Theo

Kerv and Saphi and Clip Studio Pain

This is more of a ramble post ^^ I hope you enjoy!

In December, I was hoping to produce work faster and lower my prices. I thought I could take a "simple Background" price for this picture, which came out to 400 Eur for two characters in a fairly complex pose, chosen from an offering of 3 initial sketches + several more refined drawings, at a fairly unusual angle PLUS a fully painted close-up, with the bed-background added in as an afterthought. So I tried to create an interesting and ...

Ink Progress! End of 2022

Here you can see the last of my ink commissions before my recent introduction of a new pricing system. They were commissioned by Tzerin (a wonderful artist himself) and a guy who goes by several names relating to cats ;) Catguy is how I call him!

My problem with inking has again been the process, and it led me to a chain of discoveries. While looking at the price sheet of a friend, I realized that there is always an increase in price when there is shading involved - I didn’t have that...

The beginnings of Character Design

There is a story to what needed to happen for me to voluntarily stick my head in character design work for Dovenkar, and I'm not proud of all of it. In the spirit of being as open as possible about my flaws, I would lay out here all of the ways in which I mistreated my good friend, how I was admonished by another for it, how I reconnected with him over my first attempts at some design ideas on Christmas day of 2021.  It's not a very exciting tale, but it means a lot to me. Doven, I don't...

Late 2022 Sticker-Spam

Just look at Doven. He's so happy that his Bommel is glowing. He's so enchanted by the seasonal cheer. That's much better than worrying about heating bills and inflation. Now print him out and slap him over your problems. You'll see these stickers hold just about everything* together!

I've been getting better at making larger amounts of stickies at once. As you can see, I've moved from giving them a coloured border to having them be borderless. I'm told some people remove the border, a...

Warming Up!

It’s cold as fricking heck outside. Let’s talk about how an artist warms up.

When I roll out of bed at 10:30 in the morning (judge me), I make myself a coffee and think about what I want to achieve today. What are the projects actively occupying me. I remind myself of challenging details - horse legs, bird heads - and decide which tutorials to consult, muscle names to look up, google searches to make, references to assemble.

But before all of these things, it is vital to wa...

(C) Sun. . .Bath?

A properly punny title eludes me yet. This picture took a long time to complete, evolved many a time and posed some interesting problems with regards to detail and decoration in the face of "vaguely arabic" architecture. Got to try out a more urban setting in ink for the first time as well! All thanks to Virion :) Someday I will achieve the level of detail I wish I could have had without running out of time! :) 

(C) Landscape Ladyfelk (CW:WS)

This picture is a breath of fresh air. As you know I love backgrounds, even when I end up investing far too much time into them. But this time, thanks to the flexibility of painting, I allowed myself to play with the sky and the grass. Less so the hills, they do still follow the rules of atmospheric perspective. It was Draakae who provided me with the reference picture, and also the location :

https://www.google....

(C) Messes! CW:WS

Thank you most kindly to Kuruk, who’s been the first commissioner to choose my colourless sketch style. I am glad that I got to simply practice drawing and, occasionally, helping clarity along with some easy shadows. It opens up avenues of texture and *looseness* that were just fun, without having to think about how I’m gonna have to colour this all in ;) I smile because Kuruk does intend to colour it in! I’ll share his version when time has come for me to upload this on Furaffinity. 2022-09-30 21:35:17 +0000 UTC View Post

(C) Skywalker

Commissioned in the ink style and developed into a painting on-and-off over the course of 2 months, this picture has taken a great deal of patience out of me. Shifting stars and clouds around hundreds of times and trying to find a way to work out the feeling I wanted to see, I have now decided that the image has reached sufficient coherence. Personally I like it, but it’s not an easy relationship. There’s the intent to develop it into a print, something that is intended to represent me, s...

(C) Heaven is Boring Anyways!

The file name tells me this was finished in May. It must have been right around the time my arms gave out, so I probably didn't upload this until now because sad Theo was being sad, and then he forgot. Apologies!

