Rat Creature's Journal

I'm beginning to feel oddly understanding about the stupid "sex kitten" poses female characters are so often stuck with on covers and such. It's not that I'm getting fond of the sexism, but it is frelling hard to come up with engaging poses when you just want to draw some character, portrait-like I mean rather than some scene with an inherent action. And while the message isn't great, at least the stripper body language says something rather than having the character stand around dumbly, looking very boring.

How do people who are good at portraits figure out how to arrange the character? I totally fail at this. My attempts always look stiff or stupid or both.

I hate, hate, hate when supposedly water resistant ink turns out to be not water-resistant at all when you use it. I know, I know you should test every contingency, but I unwisely (very, very unwisely) assumed that when I put that black ink on paper with paint (the goal was to then scratch in the black ink) it would then be possible to paint some water-soluble color on top of the scratched off areas.

However it turns out that this black ink will get liquid again when painted on if it is painted over other paint. So the black seeped back into the areas that I spent hours carefully scratching and crosshatching a picture into with a razor blade. It was a Robin portrait that looked rather cool with the white on black, and I just wanted to give it some red and yellow color highlight effects. Now it is a blotch. Well, not completely a blotch, I may be able to rescue something, but it certainly won't look like I wanted it to... waaah!

Of course I should know by now that it always comes back to bite you if you are too lazy to actually test how different colors react onto each other, and just assume that they behave in a certain way, but still.

After seeing the earlier iguana caia asked for "kangaroos in space" which made me think of the Muppets' Pigs in Space, so I sort of borrowed from that only with kangaroos.

( 'Kangaroos in Space' for Caia )

hsavinien requested an iguana in a spacesuit.

( a bewildered iguana behind the cut )

Once upon a time -- as reckoned in internet years, in reality in September 2007 -- I started a community called slothsdraw on IJ as a place for regular drawing practice, especially for people who have trouble sticking with their resolutions to draw more often. The reason I started it on IJ was that this was in the wake of LJ's Strikethrough debacle, and LJ's policies over what counted as unacceptable artwork (then even murkier and unclear than now) made me uncomfortable with the idea of creating a drawing community on LJ. Anyway, it never really took off -- I guess in part due to the target group being people who lack motivation *G* -- and has been inactive for a long time now.

I still thought that some of the exercise prompts and resources posted there might be interesting for others, however IJ has a policy to delete inactive accounts and though I reactivated the community there last time this happened, that's less than ideal to archive stuff. So I reposted these to a comm on DW, also called slothsdraw, for a more permanent home. (Obviously for all past responses not made by me you need to head over the IJ comm.)

I actually have no concrete plans for slothsdraw on DW, but the last days people joined (I assume they did an interest search or the like and the comm came up), so maybe activity there could revive. In any case for now there are seven sets of drawing prompts to pick from, so people can post responses to those if they like. And if there is some actual activity there also could be new prompts or discussion of a more open format as just a place to post practice drawings.

Anyway slothsdraw is present on DW now. Maybe it will be less dead than the IJ counterpart. Or not. But at least it won't get into trouble for its sloth-like inactivity. Membership is just moderated so that posters who prefer to show their practice drawings locked can have that option, without immediate and open joining undermining this, but anyone can join. More details are listed in its profile.

( Terminator + gardening for ilyena-sylph )

( Snape vs. Deathstroke for katarik )

( SGA + steampunk for telesilla )

Also, are people getting shyer when it comes to prompting?

My drawing activity this year so far has been largely non-existent. This is depressing me in a somewhat self-reinforcing, vicious cycle. And not even the added pressure of public commitment helped any. (Yeah, I have not forgotten that poll, I just suck.)

However, I have yet to fail a drawble meme. So as I'm obviously not achieving what I want to wrt actual fanart, I'm lowering the target from "produce a drawing" to "produce a doodle". (Kind of like shifting definitions around to get better looking statistics.) And I have decided to offer sketches based on comment prompts. I'll do my best for any fandom I'm familiar with, or random stuff (monsters, steampunk machines, animals...) or I can just pick prompts from your interests. I don't draw porn though, and I'm not good at portrait likeness.

Considering that I now crosspost to three places, it isn't really workable to promise things like "the first X prompts will get a drawble", so just comment with something, and I'll try my best. (In the past I've usually managed to draw something for everyone who prompted me for these non-demanding, open drawble offers, but with the way my creativity and motivation seems to have shriveled and died recently, who knows.)

If you want to see the quality (or lack thereof) you can expect, look at the drawble tag.

Also, I currently have five Dreamwidth invites in case anyone should still want one. (My flist was rather flooded with offers, so I'm not sure whether there's even still demand for them.) Anyway, if you want an invite you can comment, and I'll give those I have to the first five people in order of the comment notifications I get. I'll edit this post if/when I got five requests.

BTW, of course you can ask for both an invite and a sketch or one or the other, the two are not connected, I just didn't want to make separate posts.

P.S.: Why is the Dreamwidth spell check broken? Does anyone else get a "Spell checker not set up properly." response when they click the spell check button?

