Frogcroaks

art only view • sketchbook • portfolio • commission (vgen)

I'm lemmy, a character design artist who's trying to get better at illustration work.

My tumblr consists mostly of personal work, commissions, adopts, and a few fandoms (pokémon, umamusume). Extra info about me undercut ↓

I understand the appeal of tutorials. You want to learn something in a quick and easily accessible manner, have someone break it down step by step how they do something.

However, my problem with art tutorials since their inception but exarcebated with youtube, tiktok, instagram, etc. is how much that "accessibility" is in reality watering down and removing the nuance of the topic, repeating the same basic terminology and concepts and refusing to look deeper into things. How many times have you seen a color theory tutorial talk about the same terms (analogous, triad, pick contrasting colors, 60-30-10 rule) and come back feeling like you learned nothing new? Or a shading tutorial that went on about light source, what colors to use, etc.

This is why I'm telling you, the person reading this, that you need to let go of the art tutorial and start reading art books. Because the reason all this advice is the same is because they're all repeating from artists who learned from artists who learned from artists who learned from those books, and in the jump from interpretation to interpretation, actual explanations on why things happen and why certain phenomenons exists have been replaced by "do this" and "do that" and "don't do this".

Interested in that so called loomis method? Read loomis' books where he pioneers it. Curious on how colors and light work in a canvas? Most of that is sourced from James Gurney's Light and Color.

These books can look daunting, but you will learn a lot more by accepting their size and long explanations as they are, to go into the science of why things work this way, instead of looking at tutorials removed from their context and presented as random factoids.

oh no, all of them were with references!!!!! i promise what i did is very achievable with a good trained eye for refs, I don't have any impressive imagination skills or anything. for comparison these are some live sketches I did when I went to the zoo yesterday, you can see how more innacurate I am than my drawing.

Night absolute

A spiritual remake of this 2022 drawing:

Decided to remake the furry species challenge since the last time i did it was 3 years ago... scary!

Here's the 2023 version in comparison

printers/cutters

the paper you use

any kind of material thats part of the process tbh even the random bullshit no one gaf abt

I want to start with the disclaimer that i never cared about the number of notes or ratio of likes/reblogs that any of my posts got. Viewing it like that felt reductive and pointless: it was seeking clout for clouts sake. What i liked to see when i posted was simply the commentary people left, whether it be comments, tags or reblog additions to my art.

This update completely ruins that aspect of the site for me. I don't care that my numbers are fractioned, i care that it's gonna be impossible to track feedback, commentary, anything of worth really. I don't want to have to scramble through every other commentated reblog to see if theres comments and reblogs talking about the piece there. It's driving me mad!!!!

I will still post here, and i don't want to punish anyone to never reblog with commentary on my pieces ever, but i feel alienated from what made this site so fun to post in despite the awful updates across the years. I feel like i've been severed from my audience, that i have a limited reach on what people wish to say or comment before it goes to someone else. This is all i cared for, they could have taken away all the numbered statistics forever and i'd still be here, but this...

First of all, and I'll be blunt: the entitlement towards cheap global south labor from indie artists is insane. You can place whatever marginalized identity in your shop, it does not give you the free pass to hire manufacturers that refuse to inform you about the wages and labor protections of their workers. If the only way that you can do x product is like that, then you don't deserve to have x product as a merch option.

Enamel pins, makeshift plushies, acrylic stands, shitty tshirts and apparel... why is our community filled with dropshipping slop whos production involves labor abuses and environmental damage? why are we constantly playing dumb to these manufacturers being shady and then getting surprised they get in labor scandals? why are we coddling artists that its ok to exploit others for profit because a smol bean who just has no choice or responsibility ever?