PERI'S ASSORTED ART

Hey, Perihelion, do you do this kind of stuff professionally or just for fun? If the former, are you available for freelance work for an (ANALOG) game company? And do you have a website somewheres around that gives some indication of your rates for painting?

She has a bit of a underbite and the nose is a bit too wide.

author=Perihelion

Mah gahd, this is so awesome :D Love the character design, she's equal parts beautiful and creepy as hell. Me like.

Welcome to Creative!
You have the Talent I was told is not a real thing. Brilliant work. :)

Hello! I wrote words.

- amazing sense of color; your pixels are something i've looked up to for a while now and your environmental stuff + general sense for composition is p great

- your lineart tends to look like it has some shakiness/'roughness' to it, a little scribbly. The weights of your lines tend to be kinda all over the place, too. If you're at all interested in boning up on line quality I used to have some links to things written by people way more competent than me, but I can't find them at the moment!

Generally, smooth lineart has to do with fewer strokes and a stable hand. Getting good at that takes lots of practice, but working on your gesture drawing helps loads. There's an exercise I do whenever I have paper and some downtime, where you try to draw a straight line and go over that line 10 times, and then do that with a circle, lines of varying lengths, or another shape, and it usually makes index cards and sketchbook pages full of things like this:



This inspires all kinds of confidence in my skills, I'm sure. tbh I've never done that with a tablet and ha ha wow that sucks, BUT HEY even if you suck at first you do get better and at the very least it helped me gain some confidence in my lines. There's also trying to draw with your whole arm, rather than just your wrist and hand...i'm bad at explaining OTL

- When it comes to humanoid things, your posing seems to get stiff. Have you looked into stuff about line of action or gesture drawing? I hardly know your name let alone your story so I ain't gonna assume, and anyways here's some stuff about figure drawing if you wanna bone up in this area:

A post with links to various websites you can use for poses/models.

Another post with stuff about figure drawing

And yet another big ol' post about it

- Just curious, but how long do you usually work on a painting before throwing in the towel? tbh I don't think there's ever really a "finished, yes this is perfect" piece, just "alright i'm done, good enough" pieces. Your paintings have varied levels of rendering and detail (which is good! obvs you don't want EVERY SINGLE AREA mega detailed or vague and blobby) but I notice some parts usually look like you could push it a step further.



Here's what I mean, please note this is just an example and not me trying to artist one-up you or anything (also i do not know what kind of joint articulation or limb structure you wanted for this beastie b/c i am no mind reader, the only point I'm making is that a little bit of extra time rendering goes a long way)

I absolutely LOVE monster design so I'm just gonna vomit up some stuff here, uh... apologies if it's all stuff you already know/have heard before.

This is one of my favorite general guides about character design. Covers the basics, illustrates them with examples.

This is another rad post on the subject.

Looking at your most recent pic, you have a pretty good start. As per usual, the color relationships are v nice. I think this particular one could use a bit more contrast for "oomph", but honestly it looks fine and if you're just trying to get across the idea or essence of something, who cares about technicalities

Silhouette is something I think you could work on.



This is what you have atm, it's pretty ambiguous. What is this, and what are you going for? Again, I am no mind reader but given the general macabre atmosphere of "it's a bunch of human skin nailed to a rock", that's dark, buddy.



An easily recognizable, grim shape is the coffin -- one thing you could do is shape the rock like that if you want those kind of associations. You could even keep the jagged, uneven edges. This doesn't communicate the whole idea, however. If you wanted to work the limbs into the overall shape, you could do something like this:



Pretty slapdash, but at least gets across "coffin + limbs = D E A T H" and i guess it's mildly spooky? if you want something ~unsettling~ but w/e! the point of all that rambling is an example of one direction you could take the silhouette so that it's less ambiguous.

I do like the colors you chose and think you used them well, but a consideration: the red lips stand out an awful lot. This is fine, but if you wanted to integrate it into the other colors more, or emphasize linking this design to death or violence or other macabre things, here's a p obvious thing:



please please please don't mistake this for "COVER ALL MONSTERS IN BLOOD IT MAKES THEM SCARY BLOOD IS A SCARY THING". And again, feel free to ignore that suggestion, my point with this one is that in this particular design a bit of blood seems to fit with the gruesome look and would integrate the red a bit more, as well as allowing you to show off some of the ridges in the rock and emphasizing the volume of the design.

As for flexing your creativity muscles and otherwise improving the "quality" of your ideas... idk, I don't have any personal advice. Look at monsters you like, analyze them and try to articulate WHY you like them, and what particular aspects make them "monstery" to you. The better you get at identifying what OTHER artists are trying to communicate, and understanding HOW they go about communicating it, the easier it is to drum up your own ideas.

Technical skills are only one dimension of art, after all. I always think of it in terms of communication. If I'm designing something, the process goes a lot smoother if I have a clear idea of what I want to say. "What the hell IS this thing" has brought me some great results. I mean my own personal preferences in monsters, I like to draw things that are gruesomely attractive, or horrifically beautiful. Trying to put those feelings into pictures goes interesting places! If I'm working with a particular project obvs I try to fit the monster design to that particular setting's atmosphere and design goals.

I wish you luck in all art endeavors! if you ever want me to look at a particular piece feel free to hit me up, this is actually a general comment for anyone reading i love art and i love talking about it and i hardly ever do that. I might make a thread??? eh, ANYWAYS, good luck arting! You can only ever improve!

author=Perihelion
Yeah, I took an art class once in high school, and my teacher stressed that a lot. I have a lot of difficulty doing that with a tablet, though. My lines are a little better on paper, but a tablet has less friction and less visual feedback, so I find it's a lot harder to get the art to go where you want. I need to work on it more.

Earugh, yeah, I have a hard time drawing with just my tablet, too. How often do you noodle out thumbnails and sketches on paper? Since you have a strong background in pixel art and pixel environments, I think it's probably less of an issue for you, but I have a hard time like, composing stuff and making good poses or layouts if I work only in digital. Can't really explain it, but it's just harder to, uh, "think" for some reason, so I do a lot of the planning legwork/initial sketching for a picture on paper. It always makes drawing on top of that in PS waaaay easier. Might be something to try if doing lineart only in your art program of choice is stressful!

I think that painting was about 10-15 hours. You're right, I could have pushed it much farther, but it's big and I got bored and I wasn't super satisfied with the monster anyway. I should do something small but fully detailed as an exercise. It seems like I almost never go to the final rendering step with painting because I get impatient. That's a big reason I stopped doing pixel art, hahaha. I like your example edit, though! Yeah, it really would have popped a lot more if I'd done another detail pass... Maybe I'll revisit it at some point.

YEAH actually doing all the fiddly details in a picture is hard and takes commitment, especially once you've been working on it for awhile. Really, most important parts to detail are the main subject + things in the foreground, and that's usually good enough.

I never have the patience for clean pixel art, myself, and boy, boy does that make sprite and tilework a pain in the ass.

One thing I need to do is figure out how people get nice smooth color blending, though. I just use a hard round brush for everything, and I think there's some kind of color blending technique or brush settings to get that nice final painterly smoothness that I'm missing. Like with the skin in this. I dunno how the artist did that.

The default hard round will get you places! Love that brush. However if you're interested in trying out some new brushes, digitalbrushes is a wonderful resource. They primarily deal in photoshop brushes though.

A lot of people swear by Paint Tool Sai's brushes. They do indeed look fantastic and it's an accessible program cost-wise. I have never used it b/c I can hardly be arsed to use Photoshop and am stodgy.

As tempting as it is to download 20-thousand brushes, with great power comes great responsibility and all that. I super encourage experimentation, though. It's hard for me to quantify, but obviously a lot of a picture's final look depends on how you use a brush. By that I mean just, how you paint in textures and make different materials look like, well, different materials. The exercises over at concept cookie can be great prompts/ways to challenge yourself. They even have a category for the ones about different materials!

You're welcome for uh, I guess all the art chatter? I'm glad that's been helpful.