Only a Quick update

I haven't been able to do as much art as I've been wanting to. My English writing class has kept me pretty busy and probably will keep me busy for the next few weeks. I get some art in every day, but definitely not as much as I would like.

Oh and that key-chain I showed last Friday? It's actually having bits fall off of it. The small details (hair and horns) chip off. I only varnished with one coat, so I will see if putting another coat on will fix that.

Messing with Paintbrushes

I'm still learning how to use a lot of features in Photoshop. The variety of brushes alone would cause me to spend weeks coloring one thing a hundred different ways. So here's one way I colored this guy that I liked. I'm definitely going to still mess with it a lot.

Oh and here's some step by step pics of a charm I made:

 Above, this is it plain and unbaked. I use Super Sculpey Firm. It's great for doing detail work.

 Here it is after being baked and painted with a base coat of white. All I have for paint is acrylic, so it is as this point that it loses its nice clay look and starts looking like plastic.

And here it finally is painted and varnished. Like most of my art at this point, everything I did with this is still an experiment. I now know that:
1. I should get smaller brushes for painting stuff in this scale. 
2. The paint will take forever to dry on the figure, but will dry too fast on my paint-paper.
3. Speaking of paint, I need to find something else that doesn't make my stuff look like a cheap plastic junk.
4. Varnish will pool in annoying places and if I touch it at all after I brush it on it will peel off.

In the next few days I will see how well this guy holds up to being a key-chain, banging around on my bag. I'm gonna be so kewl at school with this guy. Maybe the next one I make will be better, with more wire reinforcement. And glitter. Glitter all over it.

Catsup

Sorry guyz I've been busy with library books. I've got about ...one two three four......7 nice thick books I've been trying to read all at the same time. And that's after the library rang down its overdue hammer on half of them. Ha!ha! I love Socialism sometimes!

Though I haven't been all about reading about goofy stuff. I've also been trying out different inking styles and doohickeys in Photoshop and Illustrator. As a note though, all of these doodles are pretty crap. I just focused on inking stuff.

The thing I hate about Illustrator is that it obviously draws like a computer would draw and not like a real pen.I'm still learning so everything looks real flashy.

Very subtle line shapes get all kinds of messed up for no reason other than the program's over-willingness to try to help "correct" them.

It is real annoying trying to draw one simple curve and end up redrawing it twelve times. And I still won't get it just how I really wanted it.

 I'm not saying I don't like it though. Vector drawing is pretty cool. Plus it makes changing the line colors real easy. But don't try to actually color the stuff in Illustrator. Oh no. I wasted 1 and a half hours just trying to color it. Ship inked doodles off to Photoshop.

This one is inked in photoshop. I usually don't like doing that because I have to work REAL HUGE to make things look nice. I can get the lines a little better than Illustrator, but this doodle is about 1/8th of the size I had to work at. Bleh. That takes up a lot of save space.

So yeah, maybe I'll look into other programs like Manga studio, since lots of people seem to like that. I remember using a free trail a few years ago but it would glitch out on me a lot. Still, I guess I can try it again. And I'll get back to posting regularly.