skintyfiia

peepaw joel

two drawings in i have already changed my technique a gazillion times

god i’m so rusty

haven’t drawn anything in months but the mandatory annual luka™ (2025 version)(„couldnt find it in me to finish it properly so im embracing the mess” version) had to be done

the whole saga:

one thing about me is that i’m stubborn as a mule and if it is humanly possible to do something then i will, in fact, attempt it with a firm belief that I am capable of success no matter my skill level lol

warning: this is going to be a long post ;___;

a little about my background: I’m a 22yo self-taught hobbyist. I didn’t go to art school, I never took any proper drawing classes. All I had since I was like a toddler barely holding a pencil was my drive to always be Better, shitty school art clubs and probably something undiagnosed too

I started digital art when I was around 13-14. My traditional skills were pretty solid (for a kid) at the time but stepping into digital really did feel like learning how to draw from scratch again. This is what some of my earliest work looked like, around one month after I had started… oh god

just a few months after that I switched to semi-realism stylistically as it was pretty close to what I was used to with traditional art. This is what we were dealing with around 1-2 years after those first pieces

I hate to say this because it’s such a useless piece of advice but most of my learning process was just me throwing random shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. Most of the time I was just picking up things from my favorite artists or experimenting. I just barely scratched the surface of fundamentals, only enough to grasp the super basic proportions for everything, some color theory and I would pretty much wing the rest (don’t do that, put in some actual effort, these things are important). I am lucky in the sense that a lot of those things do come to me intuitively, like I don’t know, color theory is very logical to me so I never felt the need to study it properly??

A lot of people mention my use of color and texture and I am going to be 100% real with you, that was born purely out of my laziness, I just sat down one evening, discovered what layer modes and curves do and how with some tweaks they make my art look like I put 12 hours more into it and my heart sang. And as for my bold strokes idk where that came from honestly. My primary school art teacher once told me I have a ‘confident hand’ and my confused 11yo ass sat there with my frozen elsa fanart like thanks??

However this approach only got me so far as I did hit a wall around 2023-2024 which is when I decided to you know… start doing actual Studies™ and learn the fundamentals properly (at least try to). Since Cillian Murphy was my main muse at the time, I sort of used him as a training ground for all kinds of techniques and stylistic choices, I even sat down one day to properly study his face in detail (for science obviously). I went to museums, I stared at actual paintings (AND sculptures!!!), picking them apart and deconstructing them in my head, noticing each brush stroke, really trying to find what makes the whole piece click. I tried master studies for the first time in my life which was mind-blowing, would 100% recommend it. The time I read about Leyendecker’s technique genuinely changed my life and I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days omg. And don’t get me wrong, I’m still winging the shit out of everything but I guess I’m doing it more mindfully now??