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January Update
3 years ago
Just thought I'd drop a quick journal to talk about what I've been up to!
This months been pretty interesting. I started off really dragging my feet on the Yoshi/Flygon pic. It got to the point where I kinda dreaded working on it. This wasn't the first time I'd felt like this with a pic either. Honestly I feel like my art has kinda stagnated more or less for the last couple years. I finally decided to actually try and figure out why this was happening and how I could break through it. So I spent about a week just examining my whole process, thinking about my art style and what I wanted to accomplish with it, studying other people's art and looking at what they were doing and what it was conveying.
My major conclusion was that I was far too much of a perfectionist. Every part of my process from sketch to lining to coloring I was spending like twice as much time as I really needed just to make everything pixel-perfect. It was kind of an aspect of pride for me, and something I kinda had to get over to make drawing not actively miserable for me. I also found I'd begun to rely too much on 3D references. I tend to pose models out in blender to serve as reference for my art, and while it is useful for sure I've noticed that with some of my art I just focus way too hard on it and the results end up kinda stiff and janky in a particular kind of way. I did some other stuff to kinda optimize my process as well. I made templates with my layer structure all pre-built. I made myself a whole suite of brushes (that I intend on releasing for subscribers eventually). I found a cool plugin that allows me to select brushes with just a flick of my pen.
Moving forward I'll be continuing to think about my process and style and experiment quite a bit. You can already see a change in my last few pictures, and I feel like it's a change for the better. It's definitely allowed me to complete pieces a lot faster. As always I very much appreciate feedback, so if there's something I did in a piece you like, or dislike, absolutely let me know. Of course if you're waiting for your turn on the commission train you should expect the result to end up a bit different from my previous stuff.
The second thing I want to talk about is, my second animation is now in production! This one ended up being much larger in scope than the Bob animation. For the first couple days I've worked on it I was starting to feel like I might've bitten off a bit more than I can chew. Now that I've had a chance to get in the flow a bit and figure out a few tricks, I favor my chances a tad more. If all goes well I should have it all done by the end of the month. The current plan is for subscribers to get first access. I haven't decided how long I should wait to put it up publicly. A month seems to be the standard from what I've seen. Honestly I'm still not a huge fan of paywalling at all but animating is such a giant workload that I need to justify it somehow. I do want to get peoples' thoughts on posting a teaser to advertise the animation. The plan was to find a particularly juicy frame and post that up ahead of time.
Anyhow that's all I have to say for now. Hope the rest of your January is pleasant, thanks for reading.
This months been pretty interesting. I started off really dragging my feet on the Yoshi/Flygon pic. It got to the point where I kinda dreaded working on it. This wasn't the first time I'd felt like this with a pic either. Honestly I feel like my art has kinda stagnated more or less for the last couple years. I finally decided to actually try and figure out why this was happening and how I could break through it. So I spent about a week just examining my whole process, thinking about my art style and what I wanted to accomplish with it, studying other people's art and looking at what they were doing and what it was conveying.
My major conclusion was that I was far too much of a perfectionist. Every part of my process from sketch to lining to coloring I was spending like twice as much time as I really needed just to make everything pixel-perfect. It was kind of an aspect of pride for me, and something I kinda had to get over to make drawing not actively miserable for me. I also found I'd begun to rely too much on 3D references. I tend to pose models out in blender to serve as reference for my art, and while it is useful for sure I've noticed that with some of my art I just focus way too hard on it and the results end up kinda stiff and janky in a particular kind of way. I did some other stuff to kinda optimize my process as well. I made templates with my layer structure all pre-built. I made myself a whole suite of brushes (that I intend on releasing for subscribers eventually). I found a cool plugin that allows me to select brushes with just a flick of my pen.
Moving forward I'll be continuing to think about my process and style and experiment quite a bit. You can already see a change in my last few pictures, and I feel like it's a change for the better. It's definitely allowed me to complete pieces a lot faster. As always I very much appreciate feedback, so if there's something I did in a piece you like, or dislike, absolutely let me know. Of course if you're waiting for your turn on the commission train you should expect the result to end up a bit different from my previous stuff.
The second thing I want to talk about is, my second animation is now in production! This one ended up being much larger in scope than the Bob animation. For the first couple days I've worked on it I was starting to feel like I might've bitten off a bit more than I can chew. Now that I've had a chance to get in the flow a bit and figure out a few tricks, I favor my chances a tad more. If all goes well I should have it all done by the end of the month. The current plan is for subscribers to get first access. I haven't decided how long I should wait to put it up publicly. A month seems to be the standard from what I've seen. Honestly I'm still not a huge fan of paywalling at all but animating is such a giant workload that I need to justify it somehow. I do want to get peoples' thoughts on posting a teaser to advertise the animation. The plan was to find a particularly juicy frame and post that up ahead of time.
Anyhow that's all I have to say for now. Hope the rest of your January is pleasant, thanks for reading.
I'm sure the animation will be amazing!!!!, and I can say you are is getting better and better, keep it up my sweet friend, you are doing a great job, and learning is an eternal process in the beautiful ( and painful ) artist journey.
The most important is you enjoy what you do my friend, and I never use the 3D modeling reference, but maybe I should do it, will make me understand better some views and perspectives, sometimes I fight a lot with the perspectives and poses, it's a good tool to have, but sometimes can be an enemy.
I wish you the best my sweet friend, and keep it up, you are a great artist!!!!, from one perfectionist artist to another, I need to say, I love your perfectionist!!!
3D references are super useful for sure. There's a lot of angles and poses and stuff I just couldn't do without having a reference like that. I think the big problem I've had is I focus so much on the reference I forget gesture, and how certain features look awkward at certain angles, and how some of the models I use aren't really rigged for some of the poses I put them in.
Thanks!