Tuilight Zone

I’ve recently started playing around with watercolor and whenever I try to take a picture to post online, it’s all muddy and just… bad quality 😭🫠.

Oh, I use a scanner. Nothing fancy, just an old CanoScan LiDE 200. Whenever I'm scanning something bigger than A4 I have to take 2-3 seperate scans and then edit them into one in Clip Studio. The colours do still end up looking very washed up compared to the original, so I have to tweak them post-scan. This is what the unedited scans look like:

(The edges are always a bit smudgy so I had to take a third scan in the middle to make sure everything is nice and crisp.)

Sometime around when Hades 1 was released there was a Q&A with game developers at the Supergiant Games Discord server. Someone asked what songs would the characters of Hades sing at karaoke and the song listed for Hypnos was "I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)" by Whitney Houston. I've been meaning to draw Hypnos dancing with somebody ever since. Never got around to actually doing it until now.

Hi anon! I mostly use Clip Studio's default brushes. I do occasionally try out custom brushes but I always fall back to using the default set.

These two are so funny.

Been playing Hades II so of course I needed to draw Hypnos again.

Got any favorite tools or tips you can share?

Thank you! This is actually a bit of a surprise to me, I never considered anatomy one of my strong points. I'm guessing the croquis classes helped, haha!

Here are some of the tool I use:

Quickposes: Timed gesture drawing tool, great for practise.

TrueRef Gesture Tool: Similar to Quickposes

Posemaniacs: A collection of rotateable 3D models doing various poses. A 3D model is never as good as a photo, but being able to rotate them to any angle is a big help.

Referenceangle: A tool for finding reference photos of just the right head angle.

Shutterstock: This where I usually go look for references these days because search engines kind of suck now. Just remember to set the search filter to "photos".

The search engines that kind of suck now: One of my favourite ways to practise dynamic poses is drawing from photos of olympic sports. (Steeplechase is a good one, you get a variety of different poses, often in the same image.) This is one area where Google/DuckDuckGo image search is still better than stock photo sites. One thing I've noticed is that you'll get you'll get better search results if you include the word "olympics" in the search.

Originally this post was supposed to be just the top image with the comment "I have no context for this". Then I remembered that I can just make up context for the things that I draw and God is powerless to stop me.