January 8, 2022

I have been doing a ton of artwork, and having a ton of fun as a result.

I skimmed a ton of art courses, and realized two things:

• Every single teacher that tries to cover anatomy basically rips off Bridgman or Hogarth
• Past the basics, most of these same teachers just showboat for the remaining portion of a given course with ‘rendering’

With this in mind, I pretty much have just been drawing along with the Bridgman based anatomy book whenever I feel like learning more of the figure, and then will literally draw mannequin forms of action figures to further simplify poses with gesture drawings.

I even found an awesome free site that is dedicated to art reference poses which I will probably use in my workflow as well:

• https://www.posemaniacs.com/

My current workflow for illustrations includes the following:

• Scan in ink drawings into GIMP at the end of the month for all the ink drawings I did
• When I’m ready to work on the image, open the .png, and then nuke the white background and bump up the levels to make every black pixel on the screen to be fully black
• Export the resulting .png from GIMP, and open it in Krita to work on as a digital illustration
• Once I’m done with the illustration, I can then resize the illustration to something of a super low resolution like 256 pixels in width, and then force the colors to be 16 bits for an indexed palette which pretty much converts it into pixel art
• Open up the resulting image in Grafx2 to complete the pixel art image

Though the last point doesn’t guarantee a perfect pixel art image, it gets pretty close to what I want.

What I have found is that working on multiple pieces throughout a given week is actually kind of fun and rewarding.

It really goes to show you the amount of work it takes to really pull off a good illustration, and lets you have a window into what you want to actually work on in that given day.

There were days when I just wanted to work on background lighting for an illustration, vs. other days when I wanted to apply painterly type ideas to a given figure’s form.

I have also come to realize that digital art itself requires so many different masking layers in order to really pull off some cool effects.

This particular video on how to do this in ‘Krita’ was VERY rewarding in this respect:

• Krita 4.4.3 tutorial - clone layers, filter masks, transform masks (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VratqYiarc)

In terms of the artwork on this site, I’ve realized a few things:

• I will probably need to host a completely separate website for my artwork if I want to continue on the digital realm of art
• This is because the file sizes even for the .png’s alone are pretty dang big

Luckily, there DOES exist some options but it will cost extra money to pull it off so here’s my research what I did so far on this topic from my notes:

• https://www.epik.com has ‘sambanya.art’ available for $15 a year:
• There exists two options on ‘Vultr’ for a VPS that could run the specs of a site like this:
• https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/
• Related comparison table:

We’ll see how it goes :)

~ Sam