This category is reserved for the characters I draw, paint, or originally design
Hope everyone’s having a fantastic weekend. Mine has been up and down. I don’t mean to beat a dead horse, but I’m gong to anyways; my internet has been down all day. However, my niece visited me for a little while which brightened my spirits a bit. At the very least, she helped provide a welcome distraction from the tech issues I’m having. Also, I got an email from my service provided and so things are beginning to move along.
With my Internet still giving me problems on a daily basis, I’m channeling my frustration into motivation. The downtime is reminding me that I still need to work harder in order to turn this daily habit into a way for me to make a living. I still have to find something in my artwork – in my skill set – that can resonate with complete strangers. I need to find my niche, something people will recognize as something uniquely my own.
It doesn’t feel like I got much done today, despite spending over an hour working on this picture. It’s just that those damn books take so long to do. I’ve got a lot quicker at it, and found a few extra shortcuts as well, but it still takes a long time to get them to look the way I want them to. Especially those books on the right shelf! They’re on a completely different angle so I have to spend extra time with those ones.
I got one of the best compliments that I’ve ever received today. It was from my 8 year old niece, Emily. I showed her what I’ve been working on (So that would be yesterday’s version of my library), and her immediate response was, “Oh wow! That looks…real!” and of course, it doesn’t look like “real life”. It took her an extra second to come up with the word “real” to describe what she was looking at. I’m positive she meant “professional”, or at least that’s how I’m taking it.
That was a whole lot of books I just did there, and I still have so many more to go! However, I have very high hopes that all those hours making books will pay off in the end. I mean, just look at the back shelf there, I think it’s shaping up really nicely. The books have zero detail on them right now though, but I hope to add symbols, numbers, and letters to each of them. Or maybe just a bunch of tiny squiggles.
Hello! Today I got started (and made some decent progress) on a library for my wizard to hang around. At first, I was going to try to make all my lines super straight, but I ultimately decided to have fun with it and just do everything free hand! Even though everything ends up a bit squiggly in the end, it’s good practice for keeping your hand steady.
I actually have a few different things to share today. I was messing around with some gradients in Photoshop and fairly quickly threw together this Final Fantasy style wizard. To start off though, I also wanted to try some interesting text techniques with a couple of my previous space drawings. I’ve honestly never really used the “masking” option in Photoshop before, but now I think I’ll try to use it more often.
