THANK YOU FOR DRAWING MY TERRIBLE SON!!!! He's the one who looks like prince charming from shrek :D :D :D

Some of my most recent batch of full-body commissions! Sweet Pea for @elblooderino, Finnigan Fletcher for @caroodraws, and Jasper Apricorn for @bacoj8 ! Thanks so much for your patronage, these are all such fun characters!

Detail shots :)

THIS IS REALLY GOOD ADVICE I think anyone who's trying to improve lineart could benefit from!!! Thank you so much for answering <3 <3 <3

Hi there! This is random, but I really really love the way you do line art! I love how simple, clean, and direct it feels. It has great energy and feels really appealing! I’m trying to improve my own line art right now… I feel like it takes me a long time to choose the “right” lines and end up with clean finish. What to you think has helped you get up to this point with your line art the most? Do you have any suggestions of ways to study and practice? Any favorite artists you look up to for their lines?

I love your work ❤️ thank you

Hello! Thank you for the kind words. I enjoy doing linework a lot, so this is nice to hear :)

These days my line art is more of a "clean drawing" rather than what one usually imagines under traditional line art, which would be opaque lines with varying weight. Right now I like to use a brush that doesn't vary size with pen pressure but varies opacity only. It gives the lines a very soft feeling that I've grown to love.

I browsed through your art, and I was a bit blown away actually, because I think you have a fantastic energy and expression in your drawings, which is something I aspire to have myself. You are very knowledgable about line weight and shapes, so I won't bore you with explaining any of that, haha.

I think good line art comes down to confidence. Obviously, an artist needs a confident hand to avoid shaky lines, to lead them exactly the way they want to, to give them an energy. This sort of mechanical skill is acquired through experience.

But! I've always felt there is a sort of a mental side to this as well, which is best observed during traditional inking. You have to commit to your lines, you have to trust them. You have to sit back and give control to your hand, because with the experience it has, it also has a mind of its own. This sounds pretty out there, but it's about letting go and not overthinking it. I realized this when I looked up to Jim Lee's work as an older teen. There's a lot of videos on YT where you can see his process, which looks utterly effortless. Take this one for example. It's quick, so it's a bit rough, but it does look like his hand is just doing whatever!

I fostered that approach in my art while doing daily drawing from life - straight to inks without sketching. The drawings look wonky a lot of the time, but it gave me confidence where it mattered later. To this day, when I do clean lines in digital too, I adopt this mindset of letting go, which gives the lines more leeway, which also means that if the line doesn't go exactly where it should according to the sketch, I can still trust it. (Although contrary to this, I still put a lot of controlled effort into faces, and this approach comes more easily while drawing bodies and clothes.)

As for suggestions for practice, as I've already mentioned, drawing from life straight to inks (I recommend this over going straight to inks from imagination as that's extremely difficult, at least for me). Have a fast hand, and do long lines even if they come out wobbly. Try to let your hand roleplay Jim Lee here and there - let it do that flick that crosses a line it shouldn't have, let it make a turn with an accidental squiggle, let it pool a bit of ink at the end of the line. Fake it till you make it. At first, I suggest trying this on subjects that aren't your expertise (eg. in my case, draw a bottle instead of a person), so you don't subconsciously compare this to your best work, but make sure you're still having fun :)

Of course, it helps to like doing line art too. I don't know what your relationship to it is, but if it suffers, I suggest busting out the traditional inks with dipping pens, wodden skewers and brushes. It connects me with the process like nothing else.

As for my favorites, I can recommend one of my favorite manga artists - Satoru Noda. Superbly confident and energetic linework. Check out his series Golden Kamuy or Dogsred :)

I hope this will give you a small idea of how I approach my line art. It might be a mess… If you have any more questions as a result of this, or related to anything else, don't hesitate to ask!

Some sketch studies of Jon Townsends from the youtube channel Townsends ~ with some attempts at caricature :’D

Bonus:  not me using yt screengrabs for study instead of all the reference packs in my hoard

LET’S GOOOOOOO

Good news! January 2024 commissions are now open!

Now with a new sketch page option! I am opening 4 slots for January. Find more examples, see pricing details, and submit a commission request through this google form!

Feel free to send an ask or DM with any questions, or email me at beteljessart@gmail. com.

SLOTS

OPEN

OPEN

OPEN

OPEN

I wanted to challenge myself to write, thumbnail and board out a short story thing in 3 days— and here’s the result! + some frames I liked!

