Hey y’all hey! Lady’s favs are resources, info, and other helpful things that I’ve found useful in my journey in the arts. Though mostly geared toward comics and digital art, a lot of the resources are universal to creatives in general. I’m in no way the definitive guide for anything besides my own inner workings, BUT I defo don’t mind sharing the things I’ve found helpful on my journey in making & sharing comics and other art in case they may be helpful to you š!
Colors-colors-colors, I love color and the use of it in my art. There is so much that can be communicated with color. Anything from feelings atmosphere, and even personal preferences can be peeped through usage of color. The same can be said about black and white, but it just hits different. I went to school for Studio Art and Design, but due to my interests, I didn’t get as much out of it as I hoped I would (It wasn’t a complete bust, but not much in the way of visual storytelling). That and thick text books with little visuals have always been hard for me to absorb. Luckily for me, there were tons of resources to explore. Like hundreds of thousands of them. Everything from blogs, to books, to podcasts, videos and classes. Don’t get mw wrong, variety is the spice of life, but stars and garters, it can make your eyes spin and sometimes you just want help narrowing the scope, get a refresher, or maybe learn a new approach.
So here are some of my fav resources on Color stuff!
Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist PainterĀ by James Gurney The link directs to his website where he also has many of the articles he’s compiled in the book on their for free. This book is one of the best comprehensive studies of color and light that I’ve read. It’s visual and the text is digestible. Can’t recommend this one more for artist and any creative that works with color and value.
Lighting Mentor on YT It’s a playlist of videos that go into the importance of color studies and what you can learn from them!
Blender Guru on YT Understanding Colors is an old one but stands the test of time.
Sadies Saves the Day on Skillshare A water color painter with an excellent understanding of painting vibrantly. She also has an inactive youtube channel where she shared her beautiful watercolor portraiture. It’s still up.
A fun extra:
Jane Blundell is a watercolor artist that has the most extensive swatch library blog I’ve ever seen for watercolor paints and adjacent materials. It’s incredibly organized and an excellent resource for finding watercolor dupes, but also great for choosing color palettes. I can stay on her site for hours.
Woop woop! hope you found something helpful. And hey, feel free to share any helpful stuff about color in comments you’ve found useful!
Hey, y’all I’m Lady T. and I make the New adult fantasy comic MagicalMashup!
Iām sure most artists have contemplated what it means to have a style and how it can be developed at one point (or now). An artist’s style is usually easier to notice when it’s someone elseās over our own, but some of us are more conscientious about what we make so maybe not. This got me thinking about when others realized they could characterize their styles as something uniquely theirs and that it includes my own.
Art timeline for me that is all over the place tbh
I saw a quote on Twitter by user @Taijuey who said: āI think part of developing a style is admitting to yourself that you just donāt like doing certain things.ā This got me thinking about my own artistic thumbprint. For sure itās a combination of things as I started drawing because I really liked anime and wanted to see my own characters brought to life outside my head that evolved into being the change I want to see in the media i consume. I remember how easy it was for me to draw faces, but bodies took me for a loop. As I grew as an artist, I tried to draw more varied subjects and thatās when things started getting interesting bc I realized there were things I just didnāt like drawing and I would be avoiding them as mush as possible to focus on what I did like and that shaped how my style developed over time. I just really like faces and shoulders yāall ok!!
As an artist, have you ever had that moment when someone youāve known for a while looks at your art compared to another artist and can clearly tell which one you did? Thatās style recognition, even if itās not where you want it to be yet. Then they said something like, āAh yes, I can tell you made this because itās totally your style.ā? Only to have you realizeā¦OH SNAP, I HAVE A STYLE!? Then you try and figure out what they meant by āyour styleā and you ask what they meant, and if you were lucky they could form their thoughts into words and you gained some insight about yourself, but if they couldnāt be precise you just scratched your head and tried to reflect on your own? I know my experience canāt be singular lol.
