NEVER BACK DOWN [WIP]

I've been pretty unmotivated lately but I finally got around to doing a commission I've been owing my bro Jase. I'll just post a few WIP shots of this because I'm lazy as usual. Funny thing about this is while I was drawing some mofo husky repping Throwdown and brass knuckles ready to beat some I was all chill listening to The Starting Line and Saosin.

Just a bit of the colors in this. I like the painterly feel I've gradually been trying to develop in Sai. Still needs some work, but yeah. Just the fur colors under the hair and clothing layers.

The finished product in Paint Tool Sai before I opened it up in Photoshop to add my watermark and throw in the texture and the shading around the edges. I guess I could've done the texture and shading in Sai but ...actually I really don't know why I didn't.

The blood splatters you can find in one of my brush packs. I'm not really sure which packages they're from but they're in there. Also I was too lazy to download and use one of my own textures (for some reason I don't keep them saved on my computer) so I just ripped one from zentextures.com. I usually go with their stuff and if you haven't checked them out even though I've recommended them before you'd best do it. The textures on Zen are ridiculously good.

x

I AM HOLLYWOOD!

Seeing how I've still got my last 2 commissions to finish and I'll probably only post one of them on here anyways, I figured I'd share the wallpaper I made for my Twitter (there's a link in the sidebar if you want to follow me) so you can see it without all the junk in front of it. It's full of Norma Jean, Underoath, Impending Doom, As I Lay Dying, Hands and most of all He Is Legend references. I think there's about 11 layers in this. 4 textures, 3 sections of newspaper stock, 2 of text, 1 of my actual handwriting and the background which the gradient is on. All the solid layers are set to multiply in blend mode. By solid I mean the big square stuff like the newspaper images and the textures, not text or the scribbles and handwriting. For the newspaper images I put them in, set to multiply and used the eraser with a soft edged brush around 15px and the opacity at 50% to softly blend them into the background so it'd look like the text was part of the image with no hard edges to make it look just sorta thrown on there.

The Underoath text which was an idea I took from the packaging from their Survive, Kaleidoscope album (the inside of the sleeve has the lyrics "Just what are you so afraid of?" printed backwards) is Helvetica and the massive EDGEWOLF is Aristotle Punk with the centers of the D and O erased out.

I really need to get back to my commissions now...

(stop being so damn lazy)

2LEGIT2QUIT: Husky Gets What Husky Wants WIP [Adult]

So I finally decided to work with some thin inks for once. I used to be a tragically huge Adam Wan fan (technically I still am, just not to such a tragic degree) and I HATED how he got such clean lines. I still can't do it in photoshop but I finally realized I was good enough in Sai to do a similar inking style. I also wanted to work with a more painterly style like Tao and Hush and I think for my first decent attempt at it, it turned out pretty good. A lot of the lines and shading in this I was just like "UGH, I WANT TO FINISH THIS I'M GONNA BE LAZY AND SLOPPY" but for the most part I tried to put as much effort as possible into it. 2LEGIT2QUIT. Definitely one of my best works so far.

I originally sketched this out on bristol with an H2 and HB pencil since traditionally even if I don't have CTRL+ALT+Z I tend to work better. I actually broke out Gray's Anatomy and some references from the internet of muscle and bone structure to make this as anatomically sound as possible since my usual full body works are TERRIBLE (hence my hesitance to take commissions for them). I also took a picture of myself to reference for Storm's pose since I had no idea how to draw him. I drew myself first then just kinda threw his head right there by the cock and said to myself "Well damn... how do I fit the rest of him in there and make it look right?". His pose was hard as HELL to get right, the legs especially gave me some trouble and I had to work a while to get the twist of his torso to look right but overall I think I managed to pull it off. I'm too lazy to upload any more pictures so I'll just start with the inks I did in Sai over the scan of the initial sketch.

The end result first pictured I'm really pleased with. I really wanted to expand on my inking and coloring styles/technique/skill/etc to try to give my stuff a bit more dimension. I'd like to say the angle of the bed was intentional to create an interesting composition but really it was just me realizing the original sketch put us at a crazy awkward angle that would never look right with the bed under us at 90 degrees. The posters I put up in there are 2 Impending Doom and a War Of Ages poster, all of which I own and have framed (along with 6 others) in my room. The poster for Impending Doom's "The Serpent Servant" I actually own signed but by the time I got to putting the posters in I was wayyyy to sick of working on this to bother forging all the signatures on.

