I've realized something about me and art. I'm not so good with putting a concept onto paper myself. Making a body from scratch is one of the most mentally taxing things I ever experience. The constant erasing and inability to make what is in my mind come out onto the paper really hurts and drives me away from ever drawing. Part of it is because while i can't say I have no idea about anatomy, I am quite painfully aware of the fact I am woefully lacking in knowledge of its subtleties. I also have never done the basics of drawing like making simplified exaggerations of a character to figure out the posing, or even doing light, undetailed lines before getting to the serious work of finalizing the picture. When I draw everything tends to be coming out in its finalized form, and this often results in anatomical and proportional errors I have no real way to fix without major work on my part. I have quite the love/hate relationship with traditional art, but I have a 160$ scanner that I got just for it...

Digital art is a whole different mess. I don't have a tablet right now; I have a mouse. Drawing with a mouse is sloppy work. It tends to mean I have to zoom in to degrees that make coloring in the tiniest parts of a picture take forever, and I get hand cramps terribly as a result. I think part of the problem is that I am left handed, yet have to draw with my right hand since my mouse using skills are oriented to my right hand. I think this creates a problem when I am trying to use my left hand oriented artistic skills with my right hand. The zooming in so far also means I lose the ability to see the picture in its entirety and just the effects of what I am doing more easily. Making anything from scratch is a real mess since trying to make reasonable lines with my right hand is only slightly better than attempting to draw with my right hand.

I've found a strange niche that I feel comfortable in though, and I'm trying to use it to learn where my failings can be improved over time. I've learned so much about shading and coloring from always performing little modifications to images of my character others do for me. I do this because I don't like nitpicking over every little thing to an artist when I might be able to fix it myself. I also do it because I find myself unable to explicitly describe what aspects of a picture need special work and emphasis since it's a turn on for me(belly and navel, anyone? Heavy squirming prey filled stomach? Just me? >.>). So, I do those things myself, if I can. It can be difficult sometimes because it's impossible to merge traditional scans with digital edits too far before it looks unnatural.

I also am beginning to finally get a feeling that the mysterious thing many of FA's top artists have talked about - the art of drawing without lines, is something I'm beginning to realize. There was a time I couldn't comprehend how one would do that, but I think I'm really beginning to get it! Mind you, don't be expecting me to heavily be doing it any time soon, but some details I'm really getting good at look so much better when I do all the shading and then go to the lines layer and erase the lines that would have previously been used as detail entirely. If you look at the picture I put up recently you will see that Avereth's belly has been reduced to very few actual lines, and looks very soft and malleable. While the lines were all still there it wasn't like that(try tab swapping between my version and the source, it's fun!), and I'm already looking at it and seeing possible ways to even make the rest of the lines disappear.

I won't modify other people's uncolored work for practice because I feel it's a serious breach of ethics even if I had no intentions of putting it up anywhere, so I only get so many chances to practice like this.