A birthday present for a friend, from last month. Happy 2023!

I'm borrowing this from a thread I started on Twitter and I'm hoping maybe it will help someone else: Responding to this meme comic:

What I could've used when I was young, and could not articulate well, was highly specific instruction on practice. If you paint a thing outside your window, and the colors always look wrong, looking through a punch hole on paper to see the color blob by itself helps. Everyone varies in their ability to see an object's shape as it actually is vs how you THINK it's shaped. Me drawing humans is still like this. I had to learn by trial & error that I needed to touch things or turn them around in 3 dimensions rather than 2d reference. I knew I needed to draw and paint over and over again ad nauseum. I didn't understand that there were many more approaches to gaining how-to information beyond "look at stuff" and "look at pictures of stuff".

It wasn't until I had a really magnificent trio of art professors that I understood I should spend as little time looking at my paper as possible when making a mark. If I constantly went back to the reference way more than I did studying my own drawing I'd take the correct shape in more. They taught me how to isolate color. They taught me that lines in a line drawing represent where that object is curving out of view which helped me break out of caricature-only line thinking. They taught me to run my hands over things & see with touch as much as eyes. They taught me color theory from an angle of math & science so that even if I had great difficulty seeing/copying correct color I could still reason my way through the rules to arrive where I wanted the art to be. THIS is what I wanted to know as a kid & teen. It took truly great teachers to articulate my needs.

In short: pedagogy matters. HOW to teach art is a totally separate skill from art making & it's unreasonable to expect artists to always have it. Ask REALLY specific questions. And ask your art teachers WHY some art works & some doesn't. Good ones will truly change your world. That first tiger emblazoned in my copy of "How to Draw Animals" by Jack Hamm was done sometime between 6th & 8th grade. That absolute unit is literally where I started vs where I am today. I did not have talent. Art did not come naturally to me. I am still far behind a number of peers my age in 2D media but that's ok because it's not a competition or a race. It just...is! If you want to make art. Ask REALLY specific questions. If you want to fast track your learning because this does not come naturally...seriously take courses in it. Two out of three of my incredible teachers were at a community college. There's even more very accessible courses for art online. You absolutely can teach yourself art; most of what I do is self taught. But no book or professional artist is going to be able to teach you as intuitively & helpfully as an art teacher.

I am a mosaic of everyone I have ever known and loved and touched and I find fragments of them in my playlists and how I make my tea. we may not know each other any more but we will stay connected like this. I hope a fragment of me is with you too.

My part of a trade with @joeyillustrated !

His serene amphithere Spoons, resting on/in a mountaintop dragon shrine.

Promo/box cover art for Beyond the Edge of Owslgard, a cool retro style game with beautiful animation coming out on December 23rd 2022!

Here’s a bunch of hats I’ve done in the past year and a half. I do them by commission if anyone is interested. They’re $70 USD

Digital arts I made of my D&D rogue character Fiddlehead Fern!

The top-down image is a sprite I made to use in Roll20.

She's really good with the crossbow and loves snails.

Sisters

The Younger Sister and The Older Sister. ...I thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiink I sold these ages ago? Based on lion skulls and the staining tar pits leave behind on the fossils.

It's frickin' bats.

More fanart, of mostly humans this time. I should draw more men?

I have been known to draw some fanart!

A bunch of animal art from the past few years. My favorite thing to draw <3

Here comes some vent art from the past year.

Hello.