The first time I heard this was in high school from one of my geeky art club bodies who said, āAh thatās so H-Queen” (at the time my nickname was H-queen, but thatās a whole other thing pft). I didnāt think too much about what he said as I felt like my work was pretty generic in comparison to theirs, but even then there were things I would do in my art that made it pretty obvious that I was the one that drew it, but it took a while for me to notice that about myself.
Did someone say color
Style isnāt just formed by how you draw, but also what you draw and the themes you use in the work you make. Iāve always been into drawing intimacy, cute moments, going against gender roles, and subverting what a main character should look like. Over the years that has turned into my focus on the diversity of women’s bodies in art, though I admit my male forms arenāt nearly as diverse I can at least understand why I developed this way. I made the deliberate choice to focus on the underrepresented ways in which women can manifest in media and bringing that to the forefront of my art as it was hard to find. I saw more diversely bodied males growing up over females in cartoons, comics, movies, and all that good pop culture stuff in between. Though times are a changing abs thereās is more body diversity rep going about, the intentional drive to do my part is engrained in what I like to draw and how I draw. I totally want to keep expanding my inclusion net though, ur my foremost goal is focusing on the change I can make with what I like to create most.
More things change the more they star the same
Other things Iāve learned about my style include my fondness for round shapes. Even if something is supposed to be seen as rigid or at a sharp angle, I always find my hand naturally adding a curve. Another thing Iāve noticed is I donāt draw a lot of bangs on my characters which is interesting considering the foreheads I draw are pretty small in comparison to the rest of the face. I also love larger-than-life hair. Like, cāmon, have yāall seen my protagonist? Totally in line with this observation and the co-protagonist has gained more volume over the years as I started to challenge myself more by drawing shorter hairstyles that werenāt just a bald head.
(back in the day Kaelen’s hair was so flat pressed. Couldnāt be standing next to my girl with hair that bodyless lol). I still tend to go for longer hairstyles over shorter ones as I find those more fun and easier to draw, I admit I donāt like drawing short hair as itās actually pretty hard for me (donāt even get me started on facial hair).
One psychedelic trip to the future pls
Through analyzing the things I like to draw and what I don’t like to draw in comparison to my body of work there are a few things I’ve come to know about my art style as of today. Itās playful, kind of trippy, filled with organic forms, fluffy, bold, sensual, carefree, and dare I say fantastical!
Anywho what are some observations yāall have made about your own styles you can dish on mine if youād like too? Can you describe your style if asked or are you still trying to figure it out? Do you consider your self style less? Are you interested in hearing what others have to say about your style? Feel free to add a small collage of your work (preferably one image with a few pieces of your work pasted next to each other, but if you canāt do that, posting 3 or 4 pics should do fine too) and indicate that you are interested in having your style described by anyone in the forum.
TLDR: Through thinking about artistic styles and being told I have a style after trying so hard to define my style, I was able to learn the components of what my artistic thumbprint is that makes up my style. For me, it’s the inclusion of subject matter, what I enjoy drawing vs what I don’t, and how I found ways to accentuate what I like. Tell me about where you are on your stylistic journey and if you don’t know, post some of your work and see what others have to say.
Some examples of the characters features in my webcomic MagicalMashup! and all them beautiful skin tones!!
Hi, y’all fellow creatives and musers of the world!
It’s Black History Month, but there is always time to talk about diversity in my book. I make a comic called MagicalMashup! that features a black female protagonist who is also fat or plus size if you prefer, I’m fine with fat as it’s just a descriptor and it is what it is, but I’ve noticed a difference in tags for fat and plus size so yeahā¦ cover all groundsā¦ (body diversity is a whole other can of wigglies that I’m sure I’ll get into at a later date). My cast is also filled with a host of other racially and ethnically diverse characters too with sexualities as beautiful as a rainbow as I draw inspiration from my life. As it is a fantasy setting, the ethnicities are all fictional, but racially speaking I pull from the real world for some relatability and representation. Today I want to talk specifically about characters in our stories and that we draw/illustrate/write that are not white.
As a creator of any racial/ethnic group, do you make black characters or other racial identities that aren’t white and based on real-life people of color for your stories or illustrations? If you do, what leads you to do this? Fill free to share pics of your characters. If you don’t, why not? Are you interested in diversifying your cast or writing?
