Thanqol Learns To Draw!

[Silviya]

A couple of tiny little monster psycho juvenile felines have been taking up all my time recently, because there are very few things harder than leaving two purring kittens who look at you with big sad eyes and start mewing for you to come back whenever you start to leave. Here, have a picture:

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On a non-kitten related note, I really like your most recent piece. The anatomy looks pretty sound, and it's got some details but not too many, and I can really get a sense of her personality. I think that the new coloring works great. The slight roughness of it gives it some nice texture and life. The cityscape drawing you're working on is also really nice. I'm a big fan of that color scheme.

The revelation is that I did all that colouring on a single layer.

That I didn't spend 45 minutes fussing over it to get each line clean, smooth and perfect. I embraced a little roughhousing with the picture, a little relaxation from fastidious smoothed linework, and it really worked out. That all feels like a genuine artistic breakthrough to me.

Oh man, I remember when I realized how much easier everything was for me to just have all the coloring in a single layer, except for maybe the background. It's different for every artist, but I found that everything became so much easier and less rigid.

On the topic of not fussing over every line and trying to make them all smooth and perfect . . . I certainly consider that to be a very important artistic breakthrough. That's what the sketching I was talking about a while back is all about, actually. Not caring if the lines are pretty or perfect, just getting them down on paper, getting the shape and movement in.

On the topic of sketching, there's another method of sketching that I use in digital art that you might find useful, if you don't use it already. I've heard it called "lineless sketching" or "colored sketching," and it's basically where you take a fairly big brush in your art program of choice, and just start slapping down color. You figure out where the light hits and what the shapes are with the colors and the form of your brushstrokes, rather than with lines. Usually, I use a gradient that matches the general colors that I want the background to be and put that on a background layer, and then make a new layer for the main subject(s), and just start trying to get the shape and color of it down. Then I work at refining those shapes in the same way that I refine the lines of a sketch, only I take this all the way to completion. I use a rectangular brush for this because it makes sharp lines easier, but round brushes work as well.

I'm fighting against imaginary perfect me and he's a jerk.

I'm pretty sure that's something that almost every artist has to deal with--I know that I do. You summed it up perfectly . One of the great struggles of art is learning to tell imaginary perfect you to shut up and go away.

Yes. Yes you really, really do, if you've never seen it.

On top of the brilliant characterisation, drama, humour and plot, it has some of the most intense starship battles I've ever seen. I mean literally edge-of-your-seat, even-though-you've-known-what-happens-for-twenty-years intense.

(That's just about my highest praise.)

Also, that One Moment with Vir Coto (in season four). I won't say more, so as not to spoil it, but there's One Moment that makes the entire series worthwhile for that moment alone. You'll know it when you see it.

Oh my god, that One Moment. That . . . that was honestly probably the most amazing moment in any TV series that I have ever seen. It was awesome.

And I completely agree on everything else. Speaking of B5 having the most amazing battle scenes ever, I found this B5 fanvid on YouTube earlier today. It seems appropriate.