The Art of Blokfort

In usual end of the month post-fashion, I will continue in random disjointed-not connected point to point journaling, without looking at a previous post to see if I’ve already said something.

First off, It’s hot, and I don’t like it. That is all.

In the middle of May, I accepted way too many commissions, again, and figured it would take at least 1-3 months to get it all done. Well, I got it all done by the end of this month! I’m going to be taking a break from commissions a bit to re-evaluate and look over a few things, but also to just do whatever I want in art for a bit. As far as what will happen after the break, I’m planning on doing a fairly large project that might take a while. No, sadly it’s not Eyes on the Prize, or any other project I have shelved at the moment (I swear I’ll get back to it some day). While I’m working on this project, commissions will have to be ‘smaller’ in difficulty and amount.

Near the start of of the month, I finished the sort of “family line up” of the Dusk Fan assassin OCs I have. I’ve been going through my other characters to finally give them some sort of ‘official’ art as well, since it’s a little funny and sad to leave them at ‘concept art’ stages.

For some of the larger of the pieces this month, it really goes to show that if you have the tools and you know how to use them, you might as well use them. Art Studio Pro (ASP), for the purposes I need, has some of the worst lighting layer options, yet when transferring the PSD file of the art piece into Procreate (Pro) with the same exact settings gives you vastly different (and much better) results. It shows that there’s still room for growth for ASP and I hope that there will be changes to the lighting settings for it in the future. Pro recently had an update to allow more layers to be used, which is pretty nice, however the brush settings are still absolute garbage-trash-incomprehensible-fury-inducing (for what I need). So currently, I do the line art on ASP, and then if I need to do fancier lighting, I transfer the PSD over to Pro.

Lately I’ve been playing around with sketches once again, and I think I’ve found yet another format that I like. What it basically came down to was canvas format. I like the idea that sketches aren’t *PERFECT* quality in terms of an image file, but I don’t want something like a .jpg for anything, those artifacts and loss of image quality suck. My base canvas format is generally 3000×3500 300dpi using a 6-pixel sized (px) brush for line-art on more “finished” pieces and a 8px brush for sketches, or thereabouts. All artworks used to start with the same base canvas file, though lately I’ve been experimenting with something around 1000×1200 300 dpi. Using the 8px brush on the smaller canvas is quite hard to work with, since the lines are big and blobby, mistakes were easier to make. So basically, this is how the canvases and a few experimental sketches were done:

• Big (Default) Canvas – 2500×3000, 300dpi
• Small (Sketch) Canvas – 1000×1200 300dpi
• Finishing Line-art Brush – 6px (smaller)
• “Sketching” Line-art Brush – 8px (somewhat bigger – trust me the differences are noticeable)

1. Big Canvas + 6px / 8px – How I normally do finished pieces, ignore.
2. Big Canvas + 8px – This tended to take a bit too long to get done, didn’t really feel like a sketch, but also didn’t look like a “finished” piece. At least, to me. Examples of this would be all of the Dusk Fan characters.
3. Small Canvas + 8px – The canvas size is way too small for the brush, and as stated before makes certain things very blobby, and mistakes arise more often.
4. Small Canvas + 6px – The sweet spot. I can jot something and still have it look like a nice “sketch” but not so clean it gets mistaken as a finished pic. And it’s quick!

So basically the 8px brush goes into the dumpster, bye bye. I’ve replaced it with a different blobby sketch brush too.