcissism… I think he’s like the creepiest anime character I can remember right now.
But I do love the ending song!
Onto Blackbird stuff:
Someone wanted to see Meron’s colours!
And more alt world bb lol, I bet if I came up with a story for it it would be more popular than current bb because it’d be set in a modern world ffffff. I’ve always hated how rough my scraps are, since I go at it with a rough mindset, so I decided to see if I could make them look marginally acceptable if I put in a little bit more effort. Clearly I have no self control because I ended up spending too much time on it and it’s practically a finished picture lol. well actually I don’t know how much time I spent on it because I drew it in between waiting for Sepia to watch madoka together, but I do know it’s too long for a scrap! I’ll probably (try to) simplify it next time. I do like doing cel shading for scraps because it’s easy and I can rely on layermode on everything! I’ll have to learn to pull back though because I’m still in the holy crap this is so cool must spam indiscriminately stage.
So I don’t really feel like drawing my other Blackbird characters like ever–I’m sure I will in the future when they get more feature, so I won’t force it and I’ll just wait for it–and I’ve been seeing more RO stuff from artist friends I love so I’ve been wanting to draw RO stuff myself. Being the productivitywhore that I am though, I really hate the fact that I can’t do anything with the high priest character because it’s technically not original, so any thing I do with them is a waste of time. I do like my RO characters enough to want to develop them more, too, so I decided to alter them into non-RO characters. I ended up stemming the design from the awefulbishop atrocity because I’m so content with my original high priest mod I don’t want to touch it ):
The colours were so hard and I’m still not happy about it. I’m bad with colour palettes to begin with and I couldn’t use a lot of nice contrasting colours because it wouldn’t suit her character. I wanted to preserve the red, but it’s really difficult to work around and it’s probably the colour that’s ruining everything lol
Here is the original disastrous palettes that I went through… none of them worked because I just juggled around colours that don’t work together HAHA
As for the “monarch” title, it came from the orc hero helm alteration because my hp is not my hp without that brick on her head. It looked like imp midna’s headgear at first but eventually I went with this butterfly shape. I’ll probably incorporate that into the rest of my RO characters’ original designs (if I ever get to it LOL) as a symbol for their group, the “Monarchs” LOLDONTHITME They’ll probably a bunch of influential figures in some random world, serving under a queen-like figure who gave them super awesome powers in exchange for their memories in the same fashion as the 4-page RO test pages I did ages ago.
In other news I finished both my manga commission and Blackbird compilation this week, and they took up the majority of my daily life for the past… year. So all of a sudden I am free to work on the drawings I’ve wanted to paint, character designs I’ve wanted to do, script writing that Blackbird needed. I DON’T KNOW IT’S JUST SO WEIRD THAT I PRETTY MUCH LOOK FORWARD TO EVERYTHING I HAVE TO DO… The next 2 weeks will be even better; my super secret charms will be arriving and if my estimates are correct, I will have Blackbird book 1 (the proof) in my hands by the end of it. I bet something horrible is going to happen when everything is almost coming together lmfao THINGS ARE WORKING OUT SUSPICIOUSLY WELL.
layer spamming makes rough colours sooo quick and hassle-free LOL :D I don’t feel inclined to over-detail at this stage of colouring (which does no good anyway) and it sets down a nice and consistent palette for me to eyedrop when I move onto details. I’ll probably forget how to pick colours without layer modes in a few months HAHAH. or maybe I’ll actually pick colours better because I’ll get used to seeing how colours interact with one another?
sketching on computer gives me more freedom to change things around, but I can’t make it as neat and detailed as my pencil sketches. in fact my computer sketches are all crude and gross because I don’t want to waste time fixing anything at this stage lol ): hopefully the final products won’t suffer! I was trying to compare my computer scraps vs scanned sketches that I coloured in the past, but I noticed I didn’t do very many of them LMAO. probably because they take so damn long with my old method.
This last one almost made it to my nice and pretty picture goal, but I just had to change hanging stars into bird cages and ruin it for myself SIGHHHH. I kind of want to CG them both but I don’t think filling my entire convention table with Veloce prints is a sound business strategy, so I’ll probably change the 2nd picture into someone else… maybe… lol ): I do feel rather motivated lately to work towards a blackbird/veloce artbook sometime in the distant future though, because I enjoy drawing them–together or separate–very much. I remember years ago my young ambitious self wanted to make a Blackbird (story) artbook. I had planned out the content so that most characters get balanced features to justify the book’s content, but then I asked myself, do I really give enough of a shit about these other characters to paint extravagant illustrations for them? LOLsla;djfshdsgkldj
ending with a picture I drew when I was like 5 on my Grimm brothers book… I was a total sailor moon fag, I had stickers plastered all over my bedpost and stationery and bags and stuff. So this is like obviously sailor moon even though it says snow white on the castle in the back HAHA. And I wrote snow backwards but THAT’S OK I WAS 5
