Posts

@Ponyvideomaker
Wicked. Happy halloween to you too

Happy halloween, y’all! ;)

Drew my Nuzlocke character dressed as Jessica Rabbit

I drew Zecora last night, and happily got my computer working enough that the scanner works again, so … pic related.

OMG hearing that delicious machine whirrrrr into life and seeing an image pop up on a screen makes me wanna dance like I’m listening to Techno - LET’S GO!.

While drawing her, I realized that I don’t care how the final image looks. I mean - I know I will hate it with all my hate. And it’s fun when others like what I’ve drawn, but it’s also confusing. But, I love to draw anyway, because I love the process of drawing. I love running my pencil along her belly. Defining her thighs and her legs. Drawing her pointy sharp hooves. Her jaw … I finally realized the thing that was most making it hard for me to draw ponies was I wasn’t allowing myself to really lean into that jaw line.

And I wasn’t allowing myself to just go ahead and draw the sternocleidomastoid. Without it, I couldn’t ‘pin’ the shoulders or the elbows or the rib cage … I didn’t know where the neck began, or how to position the sternum under the jaw. But if I just let myself draw that, then BANG everything else works. There’s the hips. There’s the elbows. There’s the knees. And then the rear legs are Patella, Stifle, Hock … it all makes sense.

I know that people consider that anthro - even “too anthro”.

But, that’s just another check box on the ‘why my art sucks’ and that’s fine - there’s hundreds of other checkboxes there, too.

But this way, drawing is fun.

… But having drawn Zecora, and being able to scan her in but NOT do ANYTHING ELSE because I still need to reinstall Photoshop?

I suddenly looked at the drawing itself. And I realized that I am drawing Zecora like I’m drawing Princess Luna … that’s … odd. I wonder why I am doing that?

Looking at screencaps of her today I realized that I completely whiffed on her magnificent croup and flank. I think I should try drawing her with some more donk in the badonka.

But … drawing her like I did feels … good! I like running my pencil over her flank and along her inner thigh and refining the curve of her buttock …

Maybe it’s because her tiny tuchus excites me so?

Do others have that same feeling sometimes? When they’re drawing something and realize they aren’t drawing them on-book but just absolutely LOVE the feeling of making those lines that you don’t even care any more?

(ps: more, and better, music suggestions in the descriptions of that image - I’m really learning how powerful simultaneous overlapping music can be when helping to calm the ADHD)

@Badumsquish
I would watch that

What if Sphinxy hosted a weird game show where you either had to answer a riddle or complete a humiliating Taskmaster-style minigame? :P

Sup. It’s been a while. :T

Care to Dance

All ponies need pettings. Tyrannical usurpers need them most of all :D

Wear the apron, Kim :P

@Mildgyth
Beautiful! ^_^

For myself, pic related.

I haven’t posted anything for a week because I’ve been learning how to draw on my Huion. It’s going well, but I’ve got a few more days of work to do on the piece I’m doing there. I mean, at this point I spend an hour doing each piece of clothing. 1 hour for petticoat. 1 hour for skirt. 1 hour for shirt. 1 hour for gloves. 1 hour for legs. 1 hour for face and eyes. The results are worth it though. Very worth it. And the more I work with it the more I’m diving into the PhotoShop tools rabbit holes. I’m now using pen presets and building my own palettes, and that helps a lot.

I’m also keeping the layers down to 3 per object: inked lineart, color, shading and highlights. And grouping those in folders which really keeps the whole workspace and the image a lot cleaner and easier to work with.

In the meantime, I realized that working on my computer was not giving me the emotional and mental and physical benefits I get from drawing on paper. After a week of not drawing, I was starting to have some of the symptoms I’d been using drawing to deal with.

So I’m going to go back to drawing on paper every day.

I’ll keep working on the computer, because I really like the results I’m getting there, and it feels like a significantly better way to ink and color a piece. I mean, if it sounds like I’m spending forever with the inking and coloring, I am. I always have. Even when I was using pens, it was like this for me. But on the Huion I don’t have any of the drama or suspense or fear of completely ruining a piece with a bad stroke, or having to go at a piece with razor blades to get rid of a drip here and there.

But the Huion doesn’t give me the dopamine a simple pencil sketch does. Just a sketch like this gives me so much dopamine. Like, I’ve always said if dopamine came in a bottle I’d be buying it by the case. And here it is - dopamine in a pencil. All I have to do is spend an hour drawing each day and I get my fix.

