Caffeinated High

━━━┛ ✠ ┗━━━━━━ Death comes for us all

━━━┓ ✠ ┏━━━━━━

Mylo was choking out quiet sobs, doing his best to muffle them with his gloves. The warm tears that trickled down his cheeks offered an odd comfort against the cold bite of the wind. He was almost thankful for the blur in his vision so that everything had an edge of softness to it - like he was walking in a dream. Jacob took a solemn place standing behind Mylo, his slim figure casting a large shadow over his friend and the grave before him. He would put a hand on Mylo's shoulder, try to offer some comfort - no matter how meaningless - but people were watching, and propriety demanded he keep a respectful distance.

Truthfully, he felt unnerved by it all. He didn't think that he was one to fear death, but now, standing here ...

From the corner of his eye, he catches a glimpse of Cael standing amongst Mylo's older siblings. The lot of them looked more somber than upset at the occasion - their expressions unmoved as they exchanged low whispers.

Jacob had to hand it to his younger brother - like a vulture swiping in after the kill - he saw the opportunity to rub elbows with the potential rulers of the Helvia household, and took it. Cold, but quick.

It just doesn't feel like the responsible thing to do. And well...I'm not a great artist. Hell, I am was not even a good employee. Let's just say I'm not very technically competent. But I am a responsible person. An accountable person. A person who feels a sense of duty in providing and contributing to the household. And art is just not...giving me a way to do that. It's hard to escape into this world when I know I'm failing irl.

I honestly normally avoid being so vulnerable online but ig this tumblr is more of a personal diary than anything else anyway.

I know I'll come back to art eventually, I always do. But when I'm in a routine of job-hunting/interview-prepping, I just feel this weird...resentment towards my art. Ik it sounds crazy but I almost feel like, "Damn, after all the hours I've poured into you, what have I got to show?"

Art isn't paying the bills and I can feel the noose tightening. It used to be a "good" escapism because I was doing the "right" thing irl (i.e. working and providing an income), and art helped me to cope with the lack of fulfilment in my job. So it was like...art helped me to be good. But now it feels like a "bad" escapism - because I'm doing the "bad" thing of being unemployed and trying to suppress the bad feelings by doing art. But I can't anymore. I feel guilty. Very guilty. The call is coming from inside the house.

But the weird thing is...when I get into the flow again, I get lost, it feels magical, I'm building worlds in my head and castles in the sky. Then I check my email and see another rejection and I feel like I'm wasting my time with this stupid art thing. Even though art has helped me in the past, it isn't helping me now and I feel...not even bitter, just deflated. Disappointed, even? :'D Like art was my golden child who I so lovingly nurtured....who still cheers me up even when I'm down, but when it comes to real issues like money and bills and taxes (well actly no taxes when you're unemployed HA!), art just stares at me like, "so...what you gonna do?" Like dear lord art can't you help me or something?? T__T

Anyway, I'm going to take a hiatus for now. I can't keep giving effort, time, and commitment into my art when I'm getting nothing concrete in return. Maybe a temporary happiness that gets me through, but then what? There are still bills to pay at the end of the day and indulging in my art isn't getting me any closer to paying them.

Sometimes I feel a bit hesitant to share WIPs until they’re really close to the final stage, because I find the final product can look so completely different from the WIP, and it’s all just a bit jarring. Sometimes the final looks worse than the WIP! And that just feels bad lmao.

But idk I wanna get more confident with my art - if the final looks worse, so be it! At least I’ll always have the WIP screenshots lmao…

Also what is it with me and drawing OCs sitting in trees? I just find them so ✨ whimsical ✨ and 🌻 nostalgic 🌻 eventho like…I hardly sat in trees growing up because ants.

So I’m actually really pleased with how this render turned out! The funny thing is that I showed my best friend the sketch and was like, “I’m not going to work on this anymore so it is what it is!” And yet, that somehow gave me the courage to attempt a very different coloring style and get a lot more bold and experimental in how I was playing with the color and contrast??

It’s like…declaring that I wouldn’t work on this anymore relieved me of the responsibility of doing a good job on it, so I didn’t have to follow my routine rendering methods and could just go a bit wild and loose. Like wow I really hate working under pressure huh. :’D

Anyways psycho!Cael is best Cael. I just always draw serious!Cael because it feels more suitable for day-to-day situations lol.