Very fun painting this one. Tried to keep the background somewhat abstract, had fun with the light as well. All by permission of Drakku, who turned out to be a pretty cool guy :) He didnt even ask for a specific background - so you see where my mind wanders if left alone xD Co...

Coloursplash!

Draakae is a buff kinda exercisey-feesh, so my first instinct was to show him all tense. Since coloured sketches arent necessarily realistic, I just fitted him into an abstract colourspace that reflected the mood with tight shadows stretching over rapid changes in colour. Since this was kinda new territory, I'm sure I could have done better in some ways. But I'm actually happy that this came together in about a day.

(If you really wanna know my main regret, I was originally intending ...

You Can Swim!

The sketch and idea for this picture came as early as April or May this year. Viari, the green Nargacuga, now has two paintings from me with either of their partners BreezyWuvsYou and in this case, AshTheOrca. In either image, Viari is "introduced" by their SO to that character's respective element. Breezy helps Viari fly from a mountaintop (sounds a little dangerous!) and in this one, Ash has jumped out of the water to hold on to Vi and willingly make a big splash. (Is that completely safe?)...

TheRussBuss Sketchpage

Coming back from my recent health issues has taken quite a while. Russ requesting an abundance of unique poses and giving me some freedom in doing my work helped a lot in getting myself conditioned again. Re-drew and edited this many many times.

Characters are Vibrato (Russ) and Zekaire! 

(C) Refresh

Since when have I been working in this inky-dinky style of mine without changing it up at all when it came to the inks? Always the lasso and mapping pen. This time I was so eager for an sfw piece where mood and composition are free that I went ahead and sketched this one out, inked it and finished the inks 90% of the way before Vero even got to *see* my idea, because it was all in one afternoon.  And to celebrate this, I went and attempted to introduce texture with a different brush for ...

Stay Frosty!

Kas, in his winter coat, is rockin out with is rooster out. We were joking, wondering if his knot changes colour with his coat because it's hairy :-)

I tried to keep the background simple but  atmospheric, and it was a far cry from the render piece I did for Deormynd and Veromir back in 2021: Much more manageable than the former snowscape.

The character was rendered with the help of multiply and overlay, but the lessons learned from the experiment of Rhys' piece carried ove...

Howny in the Void

Working without backgrounds is relieving, but also strange. What may the context for this pose be? Who designed this exceptionally plain yellow block for Tukk to sit upon? We will never know, and I shouldn't ask. But the colours were fun to play with! :D I've also attached a squatting pose, which was my original idea. I do think I like it a little more, but in the end the difference isn't that big ^^

Cutting-Edge Technology

 This rendered piece goes to three good friends. What I'd like to note about it most of all is the UI design I had to fiddle with for the background. I love to play with the colours that the characters bring to the composition, and in this instance the screens echo colour accents that I placed around the picture. However, they also contain a few jokes. I won't go through all of them, but the second screen shows this video, which Ash is probably running in the background to prevent his su...

Bell's Bells

An ink commission for Christobell, of his character Bellicose. Bell is a fun dragon to do. Not only is he similar to a Felkin in build, I genuinely think that the tarnished bronze vibe is a beautiful design. He's supposed to be a weathered old specimen of a proud race of guardian dragons, being inspected in this image. For the Background, I looked to Angkor Wat for inspiration! Drew it all freehand :P

Chub in the Tub

A close-up for Rhys, who was kind enough to allow me to experiment with the colouring. The original junk shots were split between flat coloured surroundings and rendered/painted focal areas. In this case I wanted one style to apply to the entire area. Pretty fun to do! 

Saybin x Versa

With this painting, I went for an even more impasto vibe, strong and thick brushstrokes that I was trying to approach J.C. Leyendecker's much cleaner and even more graphic painting style with. It was great fun, whatever it ended up becoming! Good times.