I think it’s important to look at these types of questions and think about them in earnest and face them head-on as story creators and artists so that we all grow and expand our horizons about each other. I am aware that some folks live in racially homogenous areas so thinking about other races isn’t something that would cross their minds regularly or if you only tell stories based on your life and have never come into contact with someone of another race that would be included in your personal tale, but if you have access to the internet and partake in social media it isn’t hard to come in contact with the diversity of the world and this is about promoting and encouraging that contact.
I thrive in creating works based on fantasy and sci-fi and those two genres are where I like to spread my wings. Growing up much of my exposure to these genres was through white lenses and oftentimes black characters and other racial minorities would be cast as tokens and stereotypes. Even if I didn’t really connect with them, I appreciated them for existing when they showed up in those two genres specifically (Sci-fi had more rep than fantasy for sure though). It’s hard to notice how the things we consume growing up can impact us down the road, but craving representation in the fields that I adore is such a driving force for me that It got me to create art focused around the type of characters I wanted to see (and still do).
I’m not here to accuse or police anyone’s work and I can only speak from the experience I have as a cis black woman living in the USA who is tall, and fat has had a run in with cancer, and often mistaken for a drag queen (no shame in that game as DragQueens are beautiful and extra and I love them, but gotta keep it real as can’t talk about that life from persona experience), but I am curious to know the thoughts other creators have when it comes to racial diversity in their work (which is different from ethnic diversity as racial specifically means physical traits for how people look [skin color and features] while ethnicity is more based on culture. These two tend to go hand in hand, but not always, to be honest, there are more nuances that go into even that so it can get a bit eye-crossing for folks who fall into mixed groups or folks that fall into other groups). For example, my race is Black which gives a basic description for how I look (emphasis on basic), my ethnicity is African American when I fill in paperwork, but I’d put Black American if it were an option as unfortunately I nor my family have had any cultural ties to Africa in generations due to slavery and the loss of any records of where my lineage comes from before my great-grandma. Being Black and American is what I know and there is still more to me than that, but I think you get the gist of what I’m saying.
I started off just doing skin recolors of favorite cartoon characters and making OCs off of them as I didn’t understand the nuances of the differences in illustrating racial groups, but through anatomy studies and people watching (an ongoing learning experience for life), I have been able to apply that to my character designs to make more racially distinct-looking characters. Observation and studies are something I recommend any artist do, and if you are a writer, this also helps when being able to describe your characters with a flair that doesn’t always center around a type of chocolate or food (I love my sweets too, but the verbiage for dark skin is as wide as the sea is vast so don’t be scared to expand form that). There are tons of fabulous resources on writing with color and this is one that I recommend, but there are many more out there, and if you know of any feel free to share š https://writingwithcolor.tumblr.com/FAQ.
TLDR: Do you create characters that are Black or other racial identities (different from ethnic identities) that aren’t white? if so, how/why do you? Feel free to post examples of your characters of color. If you do not, how come and would you like to? Any resources for creating with diversity in mind are welcomed as well!
Checkout the post on the Tapas forum foe more replies!
It’s freezing down here in the south and I just want to be in bed with a heated blanket. Anyways, I may be cold, but something that helps take my mind off of not feeling the best is looking up and trying new art supplies. One of my fav places to scope out and test new supplies is JetPens. They provide extensive reviews of all the drawing and writing supplies that they have for sale. Not only that, but everything is OPEN STOCK!! That’s such a big deal. You artist know why ;). Just to not be that one for those that don’t get it though, it means you can literally buy 1 of any pen or pencil/accessory. Try before investing!! That’s such a big deal when trying to figure out what materials you even like to use. Not only that but if you run out of one thing from a pack, you can buy just what you need. Ultimate customization!
Pens pens and more pens! Checkout my book pouch too hehe.
I wanted to share some of my favorite Pens that I use for making comics and why I dig them so much.
That tip is nice for being fast and keeping it loose!
