drawesome | Community Check-In for January 2018

goss posting in

Drawesome Monthly Check-In Post

Tomorrow will be the last day of the month, and we'd love to have you check in and chat with us. How have things been with you?

Did you sign up for or take part in any fandom activities in January, or have you been working on any personal art projects? Are you currently trying to meet a deadline? Feel free to share upcoming challenges that have got you excited, any frustrations you've been experiencing, possible goals for the next month, and so on.

(Wow, feels like New Year's was just the other day! Hard to believe a whole month has flown by already. :b )

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

minoanmiss

I'm working on my Poem In Your Pocket Day project of illustrating a bunch of poems so I can print them out and give them out the last week in April!

From:

mekare

Oh what a cool project!

From:

olivermoss

Fandom stockings got revealed. I'll be able to link what I did here once I am home.

I have a drawing I want to do, but am unsure how to approach it. Even terrible doodles are a lot of work for me, so I have have bitten off more than I can chew. It's based on the SPG 10th Anniversary Concert. But at least I have good photo refs of my own to use.

From:

dylan_mx

I'm a SPG fan too and I love their aesthetic :) Good luck with your project!

From:

olivermoss

Thanks! Have you seen Jon and Upgrade pics from the show yet? I have a few up and am working on more.

From:

dylan_mx

I haven't. Where can I see them?

From:

olivermoss

I have one of The Jon up here and working on getting an album up on my site. Their official Tumblr has been reblogging pics, so if you scroll through you can see some more :)

From:

dylan_mx

:D thanks!

From:

olivermoss

Welcome!

I've finished working on my own pictures, they are all up here if you'd like to see.

omg concert lighting plus reflective faces was like nightmare mode for photography

From:

dylan_mx

:D very nice pictures! Thanks for sharing!

From:

mekare

Looking forward to your fandom stockng links! What is SPG?

From:

olivermoss

Steam Powered Giraffe. They are a Steampunk band that just had an anniversary show with all their old members back.

I did two drawings for Fandom Stockings, one Leverage and one Person of Interest.

From:

mekare

Oh I remember the one with the dog! Nice :-)

SPG looks like a cool band, I didn't even know that Steampunk had its own music genre :-)

From:

olivermoss

Thanks!

Steampunk's got a lot of music. Abney Park, Cog Is Dead, Professor Elemental, Rasputina, etc. I listen to SPG and Professor Elemental a lot. I should branch out into other Steampunk and Steampunk-ish bands more often :)

From:

tarlanx

This is all I've managed to draw in months and even this was cheating by using a tutorial :(

From:

dylan_mx

Awww, that's cute!
I don't think using tutorials is cheating... we all have to learn from somewhere :)
I hope you'll find more time/inspiration this month.

From:

tarlanx

Thank you!

The sad thing is when I went to find all my pencils etc I discovered my younger D had swiped them all so I was left with a few sad looking chalk pastels and a pencil :)

From:

mekare

How cute! And I use tutorials all the time for different things.

From:

syntheid

I was fighting with the same portrait for weeks and still haven't finished it. I'm just really struggling with the colors and having a hard time finding references that help, so I kind of took a break from that.

Originally I thought I might start doing a portrait-a-week thing as practice, but with recent events it'll depend a little how much free time I actually have. I did do at least one (this photographed so poorly though, I could not get the colors on camera to come out the way they are on paper-- anyone have photography tips? hah).

From:

jainas

Wow, those are really great, even if they aren't finished I love the style and colors...
My best rec for photographing a drawing would be to forgo electric light, and try to to it with natural light instead...

From:

syntheid

Thanks! Yeah natural light would probably help but I'm usually doing art in my off hours which are... typically at night. I'm using sunlight bulbs, which is at least better? But I tried to adjust it in in post-process and it still seemed kind of lackluster compared to the original.

From:

olivermoss

Are you shooting in JPG or in a raw format?

From:

dylan_mx

Sadly I have no tips, but that portrait looks good to me.

From:

syntheid

Thank you!

From:

mekare

WOW. Those look both really good (I adore the blue highlights in the first one). I'd second the tip for natural lighting, everything else screws up the colours. Maybe your camera also has several lighting situation settings (day, night, sunset etc.), you might want to play around with that to get the closest result.

From:

syntheid

Thank you! I've been using my phone, and it does have different lighting options that I've tried, but it mostly seems to be coming out feeling kind of flatter than it feels IRL, and I've been having a hard time getting the dynamics back in.

From:

dylan_mx

I've started practicing figure drawing 5 mins a day 💪💪💪

From:

mekare

Hey good for you! I really should do more daily practise as well.

From:

dylan_mx

Thanks! It's hard but so rewarding.

From:

mekare

I just made a very long update post yesterday so I'll link: here.
This is the art section of that post:

"3. Art stuff

During snowflake we had to set some goals for 2018 and one of them was to converse my art masterpost from a list into a table with clickable previews. I'm still coding that (a lot of the older art doesn't even have previews, so I'm having to cut those, upload them and then put in the code) but I'm liking the new look. I also did a fanart review meme here and a couple of new pieces already this month:

Star wars sketch (spoilers for Last Jedi)
a silly Due South graphic
Ray Vecchio portrait
Georgiou portrait
and this month's drawesome challenge
Burnham and another Georgiou attempt
A Supergirl Kara/Winn/Mon-El piece"

The coding is going slowly and the post does some things I don't want, for example displaying a large gap between the "Fandom:XY" bit and the actual table with the previews. I have no idea how to fix this. This doesn't seem to happen with the tables that have only two previews per row (like Due South and Wonder Woman). Does anyone have any ideas?