RatCreature's Journal

I suck so much at coloring hair. I need to draw more bald people. Or they could all wear hats. Better yet, paper bags. That would take care of a whole lot of other difficulties too. Sylvester Jr. would be the ideal subject...

I'm not sure whether anyone is interested, seeing how the art itself got very little reaction (only two comments and one kudo so far *sulk*), but since I took the pictures of the in-between stages, I might as well post them.

( many images of the work in progress )

To give myself incentive to draw something, and others incentive to rec over at fanart_recs I've decided to offer anyone who signs up to rec a fandom in May (just four recs as a minimum!) a sketch as a bribe. It would be more elaborate than the ultra-quick drawbles I do, but I won't promise a painting or anything like that (those can take me up to 100+ hours after all), just a pencil sketch (or rather a scan of a sketch) that fulfills a request. I'm offering any fandoms I've drawn before, i.e. DC, Marvel, SGA, Merlin, Star Trek, Harry Potter, Dresden Files, and Temeraire, and all other fandoms I'm into would also be possible, which is a long list, among them Sanctuary, LOTR, Sherlock Holmes, Terminator, Farscape, Murdoch Mysteries, Avatar the Last Airbender, Star Wars, X-Files, Sentinel...

I'm fairly flexible, however I don't do any kind of RPF, nor pornographic art. The limit for sex in my art is pretty much things like kissing, groping and cuddling, but I'm not particular wrt pairings. There are a couple of non-explicit kinks I don't think I could realize well, for example genderbending, crossdressing or mpreg art.

Anyway, if you are willing to be bribed, just comment here with a description of your request, and I'll say whether I think I could do a sketch like you have in mind. Then sign up the usual way on the rec comm, and I'll hopefully be able to finish your sketch before May is over. BTW, should you happen to be one of the three awesome volunteers already signed up for May, you can also ask for sketch, if you'd like.

ETA: If you don't have a DW account which you'd need to post recs in the comm, I have plenty of invite codes to share.

With my last acrylic painting I tried for the first time to skip the lineart inking, and now I'm wondering which version of my style viewers like better, if they have a preference at all, i.e. without inked lineart like in this Star Trek art, or with inked lineart like for example in this SGA art or pretty much any color art I've done before.

One of the moments to wish for roommates: you find yourself tediously posing for some position, trying to catch yourself on autotimer with your crappy camera, and not just that, but actually half-naked because it turns out that if you photograph yourself wrapped in two layers, one of it a cozy, thick fleece, you can't easily deduce how the limb looks. I'd actually even take a tripod to put a camera on, because balancing said crappy camera on something a workable height facing in a direction where I can pose on doesn't really work all that well. Argh.

Surely not everybody can be at VVC? Why is it so quiet? Where is my entertainment? *poke*

Well, maybe incentive is better than a stick: I haven't offered drawbles in ages (and not drawn anything else either, sigh), so if you prompt me, I'll draw you a doodle.

As usual: I'll do my best for any fandom I'm familiar with, or random stuff (monsters, steampunk machines, animals...) or I can just pick prompts from your interests. I don't draw porn though, and I'm not good at portrait likeness. Also keep in mind that these are quick doodles, so for a prompt that is a description of some epic scene you've always wanted to see realized in fanart the results aren't going to very satisfying for you (or much fun for me).

If you want to see the quality (or lack thereof) you can expect, look at the drawble tag. I don't make any promises for results or a timely delivery, but the past I've usually managed to draw something for everyone who prompted me for these non-demanding, open drawble offers.

I was attempting to do a grayscale value thumbnail for my Trekreversebang artwork as preliminary to painting it, and couldn't figure out how the shadows would look, not even in so far as to roughly fake it. So now I have resorted to trying to make a rough pseudo-maquette simulating at least the broad masses. Of course I don't model or sculpt, so I do not have any of the materials or skills needed for actual maquette making. Instead I am making a contraption from some old cardboard, toiletpaper rolls and play-do. >.<

Unrelated to this, I still do not have the newest Dresden Files book, because I ordered the UK edition (which was sold about four euro cheaper than the US edition by the German Amazon), and that apparently came out a few days after the US one. But I did just get a notification that it's in the mail, so it will arrive soonish. I hope.

I gacked this from glockgal, but the original empty template comes from Kamaniki at dA. The time span for chronicling art in this meme fit me well, because I started posting fanart in 2003, so I took it as a sign that I ought to be a memesheep.

