Sketch Blog 3.0 - Purple Otome Edition

[2024.10.20] Sketches and More OC-tober Art

HI, ART BLOG, I’m doing another quick art dump really fast. I’ve been playing around with Manero Brushes for Procreate. There is a wide selection of freebie brushes and samples available if you want to give them a spin! I have the gouache, sketchbook, and epic pastel sets at the moment.

In general, I have a hate/love relationship with drawing on my iPad. I think it’s a combination of my dislike for screen tablets, brushes being finicky, and my poor posture when drawing on it. But sometimes my brain will cooperate and I’ll focus for several hours at a time working on a piece. Anyway, I think I’ve figured out a workflow that gets me from sketch to quick lighting/colors pretty efficiently. And from there, it’s pretty easy to flatten everything, up-res, and paint on one layer to my heart’s content if I want.

Doodley stuff with the Epic Pastels brush set. (Freebie version here.) I like the feel of these a lot! I don’t like the slight hue shifting built-in, so I toggle that off. It probably looks neat for other types of pieces that aren’t characters on flat backgrounds.

OC stuff

Might have seen this on the yume art log, but it’s here again because I need to remind myself to finish it. (I love how it’s going so far.)

wahhh

Doodely stuff with the Sketchbook Experience set. (Freebie version here.) I struggle with the very translucent layery look all the brushes have to them (markers, ink washes, etc). I want to get better using these, and I think part of it is building confidence in my brush movements/strokes. I'm not using them properly here. (There are a lot more flop sketches I did that I won’t put here fjdksfl)

OK! OC-tober stuff. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get to more prompts with my schedule the rest of the month, but whale sea. First 3 in this set (by date/prompt, not posting order) are with my usual Clip Studio workflow, and the last 3 are with the pastel brushes on Procreate.

Day 7: OC who’d love to get isekai’d
“Have you heard of the Other World Stream...?”

Day 8: Vampire OC
My visual kei vampire & human duo (I love them)

Day 11: OCs who are related
TWINS. My Anonymous Noise gal and TWST Scarabia son.

Day 9: OC in lolita fashion
Day 12: OC who plays an instrument
Day 14: Two characters in a style swap

Wahoo, that’s all for now! Gotta jet.

[2024.10.06] OC-tober Drawings

Hiiii again, art blog. I’m feeling really scatterbrained right now between finishing Charade Maniacs (GUESS WHICH ROUTE I JUST FINISHED) and doing drawing prompts for the month. I got a few more art book goodies recently, but I’ll probably talk about them another time. I mostly want to dump some art here and jet for now.

I’m doing Brie’s OC-tober prompt list for this year. I might dip into some selfshiptober stuff if something catches my eye, and that’ll be on the yume art log. For these, I’m playing around with Yuming’s Brushes, which are pay what you want. I'm mostly using the chalk and pastel brushes at the moment.

Day 1: Newest OC + Oldest OC
Rin (left) and Kay (right), bonus as a Kamikaze Girls (2004) screencap study/redraw.

Day 2: Favorite OC (left)
Accelera, my Tales of (the Abyss) OC who remains The Big Fav after surviving (out of spite from) all the awful mary sue litmus tests I threw at her circa 2009.

Day 3: OC who needs more art (right)
I’m calling her “Arcadia” for now, but she’s a bit Megaman Battle Network inspired. I want to throw her into Charade Maniacs with Rin for the hell of it.

Day 5: OC who likes magazines(left)
Kanon reading the very first issue of KERA I looked through (November 2009 issue)

Day 6: OC who enjoys cooking (right)
Estelle! Who I think would run some silly “super easy mug cake cooking stream”, but it’s all extremely cursed results that have been crammed into a mug. The background set is always out of focus and in gradually worsening states of chaos. It’s somehow an extremely lucrative gig.

I have... other days already done. But it would be silly to post them here ahead of time! So that’s all for now!

[2024.09.15] Weh

Hiiii, art blog. I’m a bit in limbo between wanting to draw every free hour of the day, updating parts of my site, and working my way through Charade Maniacs. September is also a very big birthday month, so I’ve been out and about slightly more than usual.

I paid a visit to BOOKOFF recently and ended up picking some purple goodies. I’m not caught up on Choujin X, but I’m collecting the volumes anyway as they come out. Trying to convince myself it’s for reading practice but I feel like my hands have been full recently.

