#ccsdraws

Had a few sketches that I had semi-finished, so decided to just finish them w/o really rendering. I do like the pencil like texture but the shadows are a bit off. Ah well :3

Left: One of Gwennis's first astral artes lessons.

Fine, some explanation

Okay, sosososo this makes sense only because I’ve been writing an AU fanfic for the last few months and this is like an endgame ship that is NOT the main focus of the fanfic (or even like actually going to appear in the current fanfic, I have PLANS for this), but I think it’s a pretty good one because you get all the angst and then then friends to enemies to friends to lovers, which is the good stuff.

It’s a bit bittersweet to see the Pokemon anime continue without Ash.

I do remember wishing they would change protagonists every generation, like they do with the manga, but at the same time, it feels like a chapter of my life is closing. There have been many cartoons/animes that I grew up with and that have ended or changed a lot, but this one really feels like closing the book on my childhood.

Favorite villian in the game. He could have had such a good character arc, but I think they rushed his portion of the story a bit. Like I get it, second boss of the game, but still, apart from Dohalim, this dude could have been such a nuanced character.

Although I knew this was going to take a while to do, there was still this surprise at how difficult it was. I’ve been watching a lot of digital speed-paints, which seem almost deceptive in a way, for example, if you look up Deiv Calviz, his League splash arts are crazy, and he posts time-lapses of his work.

But just the beginning with the sketches and then the starting grayscale, that’s around 10 mins in the video which translates to almost 7 hours in real time for that. And it’s honestly crazy, because just the normal grayscale is like where I would be like, yeah, that looks good. But there’s like an hour plus of the video left. And then you’re like another five minutes in, and these color or some basic shading and I’m like, wow, that looks finished by my standards. But he KEEPS GOING. 

My style (I believe) leans more towards animation/manga which involved more sketching and lineart and cell shading, because it’s supposed to be quicker (in comparison to these illustrations) since you’re trying to convey a story in multiple scenes/frames instead of having one snapshot.

So I’ve been trying to take more time for pieces, at least painting, and there’s one that I’m working on, and I’m really trying to take time and paint it properly and render it well, but it’s frustrating because I’m like, why isn’t it looking good now? And really in the end it’s just trusting the process, and pushing through.

And I kept a comparison of the above piece as well, where I was like, this looks okay, but I knew I needed to spend more time. So I wanted to see what more time adds to the piece. And honestly, there really is a difference.

So yeah. You can probably tell which one I spent more time on.

And I will add, that I have looked at my old art from even only a year ago, and I have improved, I’m just being critical at myself for not being immediately good at a skill I literally just started really learning.