outputs of gingervitis

Rex 2.0

I tried my hand at drawing Rex again tonight. Here's what I ended up with:
Rex sketch

Rex sketch

Still fakin' it

I looked up some recommendations of Photoshop brushes for tablet drawing.
I came across this artist Danica Sills who had a video about what brushes she used for sketching and inking and coloring, with a download link to her simple set.
I realized I rather enjoyed her drawing style while she spoke candidly about her own learnings and growth as an artist, which I appreciated. I ended up watching quite a few of her videos afterwards to observe her Photoshopping methods.
Anyway I decided to try sketching again with these brushes to see how it felt.
I learned a lot about Photoshop, and about myself, in the process tonight.
  • I tried many brush settings, using pen pressure sensitivity to control size and opacity jitter with varying brush hardnesses, but I just couldn't get my lines as sharp and tapered as how she did them in the video. I practiced strokes and lines many times and was not able to find the right hand control for that style.
  • I moved on to try skteching Rex again, from sketch to ink to coloring. This time I cheated and learned to used Photoshop CC's symmetry tool to help me out. That was great!
  • I know it takes practice to get my hand-drawn lines clean and consistent. I'm finding that I need to take larger swifter strokes for a cleaner line. Tracing along a sketch while inking gives me ..dumb looking lines. My line-thickness consistency also needs work.
  • I'm lazy.

Faking, because lazy.

I default to trying to find ways to do the easier thing to hide my laziness. To hide my strong laziness in not taking the time to learn to make clean lines and edges.
As I was coloring between my jittery outlines, I found that if I hid the lines, the colors would also look splotchy, like a bad MS Paint job.
So instead finishing with colors only (like Rex 1.0), I thought I would finish the drawing as one with an outline. But I didn't want to expose my uneven lines, so I thought I would deliberately color slightly outside the lines. Kind of like a video for kids where the style looks like how a kid might draw.
In my effort to continue to learn where to shade and add light, I added some extra flare as well.
If I add all these flourishes, most people won't be able to see all the corners I've cut!
So I learned that I will go all the way, out of my way to mask my shitty lines by over-coloring it. I do have fun at it, and the result looks kinda neat; but if I keep doing this, my hand drawn lines will never be clean.
#drawing#animal crossing