Short entry (I know most of them are short but maybe I'll get better one of these days)

I recently had the honour of being interviewed about my art practice and gaming by Tristan Tarwater for her new Epic Level Artistry series; go check it out !!

[link]

Contest winners!

I've selected winners for my character contest ! ;D

1st place (three month subscription)


2nd and 3rd (one month subscription)


it was pretty cool seeing a bunch of really different takes on my characters <3 maybe i'll do another contest someday with a broader subject.
thank you everyone !!

Hello!

I'm just posting a reminder that you've got a little over a week to finish up and submit entries for my contest ( [link] )! You should totally give it a shot because I'll buy you deviantart premium if yours is one of my favourites ♥

Hi everyone!

Like I said in my poll, I'm super thrilled that people have been taking notice of my work lately so as a kind of celebration/thank-you I'm holding a contest ♥

Your mission is to represent one of my two original characters here! You can do one or both, represent them literally by drawing or painting them or whatever, or do something more abstract in any other medium (even music or photography if you want to do something inspired). I'm leaving it pretty open; I don't want people to feel ushered out of their element. I figured it was just a cool first contest theme to hold ♥


♥ Rules:

- You must make your submission (uploading it and sending me a note is probably the most reliable way) by September 2nd. This gives you a solid three weeks from the time of this posting!

- You can make an indefinite number of revisions / submissions but only the most recent one will be judged.

♥ Prizes:

~1st place~
I'll buy you a 3 month dA subscription !

~2nd and 3rd place~
A one-month dA subscription ♥




Good luck! I'll post the submissions in a new entry at the deadline

Hey all,

notes!

I'm not going to pretend I'm the most talented artist in the world or anything, but I've gotten some interest in the past regarding how I work / my process / if I can give help and feedback to people who are working on their artwork!

I've been helping out a few of my friends for a while now and it's a really fun and enjoyable thing for me to do. Often when people ask me for feedback or redlines or whatever on their work they preface it with "I know you're probably really busy / I dont want to be annoying but" etc etc but you don't need to do that. ;D Reading my deviantart notes is one of the highlights of my morning!

So definitely write me even if you just want to say hi and get on my radar or discuss which flavour of cake is the best. It might take me a day or two to respond (usually shorter) but I'll get there!!



crabby artist rant!

Also, I posted this to tumblr yesterday but I thought it'd work here too since it's about artists haha

[ I found artist-confessions this morning, and it made me realize I hear a lot of the same complaints over and over again from people who are playing the internet popularity game:

- My original work isn't as popular as lesser-quality [fandom] fanart

- People pay more attention to my funny quick sketches than things I put a million hours into!

- My realism isn't as popular as <another artist>'s candy-coloured anime! Mine is real art!

etc.

and I know it might seem unfair when that happens, but it's not. It's completely fair, because nobody who looks at any artist's drawings owes them the effort of commenting / favoriting / reposting their work to begin with.

Yeah, fanart automatically gets a lot more exposure than original art of the same quality, but that's just how people work. It's a fact that many, many artists have been able to reconcile and get over. They like what they recognize, and what's popular in other media will be popular in art. People are more likely to connect with and repost funny things as well.

But when someone complains about certain pieces getting more exposure than others, there's an implication that their audience should be doing charity work for them — that is, they should be working to expose or give recognition to work that the artist likes, and not what they as a viewer like. That's unrealistic and it shows a whole lot of entitlement.

I'll cop to the fact that there are tons of legitimately talented artists who don't yet have the recognition they deserve, but the amount of views that a pony gijinka gets on deviantart or whether or not an individual feels the frontpage artworks are "worthy" of those slots is completely irrelevant. People are still going to like what they like and if being recognized is that important, persistence + skill is always a pretty solid formula. Just don't expect anyone to owe you anything. ]


I'll end off by saying if you've been following my work I really really do appreciate it! I'm not super deviantart popular or anything but I still get pretty giddy when someone takes an interest in what I do. If you're a persistent follower who favourites or comments on a lot of my stuff, I notice! don't think you go under the radar ;D and thank you!

today it's artists who i keep scrambling after to get a grip on colour they way they have



♥

Gibsons was pretty fun but I'm always glad to be home after a trip. I'll start scanning and colouring stuff from my sketchbook for you guys soon

Also, apparently I'm helping run a dA group now !

