#watercolor brushes are nixe

[volnixian]

@eartheats requested sunflora for @flowerliker

#nix does art #pkmn irl #// god i wish the brushes blended properly on digital art </3 #// might change brushes tbh #// as much as i love the idea of him using watercolor. the brush just doesnt work right

[thespaceaxolotl]

once again i prove unable to leave a doodle as a doodle

cooldown of sage i did last night and finished up

#my art #mirayhoverse #my ocs #sage magellan #sag #original content #watercolor brushes are nixe #saturation is a big meh but im tired #natto artto

[gynandromorph]

i’m cleaning out my folders to kill time. the first sketch was one of the first i made for drop-out -- the initial cover page idea. i struggled too much with the perspective and gave up. i think the final cover page is better. after researching more (because, at this point, i had only conceptualized a story about two girlfriends making a suicide pact together, with one having more doubts than the other, and inserted whichever couple i had with the least story built into them), i nixed the idea of glass and looking down at the canyon while hanging over it anyway. a shot of an open, lifeless desert road is also just provokes more interest than a well-known natural phenomenon.

the second image was the initial concept for the patreon banner when i started the campaign there. i was going to go for painted and more thoroughly rendered. i decided against it out of frustration with the sai watercolor brush, and lack of focus on a perceived expansive world over trademark characters representing me. both feel too important to let go without a trace, being discarded first-thoughts at touchstone moments in my life, but they have no place in any of my folders... so here they are. i’ll probably finally go about deleting drop-out’s hundreds of .psd and .sai files as well. i never had a strong idea of when to start deleting the “just in case” files.

#partaking in the act

[fruitpilled]

Hey Nix! How are you? Reminder to drink some water, sit up straight/relax your shoulders and jaw, and have a good day!

Hiya crim! Currently going thru a watercolor phase rn (PROCREATE BRUSHES ARE SO GOOD) while watching game theory! Thank you for the hydration reminder :) have a good day too!

#nix answers #painless-and-colorful #fave <3

[mysticsparklewings]