For Work
Pentel EnerGel .35mm ball Needle Point pen (black). This pen has become my favorite pen to do quick sketches within my Notebook. It has sharp lines and great for cross-hatching and tiny details. My handwriting isn’t very legible with it. but that’s not what I use it for.
Iāve never had pretty handwriting (barely legible on a good day) but this pen gives me the control I crave!
Zebra Sarasa clip 0.5. For making notes on thumbnails and having legible handwriting I like this baby. It goes down smooth, doesn’t skip, and not as sharp as the Pentel, so delicate details arent really its thing, but makes my chicken scratch look semi-legible and I like the way it feels in my hand.
For Legibiliaty Zebra Tapli Clip Ballpoint Pen – 1.6 mm. Since I write fast and loose, I’ve found that bigger tipped pens that glide instead of run over paper give me a bit more control. For that most any pen with a tip of at least 1.5mm gives me that.
Every Day Papermate Inkjoy .7MM. These are pretty easy to find most anywhere locally and I totally recommend them. They have a nice mate body that stays put in your hand, great ink flow, a variety of tip sizes & colors, and they feel nice in the hand. I use these for scheduling and keep spares in all my bags.
An example of what these pens look like. The highlight sparkles were made using the red/black pen .
For Fun
Pentel Hybrid Dual Metallic Gel Pen – 1.0 mm. These pens are purely for being cute. I just like to use them to add a lil pop to a bunch of black ink. Though sometimes they serve as a color block to help me remember I want to color a feature in a unique or cosmic way. They provide such a neat effect and flow out of the pens nicely, so you can get some good coverage area.
Tiny tiny color pops
Pilot Hi-Tec-C Gel Pen .4mm. They aren’t the best gel pens, but I like the colors they have and will do in a pinch for details or notes. I seem to always have one somewhereā¦
I love this lil sloth with its lil smile!
Just Because
Sloth Pen – I just love this lil pen from Earthbound and it puts a smile on my face while at work (not the comic work, but the 9-5 job haha). They don’t have it on the site anymore, but they have other kinds and they are surprisingly good writing pens. The ink tube is also replaceable so woot! They also have journals that I really want to get my hands on, but that’s a whole other deal.
What are some of your favorite pens and where do you get them?
TLDR: List of my favorite pens and a good place to find open stock supplies. Do you use pens for your comics or writing? If so what kinds and why do you like them? Feel free to leave reviews of your favs and where you can get them for anyone curious to try them out :).
I thought I posted about the books Iāve been reading during the Pandemic to brush up on my knowledge and skills as an artist already, but turns out I forgot to actually que them up so yeah, let me back track real quick and talk about some of them :}!
Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter by James Gurney, he also has a blog and YouTube channel with lots of fantastic information and art. His book combines a lot of lessons and more from his blog and compiled into a beautiful book filled with color theory explanations and examples anyone from a novice to expert can gain something from.
Reading this book gave me everything I wanted from the studio art classes I took in college. They were good classes, but I didnāt get the understanding I thought I would from the on portraying light and color…or figure drawing. Iām still haunted by cow skulls :/.
Anyway, each chapter is broken up to a two page spread or less with all the key points youād need to understand the concepts James is talking about. Not just talking, but also showing examples of!!
Idk about you, but nothing makes my eyes roll harder than a book about art techniques or color thatās is all text with small examples. I need to see what you are talking about, and I never had a problem grasping anything James talked about because he creates fantastic examples. All art or photos that he has created or taken himself (often from his Dinotopia series) Thatās hella baller and makes this book a most have for any artist.
I got so into reading this book I had to crack open a fresh notebook to take notes in bc the highlighters werenāt enough! For each new topic I created an exercise for practicing what Iāve read. Itās actually something Iāve carried over to any reading regarded art improvement. Itās pretty nifty when Iām trying to decide where to start. Just open the lesson planner and pick something.
Donāt strain your eyes trying to read my handwriting hahah, Iāmma probably type this up for reasons later though
He has another book as well thatās called Imaginative Realism that focuses on bringing your imagination to life that I also picked up too. Itās also pretty good, but I found not nearly as practical as much of the advice would then say, āmake a maquetteā and Iām like….I aināt got the time, clay, or space for all them figures (as cool as thatād be). Buutt when thinking about it, I can translate it into making 3D models for reference so not a complete bust.
I really love a lot of the fun sketches in this book and models (even if Iām not going to be making them).
The next books are geared towards watercolorist.
The New Encyclopedia of Watercolor Techniques is an incredibly helpful book for exploring watercolors. Everything is laid out neatly with ample examples for each technique discussed. This book has a nice balance of text and art that illustrates each point clearly.
Itās hella comprehensives on the many techniques and tools that can be used when painting and discusses terminology native to watercolor as a medium.
Glazing is a pretty baller technique that Iād like to play with more in future pieces.
The last book Iām going to highlight is actually from a series of how to books by Stephanie Pui-Mun Law that details how she creates her dreamy fantasy watercolor paintings.
Stephanie has created books on making fantasy worlds and the creatures that reside within them. Each book serves as a how to guide for creating fantastical creations in her style. Itās a beautiful style filled with wispy and elegant lines, and soft colors that make a splash on the page.
A lot of my line work tends to lean on the bolder side, but I definitely appreciate studying different kinds of artistic styles since you never know what you may pick up. Iām still reading through the Dreamscapes series, but Iām loving the step by step Stephanie takes from sketch to completed painting and the techniques and tools she used to get there!
When I have more recommendations, Iāll be sure to let yāall know :).
Sat down with my paints and got to swatching! Check out my charts woot!
Swatch chart made from my studio palette
These are the colors I have in my Studio Palette. Iāll break them down by brand, but they are all mixed up on my palette. All the brands Iāve chosen have fantastic colors, but as I was being very picky, some do have colors that just spoke to me more during my comparisons.
From Daniel Smith I have the most colors from Buff Titanium, Burnt Sienna, Quinacradone Gold, Quinacradone Coral, Neutral taint, and Cascade Green. Daniel smith has a huge line of beautiful colors and a ton of fun colors I just wanted to try out, Cascade Green is one I look forward to playing with more. Daniel Smith makes beautiful earthy colors, but also vibrant jewel tones too. Quin Coral is just a gorgeous color and so I had to have it. Buff titanium is a convenience color I like for mixing skin and pastels. Neutral tint is for darkening without black and more convenience.
Da Vinci: Raw Umber. I want to try out more Da Vinci colors, but many of the colors I picked out for them lost to M. Graham when I compared my swatches before buying. Now that I have it in my palette I really want to try more colors of this brand bc they set up solid and re-wet so nice and creamy! Not to mention that bang for our buck!
Sennelier: Lemon Yellow, Indian Yellow, and Ultramarine Deep. Sennelier swatched some of the loveliest light colors Iād seen, so I knew I wanted to get my yellows from them. The Ultramarine was a last minute swap, but I dig it as It works well as a softer blue.
M. Graham: Quinacradone Rose, Phthalo Green and Blue. M. Graham has some of the move vibrant colors around. They donāt set up as nice in palettes, but so long as I donāt leave them in the heat and then put them in my bag, they set up enough to travel with. Iām totally in love with the vibrant colors I get with these colors alone, and when mixed, chefs kiss!!
Holbien: Terre Verte. This was a last minute addition. I needed something that would be able to create earthy colors and decided on Terre Verte. I wanted the one from Sennelier, but was sold out so went with Holbein. I wanted to play with some Holbein colors anyway since they arenāt as granulating and offered more control when painting, but again, most of the colors I had picked out for them lost in the color comparisons to M. Graham and Daniel Smith. Now that Iāve played with this color, I also enjoy how it sets hard and re-wets well. Much like the Da Vinci, so Iād like to explore them some more in the future.
QOR: Dioxazine Purple. I was afraid to get to many QOR colors as I do enjoy having control over my paints as opposed to letting them fly around the page, but the more I practice with watercolors the less I fear that. I mean watercolor paint only goes where there is water so control where the water is and that settles that ha! This purple is such a fantastic color to mix with and a nice convince purple as purple is my favorite color. Iād be down to try more primaries from QOR for sure, specifically reds!