You should totally join because it's where all the cool kids are going to appreciate under-represented artists in the dA community (I know it's hard to get exposure here now that it's grown so large). And anyone who hangs out with me is automatically one of the cool kids, so you should totally go join the group and be a cool kid.

At around 2pm today I'll be leaving to go visit family and I won't be back until Sunday ! So on the offchance anyone would otherwise assume I'd died, that's not what happened. I believe I'm about done with all the necessities for the flash game my cousin and I have been working on, so hopefully when I come back it'll be up and running and I'll be able to usher you all in that direction (;

I've added a new print to my shop as well. That triptych of cityscapes that I uploaded on a whim turned out way more popular than I thought it'd be, and since people seem to like it so much I decided it'd be worth it: [link]?
It's only offered in the 10x20cm / 4x8in size because of the ratio as well as the size of the original, but it still looks pretty neat imo.

As always, thanks for the support!

edit: ~Anubins got my 30k pageview hooray!!

I posted this to Tumblr a while ago and wanted to repost it here, since it's super helpful, but had to wait until after my kiriban post became irrelevant. Some people have been asking me how I can stand to make all those annoying selections and things when I'm so lazy otherwise --

>> Apparently everyone I tell this to has their mind blown by it so I wanted to share it with all of you !

>> If you're having trouble getting both organic-looking and clean selections with the Photoshop lasso tool, select the freeform lasso and hold down the ALT key to lock it; now you'll be able to click+drag for freeform, and point-click for polygonal both in the same selection.

>> It also won't close the selection until you release ALT which is really useful for avoiding accidents and having to redo a really complicated form. It's not a very well-known feature but I find it to be extremely useful for colouring and even for lineart (because the lines can be more dynamic and fluid than when you use the pen tool).

I learned it when Dave McCaig came to do a guest lecture at my school and it really changed up the way I colour lineart (meaning, I can actually stand to colour lineart rather than beginning with colour and outlining later).

so go and select all of the things with my blessing

Hey! I'm going to be doing a kiriban for my 30,000th pageview!

Send me a screencap and I'll do a little painting of one of your characters or something similar

♥

So, I've recently been featured in someone's journal and been awarded my first daily deviation (thank you again to everyone, by the way!) and I think maybe it's about time I decided to feature some awesome artists myself! Because they deserve it at least as much as I do

h a ha ha nepotism there's a lot of friend art in here cause it's my first feature

Hi everyone!

As promised, I am opening up five commission slots for character illustrations (roleplaying characters, etc).

Commissions begin at ~$40 and a more detailed list of my prices can (temporarily) be found here: [link]

Even if you're not planning on getting a commission, it would be really super cool of you to share this info (= and if it goes particularly well, I might open up some additional slots, so keep an eye out if you miss the first pass.

Thank you soooo much! ♥

wow! i really wasn't expecting to wake up this morning with 490 feedback messages in my inbox!

it looks like was picked as a daily deviation!

i'm making my way through all the in-depth comments, and would like to give a huge blanket "thank you!" to everyone posting shorter comments / faving / watching me so i'm not spamming all over the place

and thank you especially to =Hirukio and ^KovoWolf for suggesting and featuring my work respectively i am super flattered, like whoa, this just came out of the blue

♥♥♥

hey everyone,

I just started up a tumblr for digital art tutorials ! Since there are so many that are genuinely good and so many that people just throw up because they hear tutorials will make them popular I'm trying to pick the really helpful ones out.

If you follow it that would be really really cool! And if you submit to it, we can help each other out by providing content / promoting if it's accepted ♥

Here it is:
digital painting tutorials

playing around with my journal theme haha ` ~`
i need enough text that i can see if it's being dumb

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