you’re created with hands circling your wrists. there’s never any offense meant, you must understand - it’s simply that you’re a story, and someone’s come by this desperate need to learn how to let the hell go.

hello dreamy; hope you’re well ❤️ we’re pretty similar in some aspects :o i love making gfx the most too since it’s something i wish to be good at + pairing fonts, figuring out colour palettes and executing ideas in the form of a graphics really is challenging but also super rewarding! i draw from time to time as well and i really love doing it, but since i rarely ever not draw from a reference or change things ever so slightly, it’s not something that tickles my imagination as much as a gfx would hehe since i usually have to readjust colourings or sometimes colour from scratch, i really like giffing too! but it’s probably the most mundane out of all of them since there’s nothing much different about the process dkfjdj oh, you’re absolutely fine! a good friend is like a seasoned professional when it comes to typos, and i’ve finally mastered decoding 90% of what she says… reading through your posts is like a calming breeze after talking to her—no missing words, random exclamations or extra letters 😂 but i think it’s a charming point for her too; i immediately know it’s her when i receive a text that butchered up! the whole biasing thing reminds me of a mutual of mine :D she’s always confused on who her bias is and ends up biasing the one member who is a complete opposite of her initial bias so we joke around by predicting who her bias will be once she starts getting into a new group. what’s your favourite hair colour on chan (and/or binnie haha) + what are some things that you associate with him? (i apologize for the late ask as i have been struggling with tumblr for the past couple of days ^^;) - 🌨

i'm gonna put a cut cause this is long

Hi my lil rain cloud, omg yes there’s just so much you can do with gfx, its a constant learning curve, and it’s so full of experimentation that its just always so fun. I’ve always been tempted to open up requests for gfx but its so hard to think of how to get ppl to send stuff that would actually inspire me. The best I’ve done is someone randomly sent me an ask for a gfx with Minho and they asked if it could be yellow and it ended up being a lot of fun to try to do, the request was so vague it was easy to be completely creative.  I also cannot draw unless I have a good reference, it’s like I can picture something so perfectly in my mind but the second my pen touches paper or tablet I suddenly can’t figure out how to proportion anything. But if I have something to constantly look at and compare myself to I can match it pretty well. But I agree gifs feel easy most of the time in comparison, unless I’m trying to recolor something nightmare inducing like purple stage lighting, or making things extra fancy by basically turning gifs into gfx. Giffing is a good hobby for watching tv or something, because it’s just a constant process so I can pay enough attention to the tv to know what’s happening while also cranking out sets, so I like that about it. I’m glad my grammar issues are at least legible, just lots of random commas that I hope are remotely ok lmao

Omg red is definitely my favorite hair color on Chris, like all time, I think the more ppl hated it the more I loved it, was obsessed with it. It just felt so punk, and then it faded to a pretty pink and I was happy all over again lmao. I also really loved the highlighted brown during double knot, that was such a gorgeous color and I think it really suited his skin tone a lot. I’m partial to blonde binnie, like ex or all in that was SUCH a gorgeous color on him, I do wish he got to do more fun colors tho, he’s said a few times he wants pink hair and I think changbin should get what he wants lol

Things I associate with Chris, omg does everything count or does that just really bring out the loser in me lmao but fr space, the ocean, oversized clothing, skateboarding, wolves obviously, the 🤙🏻 emoji, Pokemon, puppies, those thick silver chain necklaces lol, I will stop this will get embarrassing gdhgd

Can we talk about art for a second?

I’m pretty sure none of you are following me for art content because that’s just not what I do normally, but I’ve been working on some stuff and I just wanted to share. Here’s my current WIP:

I’m using sketchbook on my iPad Pro, and...can we just talk about process for a second? I’m gonna put this behind a cut just in case it gets long and because this isn’t my normal content. 

So I’ve been drawing almost my entire life, but I didn’t really start teaching myself anything good until around 9th grade (which is like...14 years old.). I started by copying Disney characters and then I was introduced to comic books and I copied those. I was in college when digital art start making its way into the art world. People would color their pencil drawings (this was shortly before tablets, so...with a mouse.). I grew into an artist around the time people like Aimee Major and Stephanie Lostimolo were really starting to stand out. And I don’t know about other fandoms, but I was in the gargoyles fandom and from what I can tell...a LOT of modern digital art has its genesis in that fandom. Anyway, what I’m trying to say here is that I started using photoshop with version 3.0 and I’ve had a Wacom tablet almost since the day they came out (gen one graphire tablet represent!).

I’ve never, in all that time, gotten the hang of digital painting. I have a hard time with tablets because you can’t tilt them like you can tilt a paper and it takes a weird sort of hand-eye-screen coordination that I just never mastered. But digital art is so beautiful that I’ve always WANTED to be able to do it. I can make graphics and edit photos but I have a hard time with painting. I have seen the million myriad ways of doing it, and most of them start with the same idea: lay down flats and then lighten or darken as necessary. And this never worked for me because a, the airbrush tool isn’t painterly enough for me and b, it takes for goddamned EVER. For. Ever. And I’m a fast artist! I can spit out a whole line drawing in like a half hour-45 mins with traditional media. But I have adhd, and so finishing long term large scale detailed projects is often not in the cards for me. So dumping like 48 hours of work time into a painting isn’t going to work for me.

But recently I’ve gotten back into art again and I’ve been watching the sky artist of the year and I decided I was curious about oil painting and, well, one hyperfixation later, here we are. I don’t have the money or space for actual oil painting, so I went to sketchbook to see if there was an alternative, and there is! So because I wanted to learn how to oil paint I finally figured out how to digitally paint and I’m gonna share that with you in case you, like me, struggle with the time input and focus required to do digital art.

