I Got So Lucky With This Shot Of A Black Jaguar... Caught Him In Just The Right Light To Show The Faint

Reblog to my mud blug, incase you weren’t following Percep... which you should be, if you like my stuff. Even though it hasn’t really started updating yet. It will, I swear. Some time soon. No really. Any day now.

Sketch dump to end all sketch dumps.

So: I made a deal with one of my good artist friends a while ago, ‘cuz I was whining that I’d be more inclined to post if I got more comments on my work… Now, I spend about eight hours a day with my nose to the sketchbook, but I don’t post 95% of my material because sketches just don’t seem worth bothering with. It is literally more work to scan, edit, and process the drawings than it is to actually draw them. (ten minutes of drawing, an hour to process… ten more minutes of inking on paper brings that down to about fifteen minutes of processing), so I’m much more likely to post a quickly inked drawing than a pencil drawing I spent two hours on). Well, anyway, said artist friend went through all my posts and did a great big commentary, at least mentioning everything I’d posted thus far. I won’t lie: I have some of the best friends anyone could ask for. So, it’s time to put my currency where my vocalization orifice is: I’m only gonna do this once, ‘cuz after this it’s gonna be nigh impossible to keep track of what artwork has and hasn’t already been posted.

Now, I have 8 sketchbooks full of material that hasn’t been posted, coming out to sixteen hundred pages of art in total, at 100 pages per book, x2 since I draw on both sides of a page. Not gonna post all of that, tho: I don’t mind posting bad art, of which there is quite a lot, but I gotta maintain some standards… it’s gotta be visually legible at least. A lot of it is redundant too, since I had to draw dozens of sketches for each character just to relearn how to draw them after my hospital stay. I think I filled 200 pages just figuring out Spooks head. So I’m not gonna do all 1600 pages. Just the highlights. Maybe 1 or 2 percent. Still: tl;dr, there’s a whole lotta messy ink and or pencil art is on the way.

Most of the posts will be accompanied by a writeup of some sort, so if you like the world building in percep. so far, you should enjoy this. I’m deliberating over how much I want to reveal outside of the comic itself, but if you liked the write ups for the worldshaper and Cthonians, you should enjoy some of the stuff I have queued up.

I start livestreaming, and what's the first thing I do?

Make a banner for my Livestream, of course. Eyup.

Still streaming!

Suggestions for Art to Livestream?

After two months of going without, I'm finally getting set up with internet service at home (no more mooching off of various fast-food establishments and public libraries with free wi-fi!).

First thing I plan to doing is Livestreams of art stuff. However, Perceptionality is a B/W, traditional-media comic, and the only digital work required is clean-up, typesetting, and graphic design elements. Not particularly fun to watch, I wouldn't think.

So: If anyone has suggestions or requests, let me hear 'em! I'll draw whichever ones seem like the most fun or interesting. Once I'm set up for the livestreamin's (hopefully not more than a couple of days from now), y'all can watch me clean and colour the stuff. And listen to me ramble about stuff non-stop. There will probably be music too. I guess.

I won't be drawing extreme violence or porn (though I will draw tasteful nudity) but aside from that, anything goes. I'm not kidding. Fan art, OC's, art styles ranging from anime to realistic to pre-raphaelite, sci-fi or fantasy or modern day, scenery and backgrounds are cool, whatever you can think of.

(This is gonna be a catastrophe, I just know it.)

(...I'm okay with that: should be fun)

People learn by doing, which means that by the time a  piece of art is done, you have become infinitesimally better as an artist than when you started.  Every piece will always be outdated by the time it’s finished. It means you’re improving... if you hate your work, you are doing it right.

Imagine someone who doodles a wobbly stick figure and thinks, “Yeah, that’s all I’m capable of, that’s about what I expected from me.” how lame would that be? Screw that noise: If you demand more from your work, it’s because you still believe you’re capable of better things.

Now, if the work sucks in exactly the same way every time, then there’s a problem. Only thing to do is identify exactly what that problem is, and work specifically on that one issue until it is ground into dust. Once you do resolve it, it shall never trouble you again. X3

Every time I see my art from a week or more ago, I cringe a little and mutter, “I can do so much better than that. That’s so ugly. Why is it there? Why can’t I do art right?”

I got an early Christmas present... a set of charcoal pencils and sticks, and a pad of paper suitable for them. Lucked out really: charcoal was the last thing on my list of things to play around with that I hadn't yet acquired the materials for. Pretty well the only thing missing was a tortillion, of which I already had a few.

I spent an afternoon playing around, getting a feel for them, but this is the first drawing I've taken the time to sit down and put some effort into.

