weemiji

Animating Life: The Art, Science, and Wonder of LAIKA @ Portland Art Museum

New DA:I DLC trailer is out, for peeps who haven’t seen it yet (warning: SPOILERS)

Daaaaayum

Stayed up way too late seeing if that hidden quest to get the flower crown was legit, I can now confirm that it is!  Dorian’s even prettier now =D

The tldr version:

1. go to The Emerald Graves

2. jump on this tiny rock house 50+ times, doesn’t matter if you fall off

3. get the quest to gather 10 crystal graces, then turn it in

Hello!  I have a society6 account I was messing around with, mostly because I wanted my own mug or a tote bag lol (they’ll be up as soon as I have chance to upload the formats).  I changed up the background because I felt like it was a bit too messy for printing, but if you prefer the original feel free to let me know!

Hello!

I am totally not an expert in painting so there are tons of people who are more qualified to give advice on this, but I’ll try to answer the best I can from my experience =)  The two things that are most helpful to me in learning how to render are:

Studies! (the artsy term for copying haha)  These can be still lifes, master copies (where you copy a master painter like Rembrandt, Michelangelo, etc), screenshot paintings, etc.  I did a few still lifes and master copies in oil painting class and they helped me a LOT with understanding how to paint form, lighting, shadows, folds, etc.  One of my favorite teachers taught digital painting, and he encouraged us to take random movie screenshots and paint them whenever we had free time.  I know that painting copies or still lifes of fruit/skulls/empty bottles over and over isn’t the most exciting thing and can get pretty tedious, but it helped me learn the basics of rendering and improved my skills of observation.  As long as you’re mindful about what you’re painting, these can be really great practice! 

REFERENCES.  Find tons of references, save them, love them, they are awesome.  References for color, for lighting, for anatomy, for style, for details…references for everything!  Working strictly from your imagination and creativity is GREAT, but generally there are a lot of details and nuances that you would normally miss without really looking directly/closely at something.  If I don’t know how to paint a certain face/material/what have you, I try to find a reference for it.   Personally, I can almost guarantee that whatever I’m painting will look better if I used a reference than if I didn’t.

For building up the painting, I’m not 100% sure what you mean by that but here is a simplified version of my workflow for painting from start to finish:

I draw the lineart on its own separate layer (or if it’s a scanned drawing I set the layer to Multiply). Then I put in base colors underneath, using a middle value color.  After that I block in the lighting I want by laying down highlights and shadows, keeping a definite light source in mind.  The final and longest step is to refine the details I want by painting on a layer on top of all the others.  If I need to fix mistakes or get rid of lineart, I just paint over it directly like I would a physical painting (although sometimes I do this on a separate layer, so if I don’t like the fix I can always delete it).

Leyendecker-style Dorian here to sell you some Tevinter Collar shirts.

Testing out the secondhand cintiq that my former boss/mentor gave to me as a parting gift when he left the company a week ago.  He liked to give me guff about playing too many video games and not drawing enough, so I'll show him by drawing a lot of video game fanart.  Expect an increase in crappy doodlings as I try to shake off the rust of not having drawn for a year or two despite being an animator for a living (unfollow accordingly).