There’s a few things I’d definitely go back and push, but I’m really proud of myself for sticking to the challenge and knocking this out!

Doing this challenge made me realize that I give myself waaaay too much time to do projects. Also— I need to stop using the word “projects”😂 there’s so much pressure in that word. I def want to start doing more of these and scale back a ton. Trying to train myself to get faster, looser and just board way more in general, not just when I’m in need of a new portfolio piece. I’ve started way too many “projects” and let them gather dust bc I gave myself too much time to do em and lost interest over time— so this was a good affirmation for me to show myself what I can do in a short period of time! Maybe I’ll try to do something in 3 hours next time 🤔 lmao yikes

More dnd sketch commission stuff!!

Meet Corin, a minimum wage cleric turned fighter who's just trying to make it through life.

This was so fun <3 My favorite kind of commission to do

Workin on some dnd commissions for some pals! Having a blast. Enjoy Oliver Scrungly, A disowned, dumpster fire wizard who can't catch a break.

Gonna be opening some more slots soon :0

I got mad that animation professionals and teachers can’t agree on what exactly an extreme is and the people always confuse overlapping action and secondary action and it’s because classical animation literature is confusing and redundant so I’ve taken it upon myself to make it actually make sense and concise, and this is my first draft.

Do let me know if I should clarify something or you have feedback!

Some stream of consciousness storyboards of my boi Niall going through it

Some more not very on model drawings of my dnd character Finnagan, plus some fun lighting/coloring experiments!! I'm trying to get in the habit of finishing stuff more :0

Figuring out how I wanna draw him still... design is very subject to change as I play him more haha

Latest animatic! This one is just for funsies.

I got really obsessed with this Gamechanger bit when I first heard it... I think the delivery and the characters are so fun. Hope you guys enjoy <3

have a silly genshin comic about my reaction to this part

this man isn't doing too well i don't think

Childe sketchies for fun from last week.. Fontaine has been so fun so far and it reminded me what a feral rat this man is

I have this secret dream to redesign all the characters from this game until I like them because they drive me crazy 😂

This is literally everything to me <3 <3 <3

Did some emotions to try the design of grown up Hogarth :3

I'm a little hesitant to post this because it's so rough, but I wanted to export it for my personal records before my Adobe subscription ran out and thought I might as well post it here lol

I tried to do a 3 day short film project this past month, but it turned out to be way more work than I anticipated. 👉👈 It slowly turned into a 1 week project and then 2 week project until I eventually completely ran out of steam on it and have... Set it asside for now until I can afford adobe again. (even then I don't really want to use adobe products again for my personal work since there are so many other better/cheaper options out there!!! Idk I have mixed feelings about adobe)

While I perceive this project as a failure, I think it's chill and healthy to acknowledge the work I put into it and feel proud of myself for trying something that was a bit too ambitious for me at the time.

I genuinely had a great time working on this while it lasted though!! I wanna work my way up to eventually creating full short films in my spare time and find a good non-adobe pipeline.

I'll be posting my boards (which contain the whole story, this is just the first scene) and the sparse design work I did on this later :0

My new DnD character!!!! I'm usually the forever DM so I'm excited to play this time hehe

His name is Finnegan Fletcher, he's a half-elf rogue with mysterious past. I wanted to try playing a very stereotypical gentleman thief archetype character

RBing for my own personal reference!!!

I've been working on an animation project lately after many months of not touching the medium and it's reminding me how much I have left to learn (┬┬﹏┬┬)

So grateful for people who do breakdowns and discuss the principles like this <3 <3

ALSO GO WATCH MONKEY WRENCH BECAUSE IT'S LITERALLY SO GOOD AND COOL!!! NO ONE IS DOING IT LIKE THEM IN INDIE ANIMATION!!!!

Been going through a lot of animation reels this past week and a bit and one prevailing thing I noticed was that a lot of animators either struggle with, or completely disregard, the timing and pacing of their frames. Timing and spacing is (to me) utterly essential to create some nice, smooth and well flowing animation, otherwise it can look very jittery, jumpy, volume will fluctuate greatly and won't look too good.

This clip here should help show you how I place my keys, breakdowns and inbetweens to get some nice movement. (I wish I had room for timing charts!)

As you can see from the timeline grab here, a lot of this is on 3's, with a few 2's here and there. Even some 4's to help ease. With proper placing of frames even 3's and 4's can look smooth!

AND, if you have toon boom, and you wanna have a deep dive into this file, I've attached it below so you can really have a good look!