The process was pretty straight forward: I sketched the figure with an HB charcoal pencil, then darkened the lines and filled in the shade with a 4B. After that, it was a steady cycle of blending with a tortillion, lightening patches with a light application of 4mm eraser stick or kneaded eraser, laying down more charcoal where needed, and back to blending again. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Man, I love this stuff! It's much better for heavy shade than graphite, and it doesn't make as much of a mess as I thought it would. Charcoal doesn't compare to india ink for pure, solid black, I don't think anything could, but the charcoal is so much more workable. I don't mind the time and effort it takes to build up a ton of hatching with a nib pen, but all you can do is build up. Being able to lay down, blend, and erase charcoal was an utter delight. 

I might do a few more pages of that steampunk comic I worked on a while back, just for something to do in charcoal.

reblogging to my art tumblr, since photography counts for that sorta thing. Sorry for the redundancy.

So, on our daily walk to the McDonalds today, my brother and I took a detour through the waterfowl park, and came across not one, but two geese in the middle of the path, each with a little bundle of baby goslings. I apologize for the picture quality, but all I had on me was my iPod touch, and nothing to brace it on. Also: we didn’t want to get too close, since geese can be very protective, territorial, and irritable. We stood around for at least twenty minutes, and they held up any foot traffic coming through. Every now and then, one of the adults would stand up straight, stretch their neck upward, look around, and hiss at anything they didn’t like the look of. After a time, one bundle of goslings made their way across the path, one at a time, and snuggled in with the other bundle. Occasionally, one of the adults would check out the little ones, and get jumped on, or pick through the grass looking for edibles. Not gonna lie, it was pretty adorable.

We didn’t see any ducklings, but did spot plenty of ducks swimming around in pairs, so you know they’re on the way. X3

Gift for a friend. I hope he likes it.

'Nother charcoal drawing. WhiteFox likes snow. WhiteFox likes snow very much. Also, I am apparently one of those select few who has the right kind of face for tea-shades, so I consider myself lucky there.

I don't really draw my avatar all that often... I'm not really sure how to define him. I don't think of him as a fictional character, persona, or mascot. He represents me, but I don't think of him as being me. I guess he's like the visual component of a pen-name.

I don't like this drawing as much as the one I previously posted, probably because I didn't get to define the planes of the face or neck. Course, when you're matte white, there's not a lot you can do. I did play around with using unblended strokes to add definition to the hair and beard, and it was an informative exercise, but it doesn't carry a whole lot of visual impact.

Still... I like it. 

Unplanned Adventure Comics!

'Kay, so... after helping Verzi with his little April Fools stunt, I've come to a realization: I plan way, way too much. Seriously. Whenever I start up a comic, I spend months doing preparation work. Lame.

So I started a new tumblr: Unplanned Adventure Comics! In three days, I'm gonna start posting comics based on whatever I come up with on the spot, and just run with it. You guys can submit material for me to make use of, using the ask button (Labled "Suggest Something Unplanned") Or the submit button, I guess (Labled "Submit").

A few guidelines:

You can make suggestions for anything: characters, plot, setting, themes, art style, items, genre, you name it.

No copyrighted material. This is going to be all original material, I'm not gonna be throwing Naruto/MLP/MegaMan in there. I am willing to do something inspired by existing franchises, however. Parody, satire, spoof, or similar basic concepts.

Likewise, I'm not going to be inserting other people's characters. I'm looking for suggestions and ideas, not full character biographies. I want to sorta make this up as I go along, after all.

Once the "story" actually get going, there will probably be some homestuck/Ask Woona sorta stuff, where the story advances based on what the readers suggest, with a bit of whatever-I-feel-like thrown in for good measure.

So! You have two days: Do your worst, and I'll give you my best. Let's see what happens.

Kay, so... Math geeks, I could use some help here.

You know how the Fibonacci sequence approaches the golden ratio? I've seen this mentioned all over the place.

A while ago, I was messing around with golden triangles/gnomons. The golden ratio is a:b=a+b:a, right? Well, by adding more and more golden gnomons to a golden triangle, you get more and more side lengths that are in golden ratio to each other. The sequence looks like this: b, a, a+b, 2a+b, 3a+2b, 5a+3b, 8a+5b, 13a+8b...

Now, the thing is, each of these terms are the sum of the two previous ones. Just like the Fibonacci sequence, except using a and b as seed values... it doesn't just approach the golden ratio, tho, it is in golden ratio.

Now, I'm feelin' kinda clever for figuring this out on my own, but I heavily doubt that I'm the first person to notice it. I have yet to find any mention of it anywhere, though... I don't suppose anyone knows of a source/reference/precedent?