This probably is already obvious to anyone not me, but: I was browsing the internet archive for books, and found that they archived some vintage mail order catalogs, which have lots of pictures and illustrations and thus are great for easy to find period references for anything from clothes to carriages, farm equipment and kitchen stuff. Not to mention that it is just kind of cool to look at mail order catalogs from 1900, 1907 or 1920. I had no idea that you could find old catalogs online, but there's all kinds of interesting scanned things with pictures available there, like I found some sort of British government guideline for protective clothing worn by female factory workers in 1917, with photos of what they were wearing.

I also found old course books on fashion drawing and costume design, which look kind of helpful for clueless and fashion-challenged people like me to figure out how clothing more complicated than t-shirts actually fits together, because when I look at pictures of older clothes I often can't figure out the pieces, and old photographs aren't the clearest either. I mean, even drawing contemporary clothing is hard.

I also found this old book on pen drawing with lots of examples for different crosshatching and other b/w inking techniques for illustrations, which I have only skimmed so far, but it looks interesting.

A couple of days ago I offered to do sketches based on prompts as thank you for a generous, anonymous gift of paid LJ time. I thought I'd collect the results in a post.

( a Travolta!furry for cathexys (she prompted me with 'rats in funky poses') )
( cofax asked for dragons and water balloons )
( iamza wanted a Steampunk!Batmobile )
( Livia asked me to pick something from her interests. I choose 'cowlicks' and 'cold unfeeling robot arm' and ended up with SGA fanart. Sorta )
( shidoikarji26 wanted 'cheese eats mouse' -- warning for animal harm )

BTW, if anyone still wants a sketch, the offer is still open.

Does anyone have links to tutorials and/or references for drawing injuries and wounds? Like for the purpose of comics (or angsty h/c fanart in my case), so more a moderate gore and realism level. I just vaguely traumatized myself by googling for injury references with very little applicable results, but surely this is a common problem?

Coloring the yuletart thing is taking forever. I've started yesterday and been at it for hours today, and I'm still not even half finished. How can this take so long? Granted, I'm layering for livelier colors so I have to go over every area many, many times, but still.

Also, I need to learn to sit more ergonomically or something. I have this unhealthy tendency to hunch over when I do details, because I'm very shortsighted and somehow it works better to look at details without glasses, but with my eyes that means the paper being less than two centimeters away from my nose tip. Obviously my back does not thank me for that.

I just finished the pencils for my yuletart picture, and I think it turned out really nice so far too. Of course it still needs to be inked and colored, and who knows how it'll look then.

Now I'm going to take a break to watch the new Heroes, and then maybe start with the inking.

Not entirely unrelated, I really wish I had a nicer desktop lamp, because the light I have right now is crap. And this time of year you don't even have daylight hours. Like today I woke up a bit after seven, and of course it was dark, but later around half past nine it was still dark, because it was so overcast. And I don't mean just a bit gloomy, but seriously, it was barely bright enough to read without additional lights, and my night vision is good. And crappy lamp light sucks for coloring especially. *grumble*

A doodle again instead of a proper post, but I made it through November and really posted every day. (Though November is over already? meeep!)
( teddy bears are less benign than they seem )

No content again, but I have that inconvenient daily post resolution for November. Have a cute baby cthulhu instead.

( really his big brother is just misunderstood )

My November project of daily posts keeps getting thwarted by a lack of actual content. So you get a monster doodle instead.

( cute monster )

So, because I failed at coming up with content again, but still have that daily post resolution for November, I did a random doodle instead:

( dinosaur with a raygun... )

If have no idea what to post, so as I threatened promised, you get a random doodle instead:

( werewolf doodle )

I'm not a fiction writer, so obviously I'm not doing any NaNoWriMo things like many of my f-list, but I've decided to set myself the goal to update at least once every day during November. Also, that if I can't come up with any interesting stuff to post, I'll just inflict a random doodle on the internet at large. That has the added advantage of motivating me to draw semi-regularly, something which I unfortunately tend to fail at.

Fandom: DCU (Sandman)
Characters/Pairings: Matthew the raven
Media used: pencil drawing
Rating/warnings: G, none
Notes/comments: Even though I thought of Matthew while drawing this, it could be just as well some random raven -- I mean, I didn't include anything Dreaming specific. Unfortunately it also isn't a very good sketch: something about the proportions isn't right between the body and the head, I think, but it is the first time I've tried drawing a raven that I recall, so taking that into account it did turn out *that* bad. I also tried to figure out flying ones, so there are a couple smaller odd birds that may or may not look like ravens too. Anyway, I have very little shame when it comes to posting slightly misshapen results. (No drawer-art here... *g*)
Preview:
( the image is behind the cut )

( 'Guinea Pigs and Rats having a "I am cuter than you" contest' for droolfangrrl )
( Ironman rescuing a kitten from a tree for marinarusalka )
( a space-dragon for brownbetty )

Here's the drawbles I did yesterday evening:

( coffee + evil overlords for iamza )
( rat cuddles for astridv )
( dragons + necromancer for flykat )
( Pirate!Snape for penknife )
( SPN + sleeping + travel for sealie )

BTW, the previous drawble post is still open for requests.