cloudofapathy asked: 

So I don’t actually have a specific question, but I’m very curious about your art, and your process. I don’t actually know anything about drawing or painting, so. In return I’ll tell you that my own artistic ability is pretty much fully represented by my little cloud doodle, and that he first came into being a couple years ago when a professor (of a class I didn’t actually want to take anyway) banned us from taking notes on our laptops. My notes ended up with more stick figures than notes.

Well, my tools are usually Photoshop and a Wacom drawing tablet, though sometimes I’ll draw by hand in a sketch pad and scan the art in to continue working with it in Photoshop.  It took me ages to really settle into a style, but I’ve finally worked out a couple.  One is basically pencil drawing, like the stuff I’ve been posting lately.  Sometimes I’ll leave it at the lineart, sometimes I’ll do more elaborate shading, and sometimes I’ll do lineart and then color it.  (Hahaha, color and me, we have…a dysfunctional relationship.)

When I draw this way, I’ll start by finding the pose with shapes and stick figures, kind of blocking in the rough outline of the characters and scene before I add details and make it pretty.  Some stuff I can just straight-out draw, if I’m comfortable enough with it—arms, for example, most of the time (unless I’ve got a really weird angle going on).  Hands, on the other hand, sometimes still still require me to figure out how they’ll look using the sticks-for-bones, circles-for-joints method.  And then I still don’t always get it right.

The other style is a lot like working with pastels or chalk.  I take a soft-edged, low-opacity brush and smear color around and layer it on till I have a picture. This method involves me using very thin coats of color to block in the basic shapes, and then layering the color for darkness and intensity and moving to smaller brushes for more refined edges and detail work.  I really like it because it’s freeing for me, and I like the final look.  Here’s an example:

My big problem is that I’m too much of a perfectionist.  I want lines to go where I want lines to go.  Which sounds like a good thing, right?  Except what you end up with is a kind of stale, predictable picture.  Real life doesn’t always go the way you’re expecting, and the lines you use to depict it need to be a little free to do their own thing, too.  Also, only recently have I begun to get more comfortable with trying weird perspectives, and with some of the odder, more elaborate ways the body can move (the crazy ways the spine and shoulders can flex, for example).  Getting a better handle on those has begun to open up a lot of new possibilities for me with my art, and it’s made me more comfortable and confident with loosening up a bit.

I…don’t know if that explains much?  Or if that’s the sort of thing you wanted to know.  But I am happy to talk about it more!  Ask me more questions, if you like!  When you do this a lot, sometimes it’s easy to forget the steps from the perspective of somebody who’s not familiar with them.