divyasoup

[divyasoup]

💀

[divyasoup]

being a self-taught artist with no formal training is having done art seriously since you were a young teenager and only finding out that you’re supposed to do warm up sketches every time you’re about to work on serious art when you’re fuckin twenty-five

#art tips #super true guys #source: im in art school

[divyasoup]

#legs #art study

[divyasoup]

more haley

#sdv #haley sdv #haley stardew valley #stardew valley #my babbyyyyy

[divyasoup]

hi, i ireally love your work and i don't know if you've answered this before but, what kinds of studies do you do or how did you learn color theory? i wanna get better at rendering and anatomy but im having trouble TT TT

Hi! Long answer alert. Once a chatterbox, always a chatterbox.

When I started actively learning how to draw about 10 1/2 years ago, I exclusively did graphite studies in sketchbooks. Here's a few examples—I mostly stuck to doing line drawings to drill basic shapes/contours and proportions into my brain. The more rendered sketches helped me practice edge control & basic values, and they were REALLY good for learning the actual 3D structure behind what I was drawing.

I'd use reference images that I grabbed from fitness forums, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, and some NSFW places, but you could find adequate ref material from figure drawing sites like Line of Action. LoA has refs for people (you can filter by clothed/unclothed, age, & gender), animals, expressions, hands/feet, and a few other useful things as well. Love them.

Learning how to render digitally was a similar story; it helped a lot that I had a pretty strong foundation for value/anatomy going in. I basically didn't touch color at all for ~2 years (except for a few attempts at bad digital or acrylic paint studies), which may not have been the best idea. I learned color from a lot of trial and error, honestly, and I'm pretty sure this process involved a lot of imitation—there were a number of digital/traditional painters whose styles I really wanted to emulate (notably their edge control, color choices, value distributions, and shape design), so I kiiind of did a mixture of that + my own experimentation.

For example, I really found Benjamin Björklund's style appealing, especially his softened/lost edges & vibrant pops of saturated color, so here's a study I did from some photograph that I'm *pretty* sure was painted with him in mind.

Learning how to detail was definitely a slow process, and like all the aforementioned things (anatomy/color/edge control/values/etc.) I'm still figuring it out. Focusing on edge control first (that is, deciding on where to place hard/soft edges for emphasizing/de-emphasizing certain areas of the image) is super useful, because you can honestly fool a viewer into thinking there's more detail in a piece than there actually is if you're very economical about where you place your hard edges.

The most important part, to me, is probably just doing this stuff over and over again. You're likely not going to see improvement in a few weeks or even a few months, so don't fret about not getting the exact results you want and just keep studying + making art. I like to think about learning art as a process where you *need* to fail and make crappy art/studies—there's literally no way around it—so you might as well fail right now. See, by making bad art you're actually moving forward—isn't that a fun prospect!!

It's useful to have a folder with art you admire, especially if you can dissect the pieces and understand why you like them so much. You can study those aspects (like, you can redraw or repaint that person's work) and break down whether this is art that you just like to look at, or if it's the kind of art that you want to *make.* There's a LOT of art out there that I love looking at, probably tens of thousands of styles/mediums, but there's a very narrow range that I want to make myself.

I've mentioned it in some ask reply in the past, but I really do think looking at other artist's work is such a cheat code for improving your own skills—the other artist does the work to filter reality/ideas for you, and this sort of allows you to contact the subject matter more directly. I can think of so many examples where an artist I admired exaggerated, like, the way sunlight rested on a face and created that orange fringe around its edge, or the greys/dull blues in a wheat field, or the bright indigo in a cast shadow, or the red along the outside of a person's eye, and it just clicked for me that this was a very available & observable aspect of reality, which had up until that point gone completely unnoticed! If you're really perceptive about the art you look at, it's shocking how much it can teach you about how to see the world (in this particular case I mean this literally, in that the art I looked at fully changed the way I visually processed the world, but of course it has had a strong effect on my worldviews/relationships/beliefs).

Thanks so much for sending in a question (& for reading, if you got this far)! I read every single ask I receive, including the kind words & compliments, which I genuinely always appreciate. Best of luck with learning, my friend :)

#art tips

[divyasoup]

big haley kick rn.

#haley #haley sdv #stardew valley #sdv #stardew #haley is SO BABY #sorry i cannot get past this rn #I’ve been drawing her all day

[divyasoup]

my beloved

#haley sdv #stardew valley #sdv #haley stardew valley #my babygirl #shes so love

[divyasoup]

how i feel when someone reblogs my stuff with a really really nice tag

#please please please please

[divyasoup]

i want to apologize for not posting ever by actually posting

#korrasami #korrasami fanart #the legend of korra #lok #throwback to four years ago when i posted a bunch of atla stuff and then #literally disappeared like aang #so sorry

[divyasoup]

gf got me new posca markers for christmas, so i drew her brother’s cat. her name’s engine bc they found her in a car engine.

[divyasoup]

hanging out in the lab i guess

#bubbline #adventure time #princess bubblegum #marceline #no proper lab gear smh

[divyasoup]

them

#korrasami #korra x asami #legend of korra #lok #wlw

[divyasoup]

I'll probably finish this up later, but here u go. treat

#haley sdv #stardew valley #haley stardew valley #stardew haley #shes sooo #also theres no way she isnt sunburnt #she loves the beach and even tho i know she probably takes skincare seriously #im positive spending infinite time at the beach would cause burns even with sunscreen regularly applied

[divyasoup]

young artist posting your work online, heed my warning. im holding your face so gently in my hands, you have to stop caring about numbers right now and start caring about making the weirdest and most self-indulgent art you possibly can

[divyasoup]

the new winter outfits are so CUTEEEE

#stardew valley #haley sdv #haley stardew valley #sdv #shes sooo #THE WINTER CLOTHES MAKE ME INSANE #tell me why haley mentioned alex once and i wanted to bite the bars of my enclosure #i literally have an irl long term gf??? why did i do that

[divyasoup]

obviously I’ve been playing a lot of stardew valley

#sdv #stardew valley #haley sdv #loml #how am i supposed to romance anyone else when shes so amazing

[divyasoup]

I drew cats from stardew valley :D