I'm gonna do a couple posts, but I try not to post too often and getting new art of my own to share every day means I've fallen behind on my backlog of cool art to share, so I'll try and do a few of these. As the userbase continues to scatter, it's possible that I will simply stop doing these, and if that happens I will probably do a series of posts about some of my favourite artists to follow and where you can find all those people, now.
Mother of Pearl by Io
Such good value grouping, here. Love how murky they've made this kelp forest, and yet it still feels lush.
"some linework ??" by Seven Deven
Once again, murky waters, a kelp forest, and great value grouping. That lighter cloud of bubbles pointing directly through the line of action of the main character and right to the high contrast light area of the conch shell. I really like the decision to make the individual bubbles this super bright saturated green. It works so well with the rest of the palette.
"And have a good week" by Gregory Fromenteau
Sometimes I am simply charmed by a very well executed version of a simply concept and this is one of those cases. Really love all the detail crammed into that airship and there's a great blend of like, sailing ship, steam boat and steam train all mixed in there.
untitled by Marina Lunina
I think this is maybe FF6 fan art, but that's not why it's in here. It's in here for it's colour palette and it's incredible sense of movement. This whole thing is like streaming and swirling around.
Matoya by Josh Corpuz
Josh Corpuz is an artist with a really good handle on the sort of Akihiko Yoshida ink drawing look and has a ton of great fantasy character design in the Final Fantasy sort of vein. This character was a response to the prompt: "I want FF17's protagonist to be a lady in her 70s named Matoya." Josh has just a really solid grasp on costume design through his work. I particularly love this lady's jacket. Incredible collar.
天 華 亂 墜 by Guling Guo
Okay, so here's more fan art and an emphatic request that you read Land of the Lustrous, but even without that context this piece is eerie and really well composed. Really incredible colour use. I love how the more neutral teals of the flowers and leaves make the blue hair on Phos pop super well, and another perfect example of value grouping, using the shadows on the hands to establish focus on the figure even though the figure and hands have the same local colour.
I'm fairly sure I need 3 of these catch up, but I'm gonna leave it out of ?, for now, in case I underestimated.
raised from veiled layers / eggs etchable with bytes from / the swan delegate by SAJAN
First off, Sajan uses alt text and titles their work, which makes doing these much easier for me and I must thank him for that. I love how this kind of splits a difference between 70s psychedelic sci-fi and traditional woodblock printing. Beautiful and subtle colour work in the darkest value areas, particularly around the textiles/embroidery, and a lot of excellent textures that help this feel like aging inks on weathered paper.
Dragon, Monster Design by ju
Love a good dragon. I initially read this thing as not having eyes, and I can't tell if I like it more with or without. The star of the show to me is the neck scales which resemble the way hummingbird neck plumage looks. The texture of the scales on the base of the neck and deltoid of the forearm where the white skin starts seems to suggest that the white skin is stretched over those scales like a thin, rubbery membrane, which is creepy in a good way, to me. In terms of colour and tonal construction, there's such stark lighting here, that makes this so sculptural, and the use of a grayscale palette with those hyper saturated vermillions in there is so cool.
Busy Street by Alariko
Alariko is one of those cases of an incredibly skilled very young artist who I have had to begin just looking at with admiration instead of jealously. Excellent buildings, using this sort of warped perspective that feels right and gives the whole place this kind of jumbled together look that fits the atmosphere and lends a certain style to it. So much attention paid to where weathering happens, little details in the flourishes of buildings (I'm a particular fan of the blue and white tiles at the top of the one building). I also really love that this image could just be a stylized version of reality were it not for the two witches flying above, in a way that immediately situates us into a more fantastical setting.
Arambou Blues by Rudolf Hima
I have so much respect for the paleo artists working today who are able to take the absolutely silly proportions of the various kinds of pterosaur and make them look majestic in any way. This is a truly excellent evocation of sunsets during an period we usually don't see represented, after the sun is hidden by the horizon, but where we still get those last dregs of crimson visible where it set. Rudolf's colour use here is perfect and feels like some of the best kind of wildlife photography.