First, I started practicing poses by drawing an outline over any image that caught my fancy. I have a good understanding of human anatomy because of my science background, but my poses aren’t creative and I especially struggle with perspective and multiple figures in an image. So I started to do line drawings over an image. Here’s the stock image I used for the WIP:

Look at all that fabric! Look at the movement! I love it. So I traced it:

Yes, TRACED, because tracing is a tool like anything else.

Then I choose colors. I pick 5: a midtone (the color you want the thing to be perceived as. In my case, you can see it in the WIP at the top.), a slight dark, a slight light, a blackened tone for deep shadow, and a very light tone for highlights. I always default to white light when choosing these colors, and I’ll get to my reasoning further down. The palette for the robe looks like this:

(Ignore the tan and blue, they’re for another project)

Then you start to lay down flats. Now, I do this with the synthetic oil brush in sketchbook because I like the texture (this image though I’d laid down the flats with the airbrush months ago and didn’t want to redo it, hence the lack of texture and the 100% opacity.), and as with oils, my approach to digital now is to layer rather than cover. Staying in the lines isn’t important. In fact, you should go outside of the lines because it will help you get shadows and highlights along the edges later. What IS important is putting everything on different layers. When in doubt, new layer. I work from back to front, which means that the base layer is the background. In front of that is the skin, in front of that is the robe, in front of that is the teal inside of the robe, in front of that is accessories. Hair varies depending on what’s going on with the image. Here I’ll probably put it between the skin and robe. Ask yourself: what is this covered by? And the use that to decide layer placement. Special effects are a whole other thing, as are highlights. I’ll get to that in a second tho.

The next step is to create an oversketch. This serves much the same function as an undersketch in oil painting, only in reverse because your reference photo is under - and covered - by your work. I started doing it because as I was painting I was flicking the layer on and off, making it transparent, whatever just to see where the shadows are on the reference image. It was a real pain in the rear. So I started making the blobs and borders of the highlights and shadows with an oversketch. You don’t need a method for telling which boundaries are for shadows and which are highlights because for that you can just turn the layer on and off. Just mark where the General shapes are. Here’s the oversketch for this drawing:

See? Blobs of General Area. When you’re painting, use them to lay down color and then turn them off when you’re blending because they’re not part of the final image and you don’t want to end up with gaps that were covered by the over sketch. To do this, I use the 9b pencil tool and black, but tbh just se whatever you like. That’s just my preference.

Now, for the shading. I started by trying a bunch of different natural media brushes but I eventually ended up sticking on a kind of weird choice: the fan brush. I keep the flow around 20%, which gives me these nice textured marks to lay down color, but then if I don’t lift the pencil up it stops laying down color and instead starts to blend. This means a, I can make it as smooth or painterly as I like with one tool and b, I can paint and blend with the same tool. No more muddying up my drawings by over-blending with the smudge. No losing the texture while blending because it blends with the texture. And the shape of the fan brush allows me to be smudgy with I like, but also will do hard edges. Plus the blending thins out the colors so I can get neat effects by laying down colors on top of each other because it stays a little transparent. You end up needing to lay down a lot of “paint” to get opacity but that’s ok because it allows you to make more complex colors. That’s good, because things like skin aren’t a color. They’re chemical: they’re melanin in cells over blood vessels and muscle and skin is transparent. Even very dark skinned people have undertones. So when you build up paint this way you can capture undertones without ruining your painting. Which, I’m pretty sure, is how it works in oils. But it translates well to digital.

So at this point, painting your image is basically a calming adult coloring book. You lay down color, blend, check your reference, repeat. But a few things to keep in mind:

- Take note of the darkest and lightest areas of the image. Nothing should be lighter or darker than these areas. Nothing in the drawing above will be darker than her back because that’s the darkest area of the painting.

- See the trees and the forest. Sometimes a detail doesn’t make any sense until you’ve seen it in context. Trust your guide and your photo reference. But also make sure that you don’t get so stuck in the details that you can’t relate one area to another. A fold that goes through two areas should be consistent across those two areas, even if you painted them separately. An area might seem dark in comparison to what’s next to it, but it isn’t as dark as the darkest area of the image so don’t go whole hog. Keep it in context.

- Folds in clothing aren’t nonsensical. They are a result of the movement and weight of the fabric. Ergo, the shadows and highlights that create them should also make sense.

- If you’re having a hard time figuring out where the highlights and shadows are, make a copy of the reference image layer and desaturate in, then turn off the colored reference layer.

Lastly, I’m finding it helpful to keep the highlights from colored light on its own layer. I didn’t used to do this, I used to use the colored light as one of my highlight colors. But the truth is that most objects are shaded by more than one light source, and so I’ve decided to do all the shading as white light and then the green (which will eventually be from some kind of green magic.) is on a different layer. My reasoning for this is that it helps keep the integrity of the shading and it prevents the colors from bending too much and getting muddy. So if I add a green highlight and I don’t like it then it’s easy to remove. I don’t have a highlight and shading that’s now ruined by green because I’ve been using light flow brushes. So colored light on its own layer. How much of a highlight you give it entirely depends on how strong your light sources is and whatnot. So far I’m satisfied with just hitting the high points, but I may change that later on.

When you’re done painting the area, go ahead and erase all of the excess paint around the edges of it and clean it up. I like to leave the black outline as part of the image, but if you don’t want to do that you should turn it on and off as necessary while painting so you can make sure to fill in gaps and get clean lines between the areas of color.

So if you made it all the way down here, thanks for reading my ramble. :)