Going to try to become more of an addict to drawing.

When you summon a cute monster girl and it activates your opponent’s trap card :P

@d1ckbitch
Going for an ‘inking is a separate step’ is starting to feel a lot better. And I’m getting through more of the ‘how to set up brushes in PhotoShop’ learning curves, which is nice :)

Experimenting, failing and trying again differently is a great way to improve ❤️

Maybe try a material-based approach instead of an object-based? All buttons, and maybe all metallic items would be on a layer with lighting & such, same for the speaker’s leather part, etc - it might drastically optimize the layer usage

And yeah, automatic ways to turn a pencil lineart into a clean usable digital lineart will usually lead to imperfect result, sometimes it’s just better to use the pencil sketch as reference and do a digital lineart from scratch

“Wanna be friends?!?”

I finished something for the Rainbow Rocks event (>>3455185), but wow were mistakes made.

I’m looking through how I got here, and am going to change several things moving into October.

First, I was teaching myself a new technique for going from my ‘finished pencils’ to ‘inked’ pages that I could color. In brief, increase your scanned image’s resolution, run a Gaussian blur, and then use the Curves Adjustment tool to cut out the ‘not the line’. Theoretically this should have given me sharp white and black images to color.

Magically, I would go from a finished pencil to an inked page I could just slap some color on! Right? Skipped an entire step!

Not really. And it introduced its own problems.

First, I did get solid black and white results, but the resulting images were 9000 x 8000 and 600 DPI because that’s where the whole process just ‘clicked’ for working with the finished pencil in the Curves tool.

So I’m compositing the image, and each character had a layer for their lineart, a second layer for a gray background, and then another layer for each object I was coloring. Like, on Sunset every single button was its own layer. The shirt might be three layers or four - one for texture, one for color, one for highlights, one for shadows.

When I was doing Aria’s drum kit I was using a new layer - sometimes three layers - for each fastener on her kit. One for a brushed aluminum texture, another for color, another for shading.

Each. Fastener.

Her drum kit by itself might be more than 200 layers. I gave up trying to count.

Then each speaker in the background was at least 20 layers. Add cables, connectors on cables, add every single button on Sunset’s coat as its own layer with it’s own lighting effects …

Then add lights from the ceiling and the highlights and shadows introduced by each light … each in its own channel …

By the time I was done I had a file that was 6.01GB.

Not … optimal …

So, going forward, I’ll do that ‘get solid black and white lines’ technique, but I’ll scale the resulting linework back down before using it.

Second, I need to Git Gud with my linework.

My finished pencils are fine for finished pencils. But I can’t just mess with them in PhotoShop and make them magically become an inked drawing.

My lines don’t meet, I pass through lines I should be stopping at or “passing behind”. A lot of my strokes don’t line up, resulting in broken lines that either don’t meet or go too far, and that are not a single stroke but a series of broken strokes. It looks fine in aggregate, from arm’s length. But in detail it is just a colossal mess.

I think the ‘fix’ for all of this is not to change my pencil work, but to treat my finished pencil drawing as JUST a finished pencil.

And then ink it as a separate step.

And when I mess with something at infinity pixels, make a new file for that and when the work is done make it WORKABLE pixels before I move on.

And merge layers. There was no reason for every single button, every single connector, every single cable and mechanical part to be its own layer.

So …

Given this is InkTober, I’m going to start inking my ‘finished pencils’, to see where I end up.

Some I’ll probably ink IRL. Goddess knows I’ve got entire legal boxes filled with pens. And some I’ll do in PhotoShop. I have a nice Huion graphics monitor after all, and I barely use it for art.

And, who knows, maybe I’ll break out Illustrator and see if it’s still not speaking to me, or if there’s a chance for a reconciliation. I mean, I’m paying for it. I should get some use out of it, and inking and filling shapes is exactly what the thing is designed for.

Thank you again to all of you who’ve helped me get this far, and … I hope to get as far again in October :)

Ok, lessons learned.

Lesson 1: working at 9K pixels square results in a file that can’t even be uploaded here so there’s no point.
Lesson 2: MORE LAYERS!
Lesson 3: Check to make sure I didn’t accidentally grab and move a layer just as I was saving it … sigh.