The colors in my Portable Paint Palette are Quin Rose and Coral, Buff Titanium, Dioxazine purple, Phtalo blue and green, Indian and lemon yellow, Burnt Sienna and Raw Umber. This palette is the one Iāll be using mostly for World Watercolor month.
Portable painting palette
These are my swatch cards for my portable palette. I just used some practice Bee Watercolor paper and then cut and laminated the swatches once dry so I could tuck them into the palette when on the go. They are front and back FYI.
I’f you are reading this live, I should have a few paintings up on the right where my Insta feed is. Im particularly proud of this one below though :3c.
I have spent a good bit of this pandemic reading and getting lost in the YouTube art scene. Seeing so many talented people create beautiful and dreamy compositions really got me excited and gave me the inspiration I needed to get serious about getting on track with improving my skills with physical media again. Deciding to focus on one medium at a time for now, Iāve gotten serious about refreshing what I know, or thought I knew, about these mediums. Iām going with watercolors first as the challenge month is upon us and Iāve been itching to make my own color palette based on all the notes Iāve made thus far. I talked about the book I found most rejuvenating by James Gurney, Color and Light in an older post.
I’ve been meaning to improve my watercolor game for a few years now. I first explored the medium in high school and totally fell for how the colors looked like they were glowing when applied to paper. I tried to play more with the medium after high school, but could never achieve the same results I had in class, so I moved away form it. A few years ago I got back into wanting to use the medium again and looked into buying a decent premade set. I found the 24 pan White Nights set and used that for a bit, and even though it’s a beautiful set, I still didn’t feel as attached to it and wound up going to Gauche when my local art supply shop closed down and had a massive sale on everything in stock.
I have since left Gauche alone as the ones I had did not re-wet all too well and I rotate mediums, so ones that expire fast are off the table, but hey, play and learn.
The mediums that I come back to repeatedly and have this considered my stickers are Alcohol markers, Watercolors, Acrylic Ink, and of course digital painting (Procreate and Clip Studio Paint). I know that sounds like a lot, but trust me, this is the narrowed focus list. I LOVE customizing and that extends to every part of my life. From what I wear, to what I eat, and of course what I create. I can never just follow a recipe without throwing my own spin on it and the same goes for picking my supplies. The mediums that I actually stick with are ones that I invested the time to create my own custom sets of. It took me a second to really think about that (even though it’s totally obvious).
I spent months comparing colors for my Copic collection before ordering each marker individually. I spent weeks looking into ink properties and color combinations for my Acrylic Ink sets, I spent years looking into individual pens and pencils for drawing. When it came to watercolors, I just found a decent set and wondered why I wasn’t as excited to create with it. Even if it was a fantastic set. Open Stock is truly the way to go for me. The study, comparisons, and care that go into selecting each color makes it meaningful and gives me that much more reason to want create. That’s what was missing from my watercolor selections. Not the quality of paints, but the journey of customizing my own palette.
Painting is such a unique medium. You can make new colors from just having a small selection of colors available to you and thatās pretty neat, some knowledge on color theory will helps to avoid a ton of repeated color mixes, or over mixing in general when building a custom limited palette. Limited color choices in painting palettes are a fantastic way to see color theory in action too. My style is definitely more illustrative so I knew that I would need the ability to mix bold colors and a range of skin tones.
I studied swatches from Jane Blundellās blog, if itās worth a dang in the watercolor world, sheās swatched it. I then would check out Denise, of In Liquid Color to see the paints in action as she has extensive color spot light videos, reviews, and tutorials on color mixing. I also enjoyed checking out Sadie Saves the Day for more examples on beautiful illustrations and helpful reviews and information on the medium too!
For anyone that wants a quick cheat sheet to putting together a legit color palette, I’d recommend this really neat post On the Jacksonās Art blog. It’s a short and sweet entry about choosing colors for a limited pallets and its fantastic advice for crafting a limited pallet that will create a wide array of lovely mixes. Definitely worth a read if you are trying to figure out what colors to use and why when youāre starting in watercolor.