I also realized that tomorrow is Ben (Storm) and I's 3 month anniversary so I ended up having a legit excuse for taking a break from commissions to make this. That wasn't my initial reason for doing it (which essentially was just for the hell of making him look like the bitch for once haha) but oh well.

To The Lions WIP

Bit of a birthday gift thing I did for my broham Lee. I was too lazy to make a full blown WIP of this going through adding the gradient and texture layers so here's a before and after of the original drawing I did in Sai. Normally I draw stuff in some light blue as a sketch then create a new layer and do the final inks in black over it but considering teal was a part of the color scheme anyways I just left it as it was. It didn't come out 100% how I wanted. More like... 60% but I'm still pretty happy with it. It's idiotically hard to imitate a high contrast, over exposed picture of an anthropomorphic cougar, I'm planning on taking commissions for these if people ask for them but I'll probably charge about $40 for them since the original drawing itself is kind of hard to figure out how to do. We'll see...

Blast[Beat] From The Past

I'm starting to realize that this blog is going to get very cluttered very fast, I think I'll just keep this down to posting stuff I really like or something.

Anyways, this was a fun piece to do, took me back to the good ol' days of doing art for myspace bands. This is a shirt design for a project I'm starting with my friend Kihu. My boyfriend and and another friend, Lee, are a part too, though they're more for live performances or something... I really don't know how they fit in actually. There are two other merch designs I did though I'm feeling lazy and I don't really want to link to both so I'll just link you to the better of the two. Click here to see it.

Really I don't think all those links were necessary, huh. Well, I'm off to bed I don't know what this will be posted as, this thing never posts the times right but it's 4:09am and I have no idea why the hell I'm still awake.

Iconoclast: Backtracking A Bit

So Tao reminded me that I should probably post some of my work on here. I would like to have an alternative showcase other than FA and this gives me more freedom to run my mouth longer on what's behind the art.

Anyways, I started doing some new icons in a new style I've been working on developing, it's heavily based on Tao and even more so Decaf's thick lines though to give myself a bit of credit I have been wanting to develop heavier line art anyways. I've always been a fan of textures and I don't know why I never though of using them in my works in a multiply layer over everything before now but I guess I'll give Tao the credit there, I joke around with him a lot but both he and Decaf are major inspirations to me so have at it Tao, I'm sure your ego will enjoy that one.

Here we have 2 out of at the moment 4 of my newer style icons. First one for Tao and the second for our friend Okie. I didn't feel like cluttering my blog with art you can find on my FA, but I figured I'd post these since they're the two I like the best. I'm especially pleased with how Okie's turned out considering I'd never drawn a dalmatian or dreds.

Also we've got what is so far my favorite badge I've been commissioned for yet. Or hell, art in general. The texture, coloring and everything in this left me blown away, I'm really happy with this because despite the many flaws I always pick out in my work, it serves as evidence to me that regardless of my failures, I'm still improving. Note the Impending Doom-ness of it haha, I'm surprised at how much I made that look like their logo. Badge for my deathcore bro Xan.

Man I sure wish there was some kind of lj-cut-esque html for this site, I tend to have too much to say and I'd like to let my work take up more of this page than my mouth. Oh well.

WIP: DIDY Banner

Click on picture to view full size.

Figured I'd share the wip of the banner for on here. It's a bit

cleaned up since I used my brushes and I erased outside

the line art.

I don't have the original sketch I did the line art over to show

but oh well, I did that in Paint Tool Sai since my lines in

photoshop are absolute garbage. After doing the line art in

Sai I opened it in photoshop and set the blending mode to

multiply then opened new layers underneath. Using my

watercolor brushes I layered some color under

the lines then erased the stray color outside the lines.

Next I inverted the background and made a new layer under

the coloring. Using a soft edged brush I added some

desaturated blue and used the smudge tool to blend it in to

the background at a gradient.

Finally in a layer over everything else I pasted the texture

and set the blend mode to multiply then added one final

layer and using the same soft edged brush as the blue in

the background, brushed some shadow around the edges.

OH and the text. I didn't feel the need to add this to the wip

but it's just 3 layers of Trajan Pro set under the texture layer

with a shape (rectangle with the edges erased to points)

in between DIYD and the Graphic Design part. That's it.