Terrarium Nova

Would you guys believe this started out as me trying to practice trees & use up some leftover paints sitting in/on my palettes from other projects?   The tree practicing is for a different project I'll be doing later, and I'll share the specifics of then   But yeah, I have a good amount of leftover watercolor dried onto a couple of cheap palettes, as well as some acrylics paints in a palette meant to keep them fresh (but unless you monitor it and spritz them with water every couple of days, they will still eventually dry up) and I really hate to waste any of it if I can help it, especially when it's my slightly nicer stuff. (Some of it was, some of it wasn't) So I figured I'd try to kill two birds with one stone, and the end result ended up looking pretty cool, although I do still have some more paint that didn't get used here, so this may not be the last random-ish painting you see from me. Oh, and I was also recycling a little bit since I used the back of a giant piece of watercolor paper I had previously used as a protective mat for my desk. I started with the tree shapes, mostly inspired by Bonsai trunks, and that actually did use up pretty much all of the dark brownish paint I was using, so I was off to a strong start. Then I went in with some metallic watercolor that was leftover from my Butterfly Babe piece, which dried with more of the black and silver I had mixed into it on top for reason unbeknownst to me, so the first little hill/mound I made naturally came out darker and more silvery than the additional hills I added later than came out decidedly more gold. I think after that I added in the orange sun/planet (in my head it's the sun but a lot of the details here are very ambiguous in what they could potentially be) and an accompanying orange horizon line. Originally, I thought I was going to be making a very sunset-ish background with possibly a very red sky and mixing the yellows in more, but that obviously didn't end up happening. I was kinda just going with what I felt like and where the paint wanted to take me. So I ended up going in with the yellows (and later red and magenta) leftover from my $50 vs $4 Watercolors piece (these ones being the $50 ones, the $4 ones were put on a separate palette while I was using them so I wouldn't get the two mixed up) and ended up making many yellow hills to fill out the background some more, though admittedly the ones on the left kinda got away from me a little. And I'll pause here to say that I was using water brushes throughout this entire piece as opposed to actual paintbrushes, and every time I use those (at least when I'm getting proper water flow) I find that I tend to have a somewhat easier time getting certain watercolor effects, mostly when it comes to blending out hard edges. It's funny to me, as a lot of artists would say water brushes have a higher learning curve than regular brushes, and I'm sure some have a harder time with them. I think the main reason I have an easier time might be because back at the beginning of the year when I started re-discovering watercolor, the first set of paints that got (the Viviva watercolor sheets, for anyone who's curious) came with a water brush, and at the time I had never used one and was really excited to try it, as well as I just didn't have a ton of brushes at my disposal. Likewise, I spent a lot of my time learning watercolors on a water brush, whereas, naturally, most artists learn primarily on regular brushes. To be fair, I would like to one day invest in a slightly nicer set than the cheaper set of different size water brushes that I currently have, as these don't always flow correctly and at least one has a very slow leak where the top screws on, which hasn't caused any painting problems but is just kind of annoying because it very slowly gets my hand wet while I'm using it. Anyway. I then decided I hadn't used enough of that metallic paint and went in and added some dots of various sizes in the sky, since I didn't really feel like trying to make proper stars of any kind, but I wanted more up there and that seemed like a good place for more metallic paint. After that, the plan was to start on my red sky, but I started putting the red down and realized I hadn't cleaned my brush very good, so I got this interesting shimmery darker red color, and since I had already messed up, I liked the color enough I decided to make a moon out of it, which is why that red pot is hanging out over on the left side there. Why this "moon" and the "sun" are out at the same time, I couldn't tell you. Sometimes things just happen in art. That led me to the decision that instead of covering the whole sky in a color, I would just add some clouds, and I decided to got with the expensive magenta on my palette. Things were going fine until I grabbed more paint than water (as I was hoping for kind of pale/blended out soft clouds) and I ended up with some pretty nasty unblended lines one of the clouds and it was notably darker at the top than the others. And so I introduced the technique of "this one cloud got messed up so the rest of you have to suffer!"  And I also kind of had to be okay with none of the blending and layering on them turning out super smooth or nice for consistency's sake. And you know, it's not fine art or anything, but it doesn't look as terrible as I thought it was going to. (Though that could really be said for this entire piece. ) I also ended up adding in the purple-y mountains in the foreground after feeling bad that I'd neglected some of the paints I'd originally been intended to use the most, and I think in the end it adds a nice contrast and kind of ties the magenta clouds into the piece as a whole more. I knew I still wanted to do leaves on my trees, which were still just bare trunks and branches by this point, but I wasn't sure what I wanted to do for them yet, so I did this kind of dome thing for the sky, after acknowledge I did not want to have to try and get a smooth, consistent blue wash around everything else I'd already painted in. (Yes, I once again forgot the principal rule of painting--put the background in first) While that dried, I took a break to ponder my next move. I hadn't used any of the acrylic paints that I had leftover (more than I originally would've had too, as I ended up making a sign for my mom that I haven't decided yet if I want to post or not) and one of the colors was green, which is a very basic choice for leaves, but I already had so many other strange colors going on that the basic blue sky and some simple green leaves didn't seem like asking too much. So then I just had to decide what the leaves were going to look like. In the end, I went with using the back end of a paintbrush to dot on some of the green and some of this pale, yellowy color, and a little of a mixture I made using those two colors together (originally for the sign, not this), and I tried to place the dots in mostly realistic places for leaves. And admittedly I could've done a lot more leaves and really filled out the trees, but I felt like it looked better with more of the trunk and branches showing. I also went with the dot thing partially to carry over the dots in the sky. I'm not really sure what kind of theme that is, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. And then last but not least, I signed it with a purple gelly roll, trying to balance in both color and placement just a wee bit. Funnily enough, the most tedious part of this process was actually what came after it was finished. Because I was working on a giant piece of watercolor paper that was previously a mat for my desk, and I wasn't really sure how this was going to turn out, naturally I wasn't really thinking about what size I was painting at while I was working. And wouldn't you know it, my poor painting here ended up being too long to fit in my scanner all at once.  So I had to cut it out of the giant piece of paper and then scan it twice; once to get one end, and then a second time to get the other end. Then, of course, the two pieces had to be stitched together in Photoshop, which wasn't too bad. I then spent more minutes than I care to admit trying to figure out how/to what extent the best way was to single out the little oval-ish shape of the painting, as I thought that would be much nicer than leaving the ugly bits an pieces of white scanner background. I tried to keep the actual edges smooth, though I nixed the idea of having it be a perfect oval shape right from the get-go, mostly because of how much of the edges would get cut off in one area or another. So the shape itself is very imperfect. Still, I think in the end everything turned out pretty nice. And admittedly after how the later part of last week went for me, it felt really nice to just kind of go in and not really worry about the details or if everything was turning out exactly right or whatever. Sometimes you need to do something that's just loose and has very few rules to it like this. Personally, I think I really needed this at this time in particular, and for as unplanned and simple as it is, I'm really happy with how it turned out. The title is a little random; the shape and what I did with the sky kinda reminded me of a terrarium, and much like a nova is the birth of a star, this was a pretty spontaneous birth of a...planet, I guess.  I almost called it "Terra Nova" (roughly "earth star birth") but upon Googling that because it sounded familiar, I decided I did not want to name it after a movie that came out in 2011 that I know nothing about and have no affiliation with. Anyway, things might be a little slower on the art front this week, as I have a bit of a tall order to-do list, but for the foreseeable future things are going to be somewhat interesting here; I finally ordered a gouache set I've had my eye on, and it should be here by the end of the week, as well as the tree thing I mentioned at the top of the description, and another project I've done some preliminary work for...Jeez, I have an awful lot to try to squeeze in before Inktober starts, don't I?   Perhaps I'd best go and get started on all that. ____ Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings ____ Where to find me & my artwork: My Website | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble |   Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram