come look at nauma’s drawings

i feel like there was something in particular i wanted to upload and talk about today but its escaped me... brain... brain is tanking. for now here's a comic i did about lele and i's stardew valley co-op farmers, snow bunny and elle

nyainou omg yes thank u for the suggestion... stay tuned *_*

qwick post today cuz i am pretty busy this weekend w lightbox expo going on and a bunch of personal projects that need attention...

i will talk more about my costume design process (though i dont really feel qualified cuz i do so many things wrong ahaha) but i think the precursor step is just to be interested in clothes. how theyre made, what theyre made of, how they look, how they look like that, what theyre made for, who wears them, etc. almost universally, like globally across cultures, up until very recently in time, people were up from dawn until dusk making clothing, clothes that were made to last. so i mean i can go on about how fast fashion makes me sadz but i think we can get a bit of that back just by appreciating clothing... and i think thats the first step to drawing it well *_*

here is a self portrait of me watching back to back lectures cuz i dont have it in me to do an in-depth write up today loool

phew took a break cuz i was buzy but im back. i wanna share stuff i found while i was looking for my earliest backgrounds (2016) so this is how i would warmup, i would do super quick drawings (like 1 minute) from google/youtube/lookbook/lineofaction (it used to be called pixelovely)

and by the end of the month i had several of these pages, like this:

which to me rn is a mindblowing amount of drawing LOL 🤯 how?! i eventually stopped doing these cuz a friend at the time told me i wasn’t really considering form or 3Dimensionality, which i think is fair. but it was really good for building a mental catalogue for how things look at a glance, building confidence, and drawing fast as fuck.

i also feel u on not absorbing as much as i should when i do studies... sometimes it just feels good to do them LOL it really does help build artistic confidence!

i will pick up gestures and muscle studies again specifically to draw furries as cute as lion canther

alauda yeees omg looking forward to ur power growing!!

so eventually (i think almost a year after the drawings in the last post. studying was not my regular habit back then) i decided to work on form and became obsessed w this exercise from marc leone (his lectures are on youtube). cylinders, cones, boxes and spheres, rotated, under light, moving back and forth in space. i did tons of these in the margins of my lecture notes, i would draw in a sketchbook while eating at the food court. so i really recommend this exercise to everyone, it’s quite gentle and fun and really helps your visualisation skills.

art from this week 😎 this is an illustration of my friend TP’s girls, goofy princess blair and her clever knight ade. i was really straining my brain making this lol trying to apply all the stuff abt composition and colour etc i learned in the last few weeks... i was going for an Ivan Bilinin fairytale look!

here are the 20 thumbs i did exploring how to depict their relationship and framing etc. referencing my paul felix studies and edgar payne again. i’m trying to pay more attention to the rule of thirds bc i often have heads too close to the edge. atm i dont really mess w the camera angle much which id like to start doing, and id also like to start to play w scale of objects to be more figurative and less literal.

i actually went w the last comp here but as i was drawing it it was super difficult! the crawling and tied up poses were hard to draw and kind of static and they were really crammed in the frame. so the next day i came back to it and came up w the current composition 

which i think is a lot more engaging. i was conscious of our eyes being attracted to areas of high contrast so their outfits being black and white was great for that, plus the vines drawing diagonals between the characters and the isolation of their figures against the empty sky (rather than lost in foliage) is meant to keep it clear. uhh yeah it was hard work... im really proud of it! and i hope when i know more someday ill be able to come back and pick out what i could do better.

you can follow my good friend TP on twitter https://twitter.com/teepopi!!!

i love how much energy even your thumbnails have! theyre very clear even tho theyre so tiny and devoid of detail. just checked out the artists you mentioned you studied and edgar payne's landscapes are so beautiful. i always love how far away structures are faded and bluish.... im definitely gonna try to study edgar payne if i can find out how. practicing with backgrounds and composition (outside of very basic rule of thirds) is something ive been meaning to do but for some reason composition+backgrounds feel like they take a lot of thought to properly execute X___X

i wanted to say though i really appreciate you mentioning the artists you study by name :D even tho you dont have to it can help others build a visual/referential library, and ive been jotting down some of the artists youve referenced for future studying

wallstaples thanks for your comment!!! (and sorry abt my very slow reply oops) im really glad you find the artists i list interesting! i really wish everyone would talk about their influences and show their rough work more... i really appreciate the compliment abt my thumbnails!! i still feel v new to them... (here’s a useful link for anyone interested in making better thumbs too: https://www.muddycolors.com/2020/02/10-errors-to-avoid-when-composing-thumbnails)

and yeah i feel u that any new skill is a muscle that has to grow so it feels so strenuous rn but imagine how good im gonna be at compositions in 20 years baha. i cant wait. ive mentioned devin korwin’s composition studies exercise here before and today i thought id share some ive done. i really need to do more... i think when something’s new to you the idea of it is scarier than actually doing it.

(also i draw these v small, like, a few cm each) the artists here are dean cornwell, frederick remington x2, and john singer sargent.

ok i feel like i post a lot of studies and not many like, fun drawings lol. today i'm working dressing up my oc profiles with nice HTML instead of just text boxes. it's actually really fun, like, it feels like im engaging with them in an casual way (instead of directly writing/drawing) i dont like to reveal a ton on their profiles bc i don't want to trick myself into feeling accomplished and never writing the actual story, and HTML makes me ill sometimes but im so proud when it turns out good. i hope there's enough information on them that people can get a sense of who they are though. here's a drawing of Isa from May i still like.

here’s a recent piece i really like. it’s my kids olumi, mejd, and ennas in a kind of Greek pottery/Arabesque tile look. lately i’m trying more to experiment w depicting characters with objects that say who they are/represent them, so olumi is a poet, ennas plays with knives... mejd is a mystery. the style is kind of inspired by the Rålamb Book of Costumes (1658) which is really fun, definitely check it out. i also have the illustrated edition of Robert Graves’ Greek Myths on my desk, these are all things that really inspire me. 

im really into documenting my process lately - dorian iten in his tutorial on shading says 1 difference between a professional and an amateur is a professional has a process. well i can dream haha. this time i tried using a grid to get the same proportions/framing as a movie still - films have excellent compositions and i think using them beyond copying little thumbnails can embed that in your mind better. i tried this cuz i was reading about a device renaissance artists used to get accurate perspective in their work, it’s like a frame with square divisions that you view the model through and use that to transfer it to paper - it’s super interesting! you can read more here: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/d/drawing-techniques/