Lancer development sketches by Peyton Gee
Peyton's work on Lancer is always great, but I wanted to highlight this as a great sample of in depth design process for a single illustration, iterating on the big jacket school of character design with a bunch of unique and and interesting variants. The front view is also great at immediately delivering a level of sass and character to tell you who this pilot is at a glance. As a side note, I would wear any of these jackets. As another side note, Lancer should let me work on it.
Definitely gonna need to do more of these because it was just portfolio day and I got some great new people in my feed, but let's talk about these 6 pieces from the last couple weeks first.
Cassette Player by Toof
The first thing that catches my eye here is I like this kinda retro shade of orange, like I might expect to find as the shade a locker is painted in a school in the 70s, which I feel like fits with the tapedeck aesthetic. If you've followed these for a while, you'll know I love this kind of maximallism in detail. Toof is employing these repeated round shapes to unify the elements and sections of extreme dark to guide the eye to important parts of the image, which allow the intense density of detail to function almost as a rest area. I love the suggestions we get that the outer layer of this figure is a clear plastic like that late 90s electronic aesthetic you get with the clear-purple Gameboy Color and N64s.
"Thank you for watching G-Witch" drawing of the Daribalde by Ippei Gyoubu
Ippei Gyoubu has, over the years of me getting into mecha anime, been cemented as my favourite mechanical designer working on the franchise. Just a myriad of extremely cool guys. I absolutely adore this image of the outer armour of the Daribalde melted off. It's got a really good sense of form in spite of the fact that Gyoubu is not using any shading other than for occlusion shadows, he's just using the ink of the drawing to provide contours. I love to see the faceplate of a Mobile suit melt off and have it look like it has a mouth, that's just an all time aesthetic. Also Guel continues to look mostly swagless after losing his ridiculous mullet.
negative space lads by Maung Thuta
One of Maung Thuta's most impressive abilities isn't just the speed at which he's able to produce them (these are part of his daily sketches). It's also that the designs are so original. It's rare to find ones that really feel derivative, and these two are no exception, both using this simple principle of "the torso's got a big hole where the neck and chest would be" and creating a set of designs that feel of a faction with one another. There are a ton of cool shapes to admire in these, but I am particularly fond of what a simple and elegant design the right one's shoulder joint is, such that those cannons have full articulation without need for an elbow in the design.
Fisherman by Betty Jiang
Betty Jiang is someone whose work you may recognize from pieces like her incredible evocations of oil painted portraits of Souls series characters. She has an incredible traditional feel to all of her most recent work, and this charcoal drawing is part of a series of actual traditional media drawings done for a show at Gallery Nucleus. She is a master of economy of detail here, making everything that is not the focus of the image fade into nothing or at the very least simplicity, while (for example) the faces of the fish and fisherman are lovingly rendered. I find it impossible not to be awed by her work, and I truly recommend getting up close and appreciating the degree of brush texture she incorporates into her work.
magician character design by Eva Eskelin
There are actually two character designs as part of this post that share similar design elements, so I'd recommend clicking through and seeing both. I know Eva's work mostly for landscapes with really interesting stylization and texture, particularly her really interesting treatment of foliage, so these character designs were a very cool change of pace (though both styles are truly incredible). This still features Eva's amazing ability to stylize and I really like the choices in things like making that orange cloak's billows abstracted into these jagged shapes, and then shading it by having the shadows fade into hatch marks. The texture on the dress is also just amazing.
The Chariot by Mint
Mint has continued to release her tarot drawings. You may remember in a previous entry of these I covered her card for Death, which I was very taken by. I really love what mint manages to do with such a limited palette, creating very readable shapes and flow with really blocked in solids. The armour alone has about 8 or 9 different subtly different yellows in there that do an excellent job of portraying the interesting things gold does with light.
