I mummified a chicken once

It's that time of year again ;) surprising nobody who knows me, I'm team tragedy!!

i just got out of work and i’m tired as fuck so idk if this makes sense but learning abt light falloff is lowkey a game changer. so in the top image see how the light gets dimmer as it gets further away from the lamp? that’s light falloff, basically it means that the lights get dimmer the further away you get from the light source. the shadows stay the same tho

in the bottom pic, the light source is coming from the camera. both her forehead and the front part of her drum thing are facing the camera (light source). but because the drum thing is closer, the lights are brighter there. the shadows are (basically) the same values everywhere tho so there’s actually less contrast in the face

another major game changer is soft/hard edges.

this is a very large generalization of a complex concept BUT basically if a shadow is being cast by another object, it has a hard(sharp) edge. if it’s following the form of an object, it’s soft

when i posted this a lot of ppl complimented the “colors”. but the colors on this piece are actually pretty unremarkable, like 90% of this painting is actually just shades of plain blue-gray. its literally just values making it look good bro

a lot of people think colors/color theory is the most important thing to learn for painting, and completely neglect values or treat them as “secondary”.

this likely goes against your initial gut artist feeling of wanting to have super bright saturated colors that “pop”, but a painting w/strong values and mid colors is basically always going to be “better” (from like. a technical perspective. obv you can do whatever you want forever) than a painting with weak values but bright colors that look good next to each other while flat

above on the left is a painting i did before i learned abt value, on the right is after. the left one has bright colors but the value sucks bad. the one on the right has colors some people might avoid because they look “muddy”, but stronger values

ofc that’s not to say you can’t have both, i’m just using that as an example to make my point. here’s a painting w/ much brighter colors

anyway follow your dreams

OCtober day 20

look i love anime ace as much as the next guy, it's a very accessible font for both readers and creators that's easy to read (it's also free to use which is a huge plus)

but it's such a personal pet peeve for me when i'm reading a comic that has such a unique and well-made art style and a plot that's thought out and written well, only for all of it to feel betrayed by poor typesetting

clunky bubble placement on the page that creates tangents and/or covers up what you should be seeing, uneven spacing, inconsistent buffer spacing between the text and the walls of the bubble (either too much or too little), terrible reading flow, poorly placed tails that make it hard to tell who's talking, and most of all, a font that's so generic and widely used that it may as well be the new comic sans with how often its mismatched with art it isn't compatible with

it's never an outright dealbreaker for me, I won't let one aspect of the work undermine every other part about it that I love, but it can still feel like a massive disappointment and even sometimes a hindrance to the reading experience depending on how bad it is. It's important to remember that speech bubbles are one of the primary vehicles through which you tell your story, not just through the art. When the speech bubbles don't look nice or read well, it can really drag the art down, or worse, ruin the reading experience altogether.

Give your speech bubbles as much love and care as you do your art! They're the bridge between art and storytelling!