What College Did You Go To To Learn How To Be Such A Fantastic Artist? And What Was Your Major?

grabendolch said: Hey there, what’s that second tool panel just next to your taskbar? it looks like it’s from some art program but not a part of SAI

It's called Paint Dock, it's for slate PCs (samsung series 7 & asus eee slate) to make drawing programs actually useable. I have spent... a while... since getting my eee slate trying to basically work as something where I can be a couch potato digital artist :p WHICH REMINDS ME I did intend to properly review the computer. At least a little :p

Downside is that the harddrive is seriously 64GB. I bought a 120GB to replace it with but I'm not quite ready to bust open a $1k machine yet!! I did get a 128GB sd card for it though (yes they totally make those now!) which is enough to cram all my art-related stuff on so I'm good. The other downside is that the drivers are REALLY fussy and it took ages for me to get pressure sensitivity working properly and across different programs. I got it working in SAI and Photoshop, I haven't got it to work with Inkscape though I don't want to mess with it anymore. A few times I lost pressure sensitivity at the drop of a hat and the last time I spent FOUR HOURS uninstalling and reinstalling drivers to get it working again UGH. I was able to carefully write down all the steps I took this time so hopefully that will do the trick. The pressure curve utility makes it good enough for painting, it only has 250 levels of sensitivity compared to 2000+ on the intuous tablets but so far it's been good enough for me. My hand gets crampy a little more often due to having to press a bit harder (less sensitive means its harder to get really really light strokes) but I think with tweaking the settings a bit further I can get that a little better too!

The other other downside is that the MSRP is $1000 but for the most part it's only available for $1400, I got super lucky and it was $1k at the microsoft store but it's not anymore last I checked (plus getting it thru them it came with win7 ultimate and no bloatware!). It's definitely worth it at that price... at the higher price ehhhh, I'D still have bought it but that is what being a couch potato digital artist is worth to me XD becase it's basically a laptop w/o a keyboard it is a TRUE digital sketchbook that is fast enough to run photoshop! So yeah. it's awesome.

can’t sleep can’t stop drawing clothes

Instagram sure took their sweet time coming to Android so now *I* have to make up for lost time. Everyone loves filters, amirite? PREPARE FOR INSTASPAM.

Rushed Malfunction cosplay for WWWC4! Not pictured: the ten strands of fairy lights I wove into the wig which broke as soon as I put it on LOL Pictured: post-con carnage xD Wig is maybe 20 percent finished; you'll know when it's done because Ill be shouting from the rooftops, dancing in the streets, etc

Don’t have time to draw currently :C so here’s something old I GUESS. Errikan’s life story gets peppered in through lots of flashbacks… I wrote it all out I may share if there’s interest (I… I’m shy though). I felt like I should have drawn him at further ages but I don’t actually know what he’d look like?? A happily ever after Errikan would look rather different from an Continuing Adventures-then-later-dies-in-a-barfight-related-freak-accident Errikan. … … I do know he keeps trying SO HARD to grow a beard and succeeds… eventually. Very eventually. Elvish men have it so hard.

creepyeverything:

villainry:

a day to discuss and ask about your and your creative-type buddies’ stories, characters, concepts, the whole shebang! get talking, ~get inspired~

my ask box: here

reblog with your own!

I know it is not Wednesday anymore but I will remind myself to...

HEY I want to do this too! Worldbuilding is my favoritest topic of anything of all time so yes please, ask me stuff kthxbye

I started using the internets to teach myself hobby electronics a little less than two years ago and struggling with whatever random 101 sites, blogs, tutorials, and instructables I could find. Slowly piecing together info that is never presented in an incremental-increase-of-difficulty way because its not class... It's always a continuous struggle to find information that is at your level when it is pretty much always going to be something you've already sort of learned, and therefore less useful, or something way too advanced and HOW do you fill in the gap, its always there at every level as you learn more things

I think it's useful to point out that I'm not really a self-taught artist. So while there is a TON of stuff I taught myself (particularly digital art/photoshop/coloring), I had the benefit of classes in the fundamentals (lifedrawing, construction drawing, figure drawing, etc) and that makes it SO much easier to expand from a solid knowledge base. So I'm sayin it is not the case here, while I learn to make gadgets and it is taking FOR EVER and driving me up all of the walls. But I want it so badly.

