In general the art style I’ve used for this blog has been pretty inconsistent, more so since I’ve started drawing updates digitally.
At first it was becoming inconsistent because of a combination of the fact that I was rapidly new to art and therefore rapidly improving in my ability to draw, and because eventually I realized that making fully colored traditional updates with backgrounds wasn’t time efficient. so we went from updates with panels like this:
to panels with updates like this:
Mostly greyscale drawings with colored eyes, and the occasional fully colored image for important panels like the introductions of new characters.
Then came the time when I started to draw updates digitally. Because I hadn’t been using digital art for very long, I was always unsatisfied with how it looked, especially compared to what I was able to create traditionally. However I continued using digital art because I felt like I could start to reintroduce color more consistently and that the images would be clearer than what the camera quality on my phone was able to produce.
So the early digital art ended up looking like this:
you can see that in all of these examples I made the lineart colored, which at the time seemed like a good idea especially for making the image look nicer, but ultimately created a few problems.
The first problem is most present in the first image where I tried to make the lineart for different objects different colors. This was done to match the aesthetics of the show. However, because I was just starting to get used to the program I was using, I didn’t have a way to do this effectively, so either the lines ended up looking bad, or it took me forever to finish it.
This style was short lived because of that. So in the next two images you can see that while the lineart was colored, everything was lined with the same color. This proved to be a solution to the difficulty of the process and still allowed me to fit into the show’s aesthetic.
This style also had flaws unfortunately. There would be times like shown in the second picture, where I flat out just chose a horrible color for the lineart. That shade of magenta does not do anything good for that image at all. Why did I chose that color.
Even when choosing a color that went well with the rest of the image there were some areas where the color still didn’t look right. In the third image there isn’t enough contrast between the line color and the color of the cloak.
So even in future updates where I used colored lines, they had to be dark enough to provide enough contrast and at that point it was so close to just being black that it lost the effect
This version of this style with some overlays to show light and shadows only lasted a few updates and I’m ok with that because honestly this looks like a mess.
Eventually I just stuck with normal shading and no highlights which seemed to be the best option at the time. here you can also see that the lineart is pretty clean. However the line weight in a lot of places are not ideal, and again this type of lineart was proving time consuming.
So we move on to the next style:
The whole point of this style would be that the lineart was more sketchy so that I wouldn’t have to spend amorous amounts of time on it. Also, its hard to tell in this picture, but I also started to draw the backgrounds in the same way that I drew the subject of the image, which aside from the traditional updates was the first time I was able to do so. Though with the sketchy style the actually quality of the backgrounds were not that great.
Speaking of traditional updates,
as some of you know I can only do digital updates for this blog part of the year, because the computer I use to draw them on doesn’t actually belong to me. It’s loaned to me for the school year. So this means that I often default to traditional drawing during the summer. So lets take a look at the differences in those styles.
These vary pretty wildly depending on where I am for the summer and what tools I had at my disposal
This style came from when I had lots of black pages in my sketchbook, as well as a really nice lining pen. Ive since lost it and I’m actually fairly upset about that because I liked the smoother and smaller lines it was able to create, that ballpoint pens just couldn’t do. On top of that ball point pens tend to leave very reflective lines, so it was hard to get any good pictures with my phone.
This next style was mostly just for single panel responses because doing a fully colored and shaded image especially with markers was again time consuming.
These three images actually came from when I was asking about what kind of traditional style would be preferred for traditional updates. I didn’t get too much feedback from it, so eventually I just defaulted to the first image in this section.
Eventually I defected back to the style I was using since the beginning, just without eye color. Which because eye color is kind of important to a character I wasn’t to happy about.
Even as my experience with digital art was getting more sophisticated I still wasn’t too happy with the kind of updates I was able to put out with it. There was something about the sketchiness of traditional art that I just couldn’t translate into my digital art. I tried out lots of different brushes that were designed to be more pencil - like, but none of them felt right.
So when I got my computer again at the beginning of the year I decided I would just color my traditional drawings like seem below:
For a while I was happy with this style, but eventually I was starting to see its limits. Doing background art on with this style would not work out well and, a lot of the time it was hard to color more than one image at a time because of how I was doing it.
So to now actually answer your question.
Just very recently I made my own brush that has the sketchy feeling I like to have in my line work. I used this brush for the mistletoe meme I drew this year along with the happy new years post.
Overall I absolutely love how these have come out. There was still a little bit of a problem. When shading these images what I did was I picked out two colors that fit in with the color scheme I wanted the image to have. One of the colors would be a highlight and one would be for shading. Then I would create a new layer where I shaded the whole image as shown below:
Then I just lowered the opacity until I was satisfied with how it looked.
This type of shading is really time consuming as it required me to blend everything out. This wouldn’t work if I wanted to get updates out at a consistent rate.
That’s why I decided to use the shading that you saw in the newest update.
I used essentially the same strategy for shading but instead of blending or regular cell shading, I’ve decided to use more angular shapes, because not only are the very easy to do repeatedly, but I also feel like it gives the shading a unique quality to it.
I hope that aside from minor tweaks that might happen in the future that this is the style that I continue to update this blog with. Only time will tell though.