Bonus: Ocular proof of me giving up on the drawing before I decided to render it lmao

As I was working on this it kinda got me thinking tho…when exactly can a piece be considered “finished”? I started with just rough sketches, then started to paint them in, then decided to “polish” (tho I admit the lines are still sketchy af because tbh I’m that lazy lineart person), and idk…if the mood is already captured in the initial draft, then what purpose does bringing it to a higher standard of “polish” achieve? 🤔

This is partially why I have to push myself so hard to put color to a sketch as well, because part of me feels like the sketch already tells the story, so what does the color achieve? Though I’ve been able to counter this argument with myself because I personally LOVE coloured pieces and do feel a lot more “mood” given the right color ambience, so I can quite easily convince myself to color.

But polish? What does polish achieve exactly? Like idk I kinda feel the pieces on the left are pretty much “done” and convey what I want them to convey, but I went ahead with some clean-up anyway for the sake of er…completion? Artistic integrity? Perfectionism? Aesthetics? (Tbh the aesthetics argument never works for me because I love the look of sketchy almost incomplete pieces lol, like I totally understand why those images might get more likes vs a fully-rendered and polished piece. This is a legit phenomenon btw. Source: I saw a tweet about it.)

Though upon further scrutiny…the image on the right is also very unpolished lol. The lines for one thing, the hair, the fingers (dear lord)…hmm I guess my heart was never into polishing this image that much anyway as it was supposed to just start and end as a series of sketches but then I figured since I started painting and adding lighting I might as well “clean up” each image a little lol.

Wips

WIPs

Character Drawing

Goal: Cover weak spots in drawing characters; issues that consistently appear in all my pieces.

P0 list is below:

- Fabric studies: EDGE CONTROL, 3D volume and rendering of fabric folds; not too fussed about the material itself as long as the basic fold volume is captured with good 3D form and shape language)

- Head studies: structure of head from multiple angles; facial proportions (distance between eyes, forehead height, etc.); facial features (3D volume of eyes, mouth, nose, ears, etc. how to simplify and stylise to my aesthetic tastes)

- Hair studies: 3D volume of hair, how to simplify and stylise using good shape language/capturing the silhouette effectively

P1 (these are lower priority because I can do passable versions of them in my art, i.e. they do not stick out as a weak point)

- Expressions, Hands

Style Studies

Goal: Improve and finetune my personal art style and aesthetic.

P0 focus will be on drawing and lineart; P1 is rendering.

- Master studies on drawing style; the goal is 1:1 copy, no need to extrapolate or personalise when doing master studies, just focus on achieving similarity.

- Not too sure if I should aim for quantity or quality. My experience has shown that higher quantity with a “passable” quality will get you to good quality eventually, whereas low quantity with high quality feels more like a one-time effort with less organic learning. So…focus on quantity with passable quality (it can’t be shit quality otherwise you’re just practicing the wrong thing repeatedly).

Dynamic Art

Goal: Make art look more dynamic, better “flow”, characters look alive and in motion.

Tbh the path to achieving this feels a bit more abstract to me, but I’ve distilled some practice areas based on some features that I’ve noticed in “dynamic” looking art.

- Gesture drawing: I never really practiced this, so my gesture drawing is weak. I mostly just referenced static poses, e.g. standing, sitting, from Pinterest. There are lots of courses on gesture drawing online, so will take a look to try to absorb some of the main principles (which are honestly unknown to me lmao) and do some timed gesture drawing as well. The goal will be to draw characters in movement in a natural and “flowy” way - exaggeration is needed in body movement.

- Linework: I’ve noticed that a lot of dynamic looking art has really good linework. This is especially obvious in lineart-only pieces, but even in partial/fully rendered works I notice that the line strokes and brushstrokes just look so dynamic and good. Line weight and direction contribute…wondering how to get better in them though. This is a bit of an unknown to me - so will need to do research.

- Lighting: This is more on the rendering side of things. Dramatic lighting schemes, strong separation of “light” and “dark” areas with daring emphasis on the protrusions of 3D shapes helps to create a very dramatic and dynamic look. Studying the structure of the face and dynamic lighting photography on the face could help (since the facial volume is the easiest to get “wrong”, you’ll need a strong understanding of the face structure to use dynamic lighting effectively instead of carving the face into an unappealing or inaccurate mass of shapes).

- Composition: I tend to pose characters very statically in the middle of the canvas, so I think a first-step improvement would just be to make them take up more of the canvas, to crop away some edges if needed, e.g. hair bits, shoulder (I get precious about keeping the entire character in, which makes the piece look a bit stiff at times). I think some style study is needed to supplement portrait studies for this, as I noticed most real portraits do not carry the full dynamic quality of drawn portraits since you can indicate movement in drawn portraits. I can focus on effective single-person composition first, with a stretch goal of handling multiple people in a frame.