Then Adafruit put up their revised learning system site and I s2g every time I have a neat idea for a project but not sure how I'd make it, they put up a relevant tutorial basically the next freakin day. This has been happening without fail for SEVERAL MONTHS! I LOVE ADAFRUIT AND ADAFRUIT LOVES ME BACK

I always have a cosplay/props/gadgets wishlist that is miles long and an ever-expanding list of ways to make things blinky, beepy, and/or animatronic and going NUTS because I don't yet have the skills to accomplish what I want to do (which is everything), learning a skill is HARD, harder still if there are parts of it that are not interesting but sort of a necessary evil- which for me is programming, I hate it so much, its so painful, ughhg uugghhh it hurts, I have not studied this hard to learn something I dislike so much EVER but there is a blog I like called HOW TO GET WHAT YOU WANT and that has stuck with me all this time. It's how to get what I want and I'm not gonna let my hatred of programming actually stop me from typing up terrible buggy code and uploading it to a microcontroller to make leds blink and animate and change colors because I love lights and I love COLORS. Join me!

LETS PUT LEDS IN THINGS

Hooooly shit, okay, I love your art a LOT./creepin

Thanks! I don't mind the creepin, I thought that was what the internets were for? 8| Trust me, if I didn't want to share my art I'd be ALL the way under my rock instead of just partially!

Sharing art from 2009 without sharing anything from 2019? Because I don't really draw like I used to. I'm sad about it sometimes, but I don't see it as having quit art. I still sketch regularly, but for years now my interests have been absolutely all the way into Making Stuff. Lots of learning and experimenting with Skills and less easily consumable content to share online...

Since I made my illustration I still like to call my Masterpiece (lol), my life changed a LOT. I changed a lot with it. The mockup of companion poster I started not long after is STILL asking me to complete it, it belongs right next to the poster of my Elf Son. I made a file of unfinished illustrations that I still Care about, this is the major one. I miss how much mental real-estate my elves took up, it was fun! But had to make room for Other things.

Stuff I've learned since drawing less: C/C++ (I'm garbage at it but I keep trying lol), Crochet & Knitting, writing small programs for Arduino, Blueprint Reading/Creating, metal machining on lathe and CNC milling machine, Circuitboard Design, Sculpting/moldmaking, Drafting slopers and clothing patterns from scratch for sewing... Next will be welding xD I want to MAKE! AND! BUILD!

How to achieve your dreams when you have 6 or 7 of them? I've abandoned two already (professional puppeteer, stage magician) but I still have only so much time on this earth! ;p

I also keep quiet these days cos I dont seem to have relatable problems. Creative block? I don't know herrrr.

When I die there will be 38,472,000 unrealized project ideas that simply cease to exist ಠ_ಠ

I'm keeping the Illustration skills in my back pocket, but it was honestlyyyyy never what I REALLY wanted to do forever, I want to do SO MANY things. I'll be 35 soon (hhhhhhhgh) and if I view my life as ONLY an illustrator then I peaked REAL early and have been Struggling since lmao! My destiny is tangential to colorful drawings. But lets be real its tough to be literally ANY kind of artist. Im just a lot busier Adulting and trying to survive/thrive in a worker-unfriendly economy with insufficient mental health care xD

ALL THAT SAID, I really do want to finish that poster, eventually xD and the elves need their story out in the world in some form. Still gotta decide what that is.

It seems like a lot of your characters have pointed ears/"unnatural" hair colors-- I'm assuming they're something not-quite-human, so can you explain what exactly they are/what's the deal with their race/their culture? Does your storyworld(/storyworlds) have other common races? What's up with them?

oho, two questions! All my pointy ears characters are elves from the same story of which Errikan is the main character... I've been working on a website to provide at least a bit of overview and context for them. So its a fantasy world with several races but most of my characters are elves, and they are really only elves and not human because I love drawing big pointy ears, created them way back when I discovered legend of zelda and elfquest comics about age 14. :p It was kind of a blow to learn that most elves in fantasy aren't actually as cool as those so heh, I just had to make sure mine lived up to my expectations.

The fantasy takes place on a continent called Rethamnel, the elves are the majority humanoid race, but there are also dwarves, merpeople, orcs, trolls, giants, and centaurs. I won't lie, they are mainly there because it is fun to design your own versions of fantasy races, but its not a huge aspect of plot or anything, since by the time I decided to have lots of non-elf races my main characters were already established. I worked that into my history by making them the majority, conquering, culturally imperialist race with the dominant religion, so it fits :p heh