M. D. Quill

We’re not asking for donations - this is a commission drive between my wife @asklaurastuff​ and I. Donations are welcome, but that’s not the primary focus.

We ran the numbers for a hotel and transportation locally, and it ran around $1400 after taxes, with about $100 leftover for food and incidentals. We’ve got four months to make this, as the con isn’t until June, but that doesn’t mean we won’t start immediately.

If you’re interested in a commission, hit us up here, on Deviantart, or even in streams. 

If you’d like one from my wife, her DA is http://noodlefreak88.deviantart.com/journal/Commissions-570317698 for commission prices and examples.

If you’d like one from me, it’s pretty much on a sliding PWYW scale with base tiers - $20 for a sketch, $40 for inks, $75 for full color work, with an additional fee for extra characters, more details being added to the piece the higher the amount. Busts or other such works are negotiable.

For examples of my work, including NSFW material, check out http://www.furaffinity.net/gallery/whisperz/ or http://aphexangel.deviantart.com

If you’d like to read the previous issue of Alembic Grimoire, one of the comics I’m planning on selling at the con, it can be found at http://aphexangel.deviantart.com/gallery/27943914/Alembic-Grimoire

The man-free sanctuary will offer up a range of typical beauty services such as hair, waxing, facials and manicures and pedicures, while providing unique services like henna and halal nails and eyebrow shaping.

“We want women to be able to come in and feel completely relaxed,” ~ Quhshi said.

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!

Our Lives in Exchange for a New Hope by TyrineCarver

I think it’s because I don’t have many interests, so I don’t really know many things to talk about. I also get annoyed by a lot of things, so maybe people really don’t wanna put up with someone who dislikes a lot of things.

Nor am I good at striking up conversation in the first place, honestly, tossing out my opinions and such would probably mostly just put people off.