It Talks

Thank you so much!! I don’t often get compliments to my compositions hahaMost of the time I just stare at my sketch long enough and try to figure out the right positioning of things… the rough composition is usually already planned out with the first sketch (example)Since my art usually focuses on a character I try to just build everything else around them. Here I tried aligning everyone in a circle (cause I wanted something like a wormhole in the bg) with Anabel as a main focus.

A different example, for this digimon zine cover I drew a very rough sketch and just kept tweaking it, moving the characters until I was satisfied. Here’s a process gif where you can see how much I changed them

Additional tips:

Splashing rough colors on your very early sketches helps figuring out what needs more tweaking

always look at the drawing as a whole at all times

I’m a designer so I look at a lot of stuff like movie posters or book covers or just art of artists I like and it’s a big help to get an eye for good compositions. Analyze the stuff you like!

I really recommend practicing to work more with type, it not only makes illustrations look more interesting, you’re also automatically forced to think more about the placement of things cause you can’t just put it anywhere

I take notes of things I want to try out (dunno if anyone should do that lol)

don’t get discouraged too fast, a properly made illustration with a good composition takes me fricking weeks, I don’t joke when I say I stare at my drawings for hours, thinking about it all day, takING NOTES–

Oh I mean typography, using fonts in illustrations!As far as I can see, art students tend to always hand draw letters themselves and while some look very well made, some just look like the artist didn’t put any thought into it and I just want to cry cause the majority of tumblr artists does that… at least the ones who do anime zines lolOkay I didn’t want to whine. Here’s some nice places you can get good fonts at (they’re not free but… there’s ways you know)

myfontsyouworkforthembehance (for inspiration and sometimes people like students give away their cool fonts for free!)

I understand if it’s not everyone’s thing to use graphical fonts like that tho. I don’t have anything against hand-drawing text, but please regard type as something as important and needs just as much attention as the rest of the picture!I can’t let more artists ruin their very nice art by slapping lame text on it! Look at magazine covers! Copy stuff!

More of Terashii’s “Let’s try drawing Shintaro” journey~

I really liked the episode Onion Gang, and there are some things I wanted to discuss about it. I put them on hold for a while though because I got some asks that were rather ambivalent about the episode and I wanted to talk about them too.

I think Onion is a very complex character and the way many people have been reading him as autistic-coded, to me, is pretty consistent with the behaviour of some of the people I’ve met with autism. I’m not an expert on mental illness, so I hesitate to conclude that he is autistic, in case I make use of the wrong word, but let’s expound on that further and perhaps a more accurate word can be used based on his character description.

Given that, I think it’s best to begin with an analysis of his character before moving on to the implications of Onion Gang. With that said, let’s get started.

1. There is a real difference in how Onion interacts with the world

Personally, I would be one of the last people to label a character who just happens to be quirky as having mental illness, because I don’t think it’s a great narrative to reinforce that mentally ill people can just turn it off when it’s not narratively needed, or a comedic punchline. With that said, I do find Onion’s behavioural patterns very unique. The differences between his and say, his brother’s actions are not perceived, but real.

For one, he very rarely speaks. And who does he talk to? His parents, and I’m assuming, Sour Cream. It’s not a failing on his part to understand that people are trying to communicate with him. He nods, gestures, and at times, flat out ignores when people are speaking to him. It’s just that speaking isn’t his main means of communicating with other people.

He talks to his parents because he’s very comfortable with them. In Onion Trade, for instance, he lets Yellowtail carry him. Vidalia does the same thing in Onion Friend.

Source: SU Wiki

He doesn’t really let other people get physically close to him. I feel he becomes uncomfortable when people get close, but when it’s someone he feels safe around, he likes being picked up and squeezed. 

Because Onion doesn’t seem like the kind of character who wants to be alone all the time. For the majority of the show, that’s how we see him. But this episode has shown us that’s not how he’d prefer it. If it were up to him, he’d always be with his friends. Much like most children his age, it’s the time to be very social and explore the world through his peer group. In the absence of that, he fills his time with a lot of activities he likely copies off television and other forms of popular entertainment.

Notice that Onion is given a lot of free reign with regards to doing things. In many episodes, he’s walking by himself even though it’s late (Restaurant Wars), or doing potentially dangerous things like taking a crowbar to the arcade (Future Boy Zoltron) or riding a motorcycle (Onion Trade). 

It’s not that his parents don’t care. The Yellow Fam is a very loving family. But they are very busy. Yellowtail isn’t home a lot of the time. I’ve covered before how fishermen leave before dawn, because that’s when the fish are out. They come back in the morning or around noontime after their catch and even then YT has to sell that catch. And then afterwards, he’s going to have to sleep because in the middle of the night he’s going to set off again. 

