Daniel Mercado

Tumblr is crap and hid a bunch of my posts, so, my fleeting online presence will manifest itself once a year in these instead:

https://twitter.com/Daker777

https://www.instagram.com/daker_777

https://www.artstation.com/daker

A totally normal scene. Some cute lil’ piggers cooking some meals :3 

Finally finished this, no idea how long it took because I worked on it on and off, but at least 2 weeks of working almost all day. 

My goal with this was to work on something from scratch and push it to the limit of my skills, not rely on accidental happy mistakes to make it look good, but rather on deliberately making decisions based on my current artistic knowledge to make it look specifically how I intended. Using knowledge rather than instinct if that makes more sense. Another reason is that I want to develop a portfolio so that I can start applying for jobs, dunno if it will work but I gotta try.

It could definitely look better if I spent longer on it, working on certain parts that are left a bit unfinished, but I decided to move on instead, spending anymore time is gonna be counterproductive now.

It shouldn’t really have taken this long to make, but the process wasn’t smooth at all, I got stuck transitioning it from black and white to color, figuring out the hues was a pain.

Regardless of result, I’m proud for sticking to it till the end, this was the most ambitious illustration I’ve ever completed. 

Did this today to unwind a bit, was in an awful mood, feel better now, neat. Version without all the postpo below becuz all those filters made me feel dirty and gross.

I feel like I can draw a decent variety of faces from imagination, from different angles and such, not sure about the quality of them, but I feel like they are the thing I’m best at, I can’t draw bodies with much consistency, or paint very well, so faces are the most fun thing to draw for me. 

In the study below I’m trying to get a good interesting variety of edges going, get sharp edges where the focal point is, then imply things subtly through softer edges, this is something I wanna excel at when painting from imagination, I’ll get it, eventually.

I need to start drawing more hours everyday, I’m proud that I’m starting to draw more regularly again, but It’s not enough to see noticeable improvement. Before September-October I spent quite a long time drawing very little, probably since I dropped out of “last artist standing”, It feels bad to look at old stuff and notice that my current stuff is somehow worse, I’ve lost a lot of momentum and practice, still, I feel motivated to git gud, dunno how long this motivation will last me, but I’m gonna use it.

Hat kid held me hostage for 2 days and didn’t let me draw anything *-*

The paintings where you put a giant in the distance and make it appear like a completely ordinary thing in that world are kind of an overused trope, but it’s super fun to paint man.