Ok so maybe this is silly but I’ve been adding and saving all of these cool pose references and tips and tricks for lighting and drawing in general in random little places like a chipmunk stores food for the winter and now that I’m drawing again it’s been fun to go through things that I thought would give me inspiration and actually implementing it!!
I think people say this all the time but a huuuuge part of drawing is observing and consuming, so that you have something to come back to when you go to the drawing table. Keeping in mind the cool techniques that others may have in their art is something that comes back to me while I’m drawing and I’ll be like “oh you know what, let’s give it a go and see what happens”. But it also applies to practicing other arts and seeing how I can apply those techniques in new and interesting ways! Art to me is sort of like an improv puzzle—you are creating things and you have this idea of how it’s supposed to look but how you get there is going to be a different path every time hypothetically (for me having an idea of what something will look like is a little more abstract because I have aphantasia and I can’t LITERALLY see things in my head so being able to actually visualize things only happens when I put it down on paper and then I gotta adjust a billion times so it looks right, it’s confusing lol)
Anyway going back to the original question I think something cool that I’ve started to figure out with all of the art fight art I did in July is my sort of “short hand” process for sketching, lineart and coloring so that the base process is the same but then I can go a little wild on the lighting. I would like to work more on my painterly work going forwards because I love the result but because I haven’t quite nailed it down it takes foreverrrrr to get through but this has been a great way to get back in to developing my art!