Also, at a different bookstore I came across QTONAGI’s HOTEL ASTROLOGY in the art section. I almost bought the physical edition, but the copy in the store was the sample and a bit damaged, so I purchased it digitally instead. (I like being able to zoom in on my second monitor tbh.) I adore their really dreamy color palettes and fashionable characters. I think doing a color study would be fun.

Recent goodies.

I played around with Meruz’s MRZ_Homies brush set today, which is compatible with Clip Studio and available as a “name your own price” download. The description mentions it’s cobbled from old dA photoshop brushes,and it feels very similar to the ones I learned to paint with from Deharme’s set way back in 2015. Meruz links a neat process video to demonstrate their workflow, so you can see the brushes in action. The feel of the brushes is very nostalgic to me, so blending and building up colors felt very intuitive. Meruz makes use of lasso fill to block shapes out first, and the fill-in-mono pen has been similarly invaluable to me.

I did this piece with Mizuki first to warm up. I like how the balance of warm and cool tones worked out (even though I got the bookshelf colors wrong shhh), and I’m also a sucker for quick backlighting illumination.

Above: solitary research.

The brushes are a bit difficult for me to use after the rough painting phase though. I think I would need something else to render out details, but that’s fine. Some other rough speedpaint / WIP sort of pieces from today:

Above: my brain is too Mizukipilled right now. Also hi, my most recent s/i OC for yumeshipping.

Ok that’s all for now!

[2024.09.01] Fresh Layout & Digital Sketchbook Practice

Hiiii I’m doing the thing where I reboot my art blog with a fresh new layout and archive the old layout/entries. We’ve skipped my Jack Jeanne brainrot era and moved ahead to Virche Evermore (happy belated birthday Dahut) and maaaaaybe Charade Maniacs (HIII MIZUKI). I want to continue posting more art blog stuff here! Looking through past entries and notes was insightful, and it’s been nice to see and track improvements even if they are small.

I’ve recently been a big fan of brushes and paper textures that mimic traditional media. The current setup I’m playing with uses Manero Brushes’ Paper Collection and various brushes from Simz’s Patreon shop and HHT’s recent Watercolor set. (These are all paid, I'm sorry. I should review some free stuff sometime...) I’ve been pairing these with figure drawing studies and character sketches, and I like the workflow for quickly slapping down colors and atmosphere on a sketch. The end result has a lovely sketchbook-like feeling. The downside is that it doesn’t mesh well with my very digital-feeling painting style if I want to polish it further.

Some recent sketches in that style. Figure drawing pose refs are from AdorkaStock and JookpubStock.

Above: My OCs. My scrunklies. (I missed them during all of Art Fight.)

Above: Ririka Umezawa from the manga Choujin X. I love her so much.
I was in Ishida hell last year and this year while away from Neocities.

Early sketches trying to figure out how to make the brushes work. (The struggle is evident to me pff.) Virche boys.

Above: Doodles of Virche boys with limited colors to test various brushes.

I'm going to run through my layer setup on Clip Studio very quick:

Above: Clip Studio layers.

1. Paper texture at the very top set to multiply. The drawing layers are in a subfolder set to normal, starting with the sketch (Simz Coarse pencil) on normal blending mode.
2. Simz Watercolors (from the Essentials brush package) on a new multiply layer for the flats. I like this particular watercolor brush because it’s more or less opaque for blocking in areas. I’m picky with layered opacity settings.)
3. New multiply layer with clipping enabled. Using the same Watercolors brush, I pick a medium blue or purple and shade the entire piece with 1 color.
4. New overlay layer with clipping enabled. With an airbrush, I’ll add additional lighting and depth with other colors. (E.g. warm yellow/orange for wherever is being lit, darker blue/purple for more shading depth, etc.)
5. Optional (not shown): If I’m using the Simz Corrector brush (to mimic white correction fluid for additional pop), I’ll add that as a new normal layer on top.

Anyway, I’ve been having fun with that setup and subsequently neglecting actual illustration WIPs. Here’s stuff that’s cooking for whenever I can get my brain to sit down and render. It’s all yumeshipping stuff because.... yes.

Above: WIP 8tracks-y cover for my doomed hospital assistant. WIP birthday illustration for Beth.

Ok that’s it for now bye!! Thank you for reading!