In general the art style I’ve used for this blog has been pretty inconsistent, more so since I’ve started drawing updates digitally.
At first it was becoming inconsistent because of a combination of the fact that I was rapidly new to art and therefore rapidly improving in my ability to draw, and because eventually I realized that making fully colored traditional updates with backgrounds wasn’t time efficient. so we went from updates with panels like this:
to panels with updates like this:
Mostly greyscale drawings with colored eyes, and the occasional fully colored image for important panels like the introductions of new characters.
Then came the time when I started to draw updates digitally. Because I hadn’t been using digital art for very long, I was always unsatisfied with how it looked, especially compared to what I was able to create traditionally. However I continued using digital art because I felt like I could start to reintroduce color more consistently and that the images would be clearer than what the camera quality on my phone was able to produce.
So the early digital art ended up looking like this:
you can see that in all of these examples I made the lineart colored, which at the time seemed like a good idea especially for making the image look nicer, but ultimately created a few problems.
The first problem is most present in the first image where I tried to make the lineart for different objects different colors. This was done to match the aesthetics of the show. However, because I was just starting to get used to the program I was using, I didn’t have a way to do this effectively, so either the lines ended up looking bad, or it took me forever to finish it.
This style was short lived because of that. So in the next two images you can see that while the lineart was colored, everything was lined with the same color. This proved to be a solution to the difficulty of the process and still allowed me to fit into the show’s aesthetic.
This style also had flaws unfortunately. There would be times like shown in the second picture, where I flat out just chose a horrible color for the lineart. That shade of magenta does not do anything good for that image at all. Why did I chose that color.
Even when choosing a color that went well with the rest of the image there were some areas where the color still didn’t look right. In the third image there isn’t enough contrast between the line color and the color of the cloak.
So even in future updates where I used colored lines, they had to be dark enough to provide enough contrast and at that point it was so close to just being black that it lost the effect
This version of this style with some overlays to show light and shadows only lasted a few updates and I’m ok with that because honestly this looks like a mess.
Eventually I just stuck with normal shading and no highlights which seemed to be the best option at the time. here you can also see that the lineart is pretty clean. However the line weight in a lot of places are not ideal, and again this type of lineart was proving time consuming.
So we move on to the next style:
The whole point of this style would be that the lineart was more sketchy so that I wouldn’t have to spend amorous amounts of time on it. Also, its hard to tell in this picture, but I also started to draw the backgrounds in the same way that I drew the subject of the image, which aside from the traditional updates was the first time I was able to do so. Though with the sketchy style the actually quality of the backgrounds were not that great.
Speaking of traditional updates,
as some of you know I can only do digital updates for this blog part of the year, because the computer I use to draw them on doesn’t actually belong to me. It’s loaned to me for the school year. So this means that I often default to traditional drawing during the summer. So lets take a look at the differences in those styles.
These vary pretty wildly depending on where I am for the summer and what tools I had at my disposal
This style came from when I had lots of black pages in my sketchbook, as well as a really nice lining pen. Ive since lost it and I’m actually fairly upset about that because I liked the smoother and smaller lines it was able to create, that ballpoint pens just couldn’t do. On top of that ball point pens tend to leave very reflective lines, so it was hard to get any good pictures with my phone.
This next style was mostly just for single panel responses because doing a fully colored and shaded image especially with markers was again time consuming.
These three images actually came from when I was asking about what kind of traditional style would be preferred for traditional updates. I didn’t get too much feedback from it, so eventually I just defaulted to the first image in this section.
Eventually I defected back to the style I was using since the beginning, just without eye color. Which because eye color is kind of important to a character I wasn’t to happy about.
Even as my experience with digital art was getting more sophisticated I still wasn’t too happy with the kind of updates I was able to put out with it. There was something about the sketchiness of traditional art that I just couldn’t translate into my digital art. I tried out lots of different brushes that were designed to be more pencil - like, but none of them felt right.
So when I got my computer again at the beginning of the year I decided I would just color my traditional drawings like seem below:
For a while I was happy with this style, but eventually I was starting to see its limits. Doing background art on with this style would not work out well and, a lot of the time it was hard to color more than one image at a time because of how I was doing it.
So to now actually answer your question.
Just very recently I made my own brush that has the sketchy feeling I like to have in my line work. I used this brush for the mistletoe meme I drew this year along with the happy new years post.
Overall I absolutely love how these have come out. There was still a little bit of a problem. When shading these images what I did was I picked out two colors that fit in with the color scheme I wanted the image to have. One of the colors would be a highlight and one would be for shading. Then I would create a new layer where I shaded the whole image as shown below:
Then I just lowered the opacity until I was satisfied with how it looked.
This type of shading is really time consuming as it required me to blend everything out. This wouldn’t work if I wanted to get updates out at a consistent rate.
That’s why I decided to use the shading that you saw in the newest update.
I used essentially the same strategy for shading but instead of blending or regular cell shading, I’ve decided to use more angular shapes, because not only are the very easy to do repeatedly, but I also feel like it gives the shading a unique quality to it.
I hope that aside from minor tweaks that might happen in the future that this is the style that I continue to update this blog with. Only time will tell though.