Vidalia has begun to rediscover her own individuality after settling down and having a family. And one interesting thing I’d like to point out is that the other people in Beach City don’t reprimand Onion for his behaviour. They stop him when he’s about to do something harmful, but we don’t hear people lecturing him or saying he’s being weird the way Steven has voiced out. In Too Short to Ride, Mr. Smiley reacts with horror, not anger, that Onion is juggling flaming torches.

Recall that Steven Universe is seen from Steven’s viewpoint. At this point, it’s very likely that the town and its adults know about Onion’s condition. And they’re all helping out in the classic “it takes a village to raise a child” way. But it’s not something they felt the need to tell Steven. The show has never made a big deal about details our society has deemed need-to-know, like race and gender. The town also sees Steven as a child too. It’s easy to forget he’s fourteen sometimes. It may be one of those times when raising Steven to just accept that some people do things differently is better than telling a young person, “Hey, this person is different in a way you can’t completely understand so your fear will just alienate that person from you.”

I think this is further reinforced by how Onion is treated at home.

Source: SU Wiki

In any other household in Beach City, this behaviour would have been chastised or at least looked upon with worry. Vidalia didn’t bat an eyelid at it. This isn’t her being a lax parent. Recall that in Greg the Babysitter, there was a very real fear of her murdering Greg if anything happened to Sour Cream. She’s supportive of her children and attends SC’s concerts, probably acting as the bridge between him at YT at times. There’s no reason to say that she isn’t concerned about Onion’s life. But that’s the thing. For children with autism, you can’t “fix” their behaviour. Many therapists will accustom children to socialising with others, so they can be functioning and can look out for themselves, but they can’t erase his autism. Basically, they’re not forcing him to act like “all the other children.” Onion can be Onion, but he also has to act within a reasonable set of expectations.

Additionally, autism, like many mental conditions, has a spectrum and manifests in many forms. Some people don’t like being touched or hugged by human beings at all, but they’re fine with hugs from animals. Some never speak, and communicate though other means. It’s very unique. Onion has shown multiple times that he likes the feeling of squishing things. The ketchup packets he drives over, the mashed potatoes, the bugs, I think he prefers pressure stimulation, and that’s why he often grabs Steven or tugs at him. To Steven, it’s an intrusive gesture. But it holds a very different significance for Onion, and that leads me to my next point.

2. Onion looks up to and cares about Steven

ok, looks easy enough

okay, i get this… this is fine…

aaaaaahh

We live in a pretty great digital age and we have access to a ton of amazing tools that artists in past generations couldn’t even dream of, but a lot of people look at a cool trick and only learn half of the process of using it.

Here’s the missing part of this tutorial:

How do you populate your backgrounds?

Well, here’s the answer:

If the focus is the environment, you must show a person in relation to that environment.

The examples above are great because they show how to use the software itself, but each one just kind of “plops” the character in front of their finished product with no regard of the person’s relation to their environment.

How do you fix this?

Well, here’s the simplest solution:

This is a popular trick used by professional storyboard and comic artists alike when they’re quickly planning compositions. It’s simple and it requires you to do some planning before you sit down to crank out that polished, final version of your work, but it will be the difference between a background and an environment.

From Blacksad (artist: Juanjo Guarnido)

From Hellboy (Mike Mignola)

Even if your draftsmanship isn’t that great (like mine), people can be more immersed in the story you tell if you just make it feel like there is a world that exists completely separate from the one in which they currently reside – not just making a backdrop the characters stand in front of.

I’m a 3d artist and have been exploring the possibilities of using 3d as reference for 2d poses. I want to add a couple of tips and things!

Sketchup is very useful for environment references, and I assume it’s reasonably easy to learn. If you’re interested in going above and beyond, I highly recommend learning a proper 3d modeling program to help with art, especially because you can very easily populate a scene or location with characters!

Using 3ds Max I can pretty quickly construct an environment for reference. But going beyond that, I can also pose a pretty simple ‘CAT’ armature (known in 3d as a rig) straight into the scene, which can be totally customized, from various limbs, tails, wings, whatever, to proportions, and also can be modeled onto and expanded upon (for an example, you could 3d sculpt a head reference for your character and then attach it to the CAT rig, so you have a reference for complex face angles!)

The armature can also be posed incredibly easily. I know programs exist for stuff like this - Manga Studio, Design Doll - but posing characters in these programs is always an exercise in frustration and very fiddly imo. A simple 3d rig is impossibly easy to pose.

By creating an environment and dropping my character rig into it, I have an excellent point of reference when it comes to drawing the scene!

Not only that, but I can also view the scene from whatever angle I could ever want or need, including the character and their pose/position relative to the environment.

We can even quickly and easily expand this scene to include more characters!

My friends have created this site for tracking your images, it’s called copypants.com.

It sucks finding people who repost your art without crediting you. On top of finding your images, Copypants acts as a middleman for interacting with the reposters. They make it really easy to send credit requests to people reposting your work.