Larger, Largest, L0rgissimus

Simple pleasures: Bigger. That's the theme of this picture! That's the profundity we explore. Hahaha. All jokes aside, this one once more goes to AoLun, recognizable by the outrageous size of the, urm, tail :)   

I began with the line-art, much of which I ended up having to erase. As I have two Lined styles right now, one with flat colours and another with rendered ones, I didn't quite know how to texture within the silhouette. For instance, lines inside the space of the tail...

A Ghostly Mess!

The cheetah-man had no idea what was in store for him when he let me at his character and chose the "ink" style. Using unnatural and cold colours to contrast with the yellow fur, I integrated the ghost hands by means of an otherworldly fertility theme.

On to a few thoughts. I set out to not only use black as the "key", but also include colourful elements over the "key" layer to give the impression of a kind of glow. This caused a few problems. For one thing, how do you represent glow a...

Stickerdump early 2022!

Gifts and commissions side by side, joined in square harmony. And that's not even all of them. Out of humility I'm not including the ones I made of Theo for instance, and everyone on my server knows those anyways xD As should be visible, I never seem to know what I want. Sometimes a character turns out more cartoonish, sometimes the proportions are quite realistic. Sometimes I even try to do it without any sketch or lineart!

But overall, the more stickers there will be, the more consis...

Sillies from early 2022

There is no style that unites them, but I thought it'd be worth pointing out that like many other artists, shitposts are a core component of my socialising strategies. I think xD While some may be commissioned, others may come completely out of the blue, making the speed at which I can create them essential: Strike the iron while it's hot!

April Portraits

I opened specifically for portraits a while ago. Both of them were pretty fun!  The painted one is of Bellicose's character, whereas the sketch goes to Vero, for his recently acquired and yet unnamed bull dragon that we just call MooMoo most of the time. Hahahaha.

While the sketch is relatively obvious to me (I wanted something summery, adorable and agricultural for my favorite lil cow), the "temple dragon" imagery was a unique task. Since the character is based on the colours of ...

(C) Kyro in Cairo

I know, I know I know I know. They're not in Cairo. This is just *some* ancient Egypt-themed background. But the urge is too strong u_u I'm just a haybrain folks. No control.

If it is a little difficult to tell (considering it's perhaps an unusual thing to see,) The dragon Kyro here is both inside the gryphon as well as using the other of his two prehensile appendages to tug on Delrix' jewellery.  

The style I worked with in this case is the sketch and colour style. I thor...

Tentaculus Up‘assulus!

Hey there Nix, I know you‘re reading this description >:3 Look at poor lil you getting absolutely demolished in style. I‘m still happy with how it turned out, which is largely your doing.

This piece was a lot of freakin fun. Barely any redos, barely any issues, just a bunch of free energy. Going all out! It‘s a terrific progression from Tukk‘s piece. I was going with a dungeon sorcery kind of vibe, but I omitted many of the usual accessories that come with it: inscriptions, b...

more Argus Labs shenanigans!

Trist is Ash’s character, an albino . . . Aerusan. Did I get the spelling right? ;) Pink joints are intentional. It looks like he got up to more omni-ring stuff while nobody was looking — see the last picture I did of him :)   

I don‘t have much confidence in my abilities to design or utilize science fiction spaces and user interfaces. It‘s something I literally never thought about in art, before I did that one Telegram chat window in that commission for Kasik. But rec...

He Tukk me to the Forest

Tukk was pleasant to work with, and that‘s how this piece came together so easily. He wanted versions with different kinds of equipment, I sent two poses I wanted to do. We both gravitated to this one, he paid, and then I realized that I  truly didn‘t have that much to work on regarding the externally versus internally betesticled version. One was with, one without, urm, orbs. So I threw in a peeking version to balance out the universe again. It was fun, it was loose, I only obsessed...

Triple Threat Sketchies

With this style, I challenged myself to produce something presentable without an underdrawing. Usually the way I sketch is very messy. Then I tend to erase it softly, refine it in places, and slap a whole new layer on top to draw over. That gives security and precision, but it naturally also slows me down. So, in this case here, I straight up committed to only having one line-layer. And it kinda worked! By the way, yes, the plants in the front are inspired by some pick-uppable flowers from El...