Hi! How Do You Feel About Having Line Art In Finished Pieces? If It's Bad, How Do I Manage To Get Away

Hi! How do you feel about having line art in finished pieces? If it's bad, how do I manage to get away from that? When I ask for critiques people say "stop w the line art/you're too dependent on lines" but I never realized that was a problem??

Frankly, I think it’s amazing. If you can own something in art?  Do it. 

There are trends, esp among the GIT GUD crowd, that lend towards the sort of lineless vaguely-real painting style - if that’s what you want to do, I can lend some help on painting over your lines until they disappear. But it’s important, I think, to throw back at folks that those are industry/internet trends, and may not be a real thing in terms of quality. Do what you want, and if you want to do right now is lineart? Do that!

That said, what they might mean is that there is a tendency within younger/less-developed artists to rely on the lines to indicate where to shade (in a pillow-shading/coloring book fashion), which is an actual easily-corrected error. Basically, that error stems from “lines are the darkest shadow, I will use them as the darkest shadow for all shading.” The issue with this is that lines are stylistic - their placement draws really absurd levels of eye-attention to themselves. So any shadow you want to place identical to where the line is a shadow? Take a break on it. The line will do half the work on it’s own. Consider any and all shading as divorced from the line work.

It’s a weird leap of thought, but it helps to try the following exercise - draw a picture in lines, as you imagine it. Now that you have it, try to shade it with the lighting coming from a shittily-different direction from the lines. Not exactly opposite how they fall, but close to it. Obviously, the indirect effect of this is that half your lines now suck - they indicate shadows where light should hit - but they transfer their existence (when painted right) to indicating a shape rather than a shadow. It’s a weird exercise, but I find it helps to understand using linework as just one way to define edges on a finished work. There’s a lot of ways to do it - lines are the most straightforward, and honestly one of the hardest in their own way.

With time, you can start working on moving linework to mirror shading so that they act as a single unit, in league with and complimenting each other. But at first, it will honestly feel a lot like they fight each other for dominance. Whichever you feel is less in charge of the raw 3-d shapes you’re trying to depict - that’s the one you’ll need to work with to bring up to match the other.

Trying to come up with various outfits and armors for Darrow is like the best version of paper dolls. (aka, I was gonna draw other characters but I was having way too much fun playing dress up)

Please finish that Red Rising piece you were complaining about. The one with Gold Darrow, Eo, and then Red Darrow. It's outstanding work! Also, I never pictured the RR universe with any hint of baroque aesthetic, but holy shit, what an amazing vision! Beautiful.

Aah, thanks! I’m right now working on re-drawing all the sets so that they have the same level of more finished linework, but I’m also really partial to that first set so I’m going to finish it up on the painted version of it as well. (Though, just it. If I ever do a colored version of the rest it’ll just be flat colors I think)

If I can’t slap some baroque or art deco on something and call it a day, I’m done with that ho. But the more I got into RR - 300 year old space ships? Weapons engraved with great deeds? Elaborate space opera nobility with 18th century european bullshit? I just got more and more enamored of going hog and gilding everything. I’m a giant nerd for design but I kind of sat down when I first started drawing anything from the books with this idea of “okay, if I was art director, how would I push a look to set it apart from the glut of hollywood blockbusters and represent what worked for me in the books” and came up with a lot of central design tenets and aesthetics. I’m really not 100% how on-model it is, but I went into drawing to ensure if I can’t unsee it neither is anyone else allowed to.

(also I know I’ve gotten some asks that were just compliments that I never answered… thank you guys so much I know I don’t really answer those much but I just kind of don’t know how to tell people how much they mean it’s easier to answer specific questions or demands without getting flustered but I love any and all asks no matter the content!)

WoT Big Bang 2016

And here’s finally the post for the other event, and this one will span most of the year. For those unfamiliar with the concept, here is some info about fandon big bangs in general.

Briefly:

Writers sign up to write fic of at least 10k words.

Artists sign up to do art for these fics based on a summary/preview.

We create things for the fandom and make everybody happy \o/

Like mentioned, this will be a long-term project – we want to give people ample time to procrastinate I mean, to realise their vision. Also note that 10k words is the minimum – there is no upper limit, as long as the result is a complete fic within the time frame specified below.

Schedule (subject to small adjustments):

February 1st: Sign-ups open.

April 1st: Author sign-ups close.

May 1st: Author check in. 

June 1st: Previews! Authors post the summary and a preview/excerpt for their fic, as well as expected rating and potential content warnings.

June 7th: Artists claim the fics they want to make art for.

July 1st: Author & artist check-in.

August 1st: Author & artist check-in.

September 1st:  Author & artist check-in.

September 25th: Works due.

September 25th – October 1st: Works posted.

More details under the cut.

Keep reading

The Red Rising trilogy is pretty good, you guys. 10/10 would huddle under my comforter with a completely justified fear that all my faves will die before it’s over again.

goddamn, she murdered everybody and I was her witness