( a huge image behind the cut, it might be considered NSFW by some strict standards due to kissing and groping going on in some art samples )

I'm beginning to feel oddly understanding about the stupid "sex kitten" poses female characters are so often stuck with on covers and such. It's not that I'm getting fond of the sexism, but it is frelling hard to come up with engaging poses when you just want to draw some character, portrait-like I mean rather than some scene with an inherent action. And while the message isn't great, at least the stripper body language says something rather than having the character stand around dumbly, looking very boring.

How do people who are good at portraits figure out how to arrange the character? I totally fail at this. My attempts always look stiff or stupid or both.

After seeing the earlier iguana caiusmajor asked for "kangaroos in space" which made me think of the Muppets' Pigs in Space, so I sort of borrowed from that only with kangaroos.

( 'Kangaroos in Space' for Caia )

Once upon a time -- as reckoned in internet years, in reality in September 2007 -- I started a community called slothsdraw on IJ as a place for regular drawing practice, especially for people who have trouble sticking with their resolutions to draw more often. The reason I started it on IJ was that this was in the wake of LJ's Strikethrough debacle, and LJ's policies over what counted as unacceptable artwork (then even murkier and unclear than now) made me uncomfortable with the idea of creating a drawing community on LJ. Anyway, it never really took off -- I guess in part due to the target group being people who lack motivation *G* -- and has been inactive for a long time now.

I still thought that some of the exercise prompts and resources posted there might be interesting for others, however IJ has a policy to delete inactive accounts and though I reactivated the community there last time this happened, that's less than ideal to archive stuff. So I reposted these to a comm on DW, also called slothsdraw, for a more permanent home. (Obviously for all past responses not made by me you need to head over the IJ comm.)

I actually have no concrete plans for slothsdraw on DW, but the last days people joined (I assume they did an interest search or the like and the comm came up), so maybe activity there could revive. In any case for now there are seven sets of drawing prompts to pick from, so people can post responses to those if they like. And if there is some actual activity there also could be new prompts or discussion of a more open format as just a place to post practice drawings.

Anyway slothsdraw is present on DW now. Maybe it will be less dead than the IJ counterpart. Or not. But at least it won't get into trouble for its sloth-like inactivity. Membership is just moderated so that posters who prefer to show their practice drawings locked can have that option, without immediate and open joining undermining this, but anyone can join. More details are listed in its profile.

My drawing activity this year so far has been largely non-existent. This is depressing me in a somewhat self-reinforcing, vicious cycle. And not even the added pressure of public commitment helped any. (Yeah, I have not forgotten that poll, I just suck.)

However, I have yet to fail a drawble meme. So as I'm obviously not achieving what I want to wrt actual fanart, I'm lowering the target from "produce a drawing" to "produce a doodle". (Kind of like shifting definitions around to get better looking statistics.) And I have decided to offer sketches based on comment prompts. I'll do my best for any fandom I'm familiar with, or random stuff (monsters, steampunk machines, animals...) or I can just pick prompts from your interests. I don't draw porn though, and I'm not good at portrait likeness.

Considering that I now crosspost to three places, it isn't really workable to promise things like "the first X prompts will get a drawble", so just comment with something, and I'll try my best. (In the past I've usually managed to draw something for everyone who prompted me for these non-demanding, open drawble offers, but with the way my creativity and motivation seems to have shriveled and died recently, who knows.)

If you want to see the quality (or lack thereof) you can expect, look at the drawble tag.

Also, I currently have five Dreamwidth invites in case anyone should still want one. (My flist was rather flooded with offers, so I'm not sure whether there's even still demand for them.) Anyway, if you want an invite you can comment, and I'll give those I have to the first five people in order of the comment notifications I get. I'll edit this post if/when I got five requests.

BTW, of course you can ask for both an invite and a sketch or one or the other, the two are not connected, I just didn't want to make separate posts.

P.S.: Why is the Dreamwidth spell check broken? Does anyone else get a "Spell checker not set up properly." response when they click the spell check button?

A couple of days ago I offered to do sketches based on prompts as thank you for a generous, anonymous gift of paid LJ time. I thought I'd collect the results in a post.

( a Travolta!furry for cathexys (she prompted me with 'rats in funky poses') )

( cofax asked for dragons and water balloons )

( iamza wanted a Steampunk!Batmobile )

( Livia asked me to pick something from her interests. I choose 'cowlicks' and 'cold unfeeling robot arm' and ended up with SGA fanart. Sorta )

( shidoikarji26 wanted 'cheese eats mouse' -- warning for animal harm )

BTW, if anyone still wants a sketch, the offer is still open.

Does anyone have links to tutorials and/or references for drawing injuries and wounds? Like for the purpose of comics (or angsty h/c fanart in my case), so more a moderate gore and realism level. I just vaguely traumatized myself by googling for injury references with very little applicable results, but surely this is a common problem?