There are more resources that I used, but these are the ones I found myself going back to repeatedly when crafting my palette. Once I had my list of colors together, I was ready to shop! Of course the pandemic has art supplies in short supply, but I was fortunate enough to find what I needed through three store: Dickblick, Jerrys Artarama, and Jacksonās Art in the UK, sadly my local art supply shop packed up shop last year, so Iāve had to move supply hunting all online now since they only things left in town are Michaelās and Hobby Lobby, so yeahā¦nah.
The other supplies I purchased were a palette that Iād be able to add more to later for my studio, the MITJELLO 18 well palette and the Portable Paint Palette for on the go. It has 12 wells and I love its design! I had all the other tools already, but did up my brush game as I realized of all the brushes I have, the only ones I use are the Jacksonās brand Quill Brushes, I have this brush in a variety of sizes. The only brush I use that isnāt in this quill family is a 00 round for detail. They are such lovely and cheap brushes. They feel good, have a variety of sizes, go thin to thick, hold a good amount of water, and they are forgiving if I leave them in water by accident. I KKKNOOOWWW thatās a terrible habit, but I have short term memory problems that crop up at funny times and finding my brushes in good health after one of these bouts feels good.
Next Iām going to paint out my watercolor mixing chart for my large palette and then make some smaller swatch sheets for the portable pallet to use for reference. Iāve studied for this and know the colors I have will make some cool colors, but being able to see the nuance of each color in person has me excited.
Itās time for another art challenge!! This time itās World Watercolor Month! Another month long art challenge and you bet Iām participating and excited to reach that finish line. Amongst all the other things, Iām working on with the comic, and now planning a wedding amidst this pandemic, Iāve added this extra art exercise to my schedule as well.
Why? Well to be honest, I love the steady growth and experimentation that art challenges provide. Iām not as rigid when I participate in them, and they let me explore whatever pops into my mind. Iām not harping on myself about being consistent or trying to be a perfectionist. I take it for the learning experience it is and just create. In times like these, that kind of energy is exactly what I need to keep my creativity and self in a healthy state of existing. I also get a lot of filler characters done during these challenges for the comic too. I mean Iām going full in on the fantasy, so gotta bring the people and beings of the world to life too. Productivity all around!
Iāve wanted to dedicate time to improve my watercolor game for a few years now. Heck I even thought it would be a great idea to color all backgrounds or architectural references for MagicalMashup! in watercolor (and even did a few) before realizing that the amount of work would still be the same.
I still have to get over myself about backgrounds and just draw them more ( not only that, but mixing the palettes necessary for each nation would consume a ton of time bc Iād be trying to match the digital swatches by hand and just woof. I mean just making the digital coloring palettes took weeks alone :V).
In the end, I just kept back-burning dedicating the time needed to up my watercolor game. Often to focus on getting my digital art together, figuring out what do with acrylic inks, or learning how to use Alcohol Markers adequately.
Art is a never ending journey of learning, so I figure alternating between the mediums that Iām invested in while giving each one its own dedicated study time is the best way to satisfy my itch to use a variety of mediums. This way I can develop all four while giving them the attention they require to see improvement and get a better understanding of each medium. I love creating in all four mediums for different reasons, so logically Iād love to combine all four and see what happens. A lofty dream that will end in something amazing or terrible. Either way, Iām going for itā¦ but not just yet. There is still only so many hours in a day. Iām still developing a comic after all and that comes first, so I get my physical media practice in usually on weekends with a few acceptations.
One BIG acceptation is an ART CHALLENGE!! What better way to start the practical part of the learning cycle then with an art challenge! It just so happened that when I was deciding when to start taking all my color theory and light studies into practice I heard about World Watercolor Month (the universe has spoken)! Iām looking forward to seeing what comes of this month long journey and sharing the results, but first I want to talk about my prep!
Just a quickie with the Kuretake gansai tambi set of watercolors that I havenāt use. I want to at least use them for use more quick sketches if nothing else.
