art blog

you see it on here a lot especially in (i won’t link anything but i’m sure you know what i mean) those album track ‘aesthetics’ posts, au ‘aesthetic’ posts (ie where people use ‘pinterest-y’ images to kinda craft a visual au), and even just rather typical graphics that have a lot of ‘texture’ elements. and texture packs too!! that’s often where the problem starts; people just collect images (often literal art), compile them in a folder w/o sources, then insist no one can repost those images w/o crediting the person who compiled them. what???

SO may i suggest some of my fave places you can get FREE, ROYALTY-FREE elements that are totally legal to use

creativemarket has 6 free high-quality resources (textures, brushes, fonts, etc), different every week! wow awesome i check it every week

search ‘freebie’ on behance. awesome stuff!!! lots of v nice templates textures and fonts

mockup zone freebies

unsplash: tons of very nice free photographs, not shitty stock photos

pexels: same idea. + they have an adobe plugin so you can get photos without closing your editor damn nice

As of August 27th, 2020, it was revealed that Jake Parker (the creator of inktober) had plagiarized the work of black artist Alphonso Dunn in Parker’s upcoming book ‘Inktober All Year Long’.

Alphonso’s video breakdown of the similarities

Proof Jake Parker was aware of Dunn’s work beforehand (01-21-20)

Parker’s publisher puts his book on hold (08-28-20)

DeviantArt suspends their Inktober Awards (08-28-20)

Alphonso Dunn’s book: Pen & Ink Drawing

2020 Inktober alternatives:

i made a little palette meme bc i was bored. hex codes under the cut! 

obviously i gotta start this blog out with the man himself

It’s a lot of observation for me, both live references and references from other artists/animators, and a lot of practice/experimentation. I reference at a lot of concept art from movies I really liked the art styles of, Lady and the Tramp and Balto being my biggest influences. It’s a lot easier to learn how to build designs when you see how other people have done it. 

Milt Kahl is by far one of my favorite examples for canine editorials. They guy was a master of drawing in general, but his work on Tramp and Pongo was insane. Here’s a post that goes more in depth about the ideas of editorials. The short version is borrowing from reality but then ‘breaking’ the anatomy to make the shapes more clear and defined.

Balto is also a canine animation treasure trove and I really wish an artbook existed of the movie. This is where I get a lot of my knowledge of shapes, especially in some of the un-used character work. 

The most important thing about learning how to draw animals is to first learning how to draw them from life or live references. When I'm drawing an animal for the first time, I draw from reference solo to see how close I can get. Then redline my reference picture by tracing it and comparing it to my work, and then draw the same image again with the knowledge I gained from the redline. After I get comfortable just drawing the animal is when I start using animation and style references. Since I know the shapes that make up said animal after drawing it multiple times, it make is much easier to know which shapes I can and can't exaggerate.

I do the same thing when I feel 'stuck' with my shapes/expressions. Here's a wip shot of Riki where I didn't feel I was quite getting the expression and shapes right, so I deconstructed Balto and then went back over